3DSM - Wire Frame

Here you will be taught how to make a wire object (torus knot in this tutorial).
Easy yet effective.

1) Make a torus knot (Create -> Geometry -> Extended Primitives).

2) Now we will apply the wire texture. Click on M or goto material editor
mark the wire texture

Than you will have this in the preview

3)	I advise using those default settings, but you can adjust the thick of the wire by increasing the size amount

4) Now lets apply some color.
Goto maps bar (in the material editor)
press the NONE next to diffuse color

5) Choose the 2D maps
Ichoose the swirl (it blends well)

You should have this as your preview

You can change the colors of the swirl in the swirl parameters

6) Drag the texture in the preview to your object.
Heres what ive got so far.

7)	For batter effect with the swirl adjust the settings in the swirl parameters. I used those settings.

After shading some light (default 3DSM light are not advised) some bend and wave modifiers this is what i got

Monday May 7, 2007 - 12:31am (ICT) Permanent Link | 0 Comments

Making realistic Grass with VRay Fur

In the next tutorial i will show you how to create realistic grass, using VRay Fur.

When you wont to make grass you can always use displacement or real planes modeled in the shape of grass scattered on the field. The last one is a very good technique but it takes very very much memory to process. The displacement is also very good but than the grass will look too stiff, and not naturaly bend. So the VRay furr gives you the ability to make the grass a bit bended with a gravity control and also u can use maps for the spreading of the grass on the field.

So, we start with a scene(i have this scene shared on the downloads section) and make a plane where we wot to place the grass.

You can unse different shapes on which to apply the fur.

After that go to modeling modefiers in the VRay section u can finde VRay fur.

With the plane selected click on the VRay Fur. The modifier aplies automaticaly to the plane

If you forgot to select the plane or if you wont to select another plane or shape to have fur, than just press the source object button and click the object you wont into the scene:

Now that you haveadded the VRay Fur, it is time to

For this tutorial i used the distribution per area 120(so it renders in less time) but you can add bigger values to have more grass.

I have added here a render for you to see on what else you can use VRay fur. The things that necesite some kind of displacement like coretures, carpets, तोवेल्स

source: NGUYỄN MINH TUỆ

Old lamp

Old lamp

Ok, as a reference I took the photo of an old lamp. By the way it was the only one ref image that I used. Everything else I took from my head :).

I've tried to do something old and sweet at the same time. And I think I did it.

Modeling/Texturing

Modeling was done in 3d Studio Max 8.0 SP 2, texturing in Photoshop CS.

First, take a look at the complete scene.

There is nothing hard to model :)

Now let’s take a closer look at each model in this scene.

To model a lamp I used cylinders for almost each part of lamp, then convert it to EditPoly and adjust vertexes as on reference. Then entire model was smoothed with 2 iterations for best result.

Then I used the UV Map modifier (Cylindrical mapping). For all metal surfaces I did the color, specular and bump maps (and 2 opacity maps), for glass surfaces I did the opacity and dirt maps.

Here is an example of low res maps:

Windows is a modified Box primitives with some chamfer, so there is nothing hard to do.

For mapping I used UV Map modifier (Box Mapping).

Now it’s time for close ups of other scene elements:

Plant in the glass (poly modeling and simple mapping with procedural maps, roots was done with renderable splines)

Next thing is… (don’t know how it would be in English) Simple poly modeling as well.

Next is some cloth thing. Poly modeling, displacement modifier and Hair and Fur modifier. For color map used procedural texture. I started this model from Plane primitive object.

Displacement map:

Curtains

Started with splines which defines the shape of curtains, than converted to EditPoly. All textures are procedural (Color and Opacity).

One more interesting thing is a wallpaper corner (modified Plane primitive object)

Take a look at the entire room model

It’s a simple box with some details like hole in the wall for windows. We don’t see the entire room but it’s needed for the proper lighting.

Lighting and Rendering Setup

Ok, for lighting I used only 2 emitters: 1 direct light that simulates the Sun (with some yellow/orange color and area shadows) and one V-ray light right behind the window to simulate the day light (almost white with some green and blue value, depends on environment basic color).

Here are the settings for the lights:

For the environment I choose this image:

All other work was done by V-Ray rendering system :)

Here the rendering settings:

By the way to reach shadows from non existing trees behind the window I used one more “Total Texture” image as a projector:

That’s it. Hope you like it.

Here the final image. No post work was done.

source: NGUYỄN MINH TUỆ

Radiosity – The Things Your Mother Never Told YoU

Download Scene File:

Download Scene File Here[1.6 MB]



(Part 2)

VIZ or MAX


This is the first written, but second part, in a series of tutorials that will each deal with:

1. Modeling a scene for radiosity.

2. Setting up, calculating, and tweaking radiosity.

3. Defining materials that work with radiosity and texturing the scene.

4. Calculating, tweaking, and rendering the final solution.


This is the image that we will end up with at the very end of the series. But today, we will focus only on lesson 2 - Setting up, calculating, and tweaking radiosity.



[Click Here For Large Image]


This tutorial serves as a very thorough introduction to VIZ/MAX radiosity. We will be creating the following image in this lesson (figure 1).



[Click Here For Large Image][Figure 1]


Click Here to download the sample MAX file before you begin.


Now, let's begin!

Setting Up a Daylight System, Test Rendering, and Tweaking

1. Open the sample scene file entitled: tut-radint-begin.max. Take a look at what we've got here. I've modeled a basic room, some windows, a couple of doors, no furniture, and everything is white! Good, that's what we want. Before I spend hours defining materials, I always test lighting and model integrity. I do this by using a very neutral color that doesn't compromise the solution with color bleeding or high reflectance values. An off-white material is perfect for this. It allows me to adjust my lighting and run a few unbiased tests.


2. I've already defined a camera so click the Min/Max Toggle in the bottom right to switch to a full screen camera view. Hit "C" on your keyboard just to make sure you're in camera view. Press the "Quick Render" button and you'll get the following image (see figure 2)



[Click Here For Large Image][Figure 2]


3. Not very pretty is it? Let's add a daylight system now. Press "T" to switch to the top view. At the very top of the screen, click on "Create", then "Daylight System". Move your cursor, which is now a set of crosshairs, and click/drag in the center of the room. It really doesn't matter where, as long as it's near the center of your model. Click again to set the sun's distance from the target (referred to as the "orbital scale" in the daylight setup.) For the location that I chose see figure 3.



[Click Here For Large Image][Figure 3]


4. Let's adjust the daylight system's properties. Make sure you follow along precisely or your final image will not look the same as mine.


a. Make sure the daylight system is selected and click the "modify" tab on the right




Control Panel [Figure 4]


b. We are going to leave all of the settings here at their default because they are already optimized and usually won't need to be changed. Under the "Daylight Parameters" rollout, click the "Setup…" button to move to an imbedded set of parameters. We will set our time, location, etc.

c. Adjust the time to 11 hours, 0 mins, and 0 secs.

d. Adjust the month, day, and year to 8, 21, 2004 respectively.

e. Check the "daylight savings time" box

f. Click "Get Location" and choose "Baton Rouge LA" as the location. The coordinates will automatically be displayed in the longitude and latitude area. How neat is that?

g. Change the orbital scale to 81' (feet). Why? I'll tell you why. Remember that the orbital scale is the distance the "sun" is from your target. The orbital scale only needs to be far enough away from your model so that the daylight assembly head is not inside a room or object or touching an object. You'll get some really weird results if so. 81 feet is plenty far away. Once your assembly head has cleared the scene geometry, distance doesn't really matter to your lighting solution – i.e. we will get the same lighting results at 81 feet as we would at 810 feet. Also, don't judge distance from the top view port only. Always switch to the front or side viewport to make sure the assembly head is high enough.

h. Adjust the north direction to 252.5 so that the sun is shining in the front windows.




[Figure 5]


i. We're done with setup. I spent a little while experimenting with different times and north directions until I found the one setting combo that looked best. The reason I chose this setup was because I liked the way the sun was positioned and shining through the windows and on the floor. I had to do several test renders to see. TIP: You can quickly adjust DIRECT lighting placement without calculating radiosity. Just press the render button. Let's try it. (see figure 6)




[Figure 6]




5. Since we're happy with lighting placement, let's calculate the radiosity. Open up the Radiosity Panel by either clicking this button or by going to "Render", then "Radiosity".


6. Let's run a quick test with all of the default settings except for "Initial Quality" and "Meshing".


7. Change "Initial Quality" to 30%. In the Initial Quality stage, the distribution of diffuse lighting in the scene is calculated and the overall appearance of the lighting level of the scene is established. Higher values produce more accurate results. Since this is a test, we aren't looking for accuracy. (You could have actually kept the initial quality set at 85% and stopped the solution manually when it gets close to 30%. Either way is OK.)


8. Look for and open up the "Radiosity Meshing Parameters" rollout and activate meshing by checking the box. Leave it at the default value.


a. What does meshing do? Meshing subdivides the entire scene's geometry by the amount specified in this box. The finished lighting solution is actually stored in this mesh. The finer the mesh resolution is, the more accurate the lighting detail will be. But there is a trade-off in calculation time and PC memory. Without meshing activated, the scene will look flat and absolutely horrible. Always check this box.


9. Press the "Start" button and watch as the computer takes off. At this point, VIZ/MAX is reading all the geometry in the scene, subdividing it by the specified mesh size, and finally calculating the light and subsequent bounces from the photometric daylight system we set up earlier. VIZ will continue to process until it reaches the "Initial Quality" setting of 30% (or until you stop it). On my computer, the processing took 4 seconds. Pretty quick!


10. Make sure "use radiosity" is checked in the render dialog. To verify, press the render dialog button and take a look (see figure 7).




[Figure 7]


11. Press the "Render" button and what do we get? Nothing good…(figure 8). What's wrong? Well, several things. Let's start fixing them.



[Click Here For Large Image][Figure 8]


12. Go back to the radiosity panel with and RESET the solution with the "Reset All" button. Change initial quality to 90% and meshing size to 1' (1 foot). Press Start. Sit back and wait for just a minute – this shouldn't take too long. When it's done hit the render button.


13. Ouch! Still not very good – but getting better. Try this. Open the radiosity panel and look for "Interactive Tools" and "Filtering". Change the "Filtering" value to 3. You DO NOT need to RESET the solution. Here is why:


a. Quoting straight from the user reference, "The options in this [interactive tools] group help you adjust the display of the radiosity solution in the viewport and in the rendered output. These controls take effect immediately on an existing radiosity solution and do not require any additional processing for you to see their effects. Filtering reduces the amount of noise between surface elements, by averaging the lighting levels with the surrounding elements. A value of 3 or 4 is usually sufficient. If you use too high a value, you risk losing detail in the scene.. However, since Filtering is interactive, you can readily evaluate the result and adjust it as you need."


b. After adjusting the filtering, render the scene. That looks much better. The splotchiness and artifacting have been smoothed out (see figure 9). Now we're getting somewhere!



[Click Here For Large Image][Figure 9]


14. There are still some more adjustments yet to make. How about the background color? You don't see too many skies that color, especially when the sun is shining so brightly. Let's temporarily change that. It's bothering me!


15. Open the "Exposure Control" panel by clicking or if the radiosity panel is still open, press "Setup" under "Interactive Tools". Click the black color swatch under "Background Color". This opens up a color selector window. Change the background color to pure white – an RGB value of 255, 255, and 255. (figure 10)


[Figure 10]


16. Render the scene again. How does it look? Still grey? Any idea why? Think about it for a minute before going to the next step and see if you can narrow it down.


17. Ok, cheater. I know you didn't think about it. The material for the window is 95% opaque. It's not allowing us to clearly see out. That also means that we're not getting all of our sunlight in!


18. Open the Material Editor by pressing "M" on the keyboard. Select the material sample #20 and open the material ID #3 named "Inner Bevel" by clicking it. (figure 11)


[Figure 11]


19. Look for the culprit – "Opacity" and change its value to 0. (figure 12) Wow. The window instantly clears up! It was nearly solid. This will really make a huge difference in the lighting level of the scene. Close the material editor and open the radiosity panel.


[Figure 12]


20. RESET the solution with "reset all" and then press Start once again. When it's done, render the scene. Dang! Now the scene is too bright! Welcome to the trial and error world of 3D. Tweaking and re-tweaking is a daily part of the 3D artist's life.


21. This is an easy fix. Open the exposure control panel again and adjust the "brightness" to 25 and the "contrast" to 100. Render once more. Well, we finally did it. We got control over the lighting.


That was easy, wasn't it? If your head is swimming, don't worry. You will have the hang of this stuff in no time. Take a break if you need it and come back later. I'm not going anywhere.

Upping the Quality

How was your break? I reflect upon the words of my 9th grade Physical Education Teacher, Ms. Phillips, "If you took a break, good. If you didn't then good good.".


Oooookaaay…pressing on.


So we've got control over our basic lighting. Now it's time to push things a little further. When it comes to increasing solution quality and lighting accuracy, you have 2 options. (And they are both slower than a lipless man trying to suck molasses through a drinking-straw on a winter day! …that's slow.). The two options are:

? Decreasing the mesh size and "refining" the solution.

a. Refining works during the radiosity calculation and is a good idea if you plan on animating a camera because refining happens only once and does not effect render times – just solution time.

? Regathering

a. Regathering works during the render and is GREAT for still shots but impractical for animations because every frame of the animation will be regathered. Even so, regathering is the more accurate of the two methods.


Let's start with option 2 – regathering


22. Open the radiosity panel and look for the rollout labeled "Rendering Parameters". Open it up to find the regathering settings. Make sure "Render Direct Illumination" is selected and check the box next to "Regather Indirect Illumination". This will activate regathering during the render. (figure 14)


[Figure 14]


If you were to render now using the default settings, this is what it would look like (figure 15):



[Click Here For Large Image][Figure 15]


23. Notice the blotchiness on the walls and ceiling. The lighting and shadows are more evened out and accurate, but these blotchies aren't supposed to be there and they've got to go. Something else worth mentioning is the fact that rendering time has increased to 12 minutes. Definitely not conducive for animations. Render times also increase as output resolution increases. If I would have rendered this image at 800x600, the render time could have easily quadrupled to 48 minutes. Let's fix that blotchiness now.


24. Go back to the radiosity panel under the rendering parameters and adjust the "Filter Radius (pixels):" to 5.0. This setting "samples" or blurs each neighboring pixel and smoothes things out. You don't want to go too high on this setting because it can blur the pixels so much that you lose important and subtle details. It's like supersampling the light for your entire scene. No wonder it's slow. Here are the very nice results after a 15 minute render. We still could have used a slightly higher filter radius – perhaps 6 or 7.



[Click Here For Large Image]


a. TIP: Later on, perhaps on a different scene, if you are having trouble getting rid of blotchiness (i.e. the blotches only get blurry) despite increasing the filter radius you may need to increase "Rays Per Sample". Try increasing the default value of 64 by increments of 20 until they go away. Upping this value will add significantly more time to your render.


Now that you are familiar with regathering, let's move on to option 1 - lowering the mesh size and refining the solution. The results won't be as accurate, but the scene will render much faster.


25. UNCHECK "Regather Indirect Illumination". Re-render the scene to revert back to the messy, unregathered look. Now you have the original rendering back on the screen, and thus something to compare these new results.


26. RESET the solution.


27. Leave the "initial quality" where it is, but change the "meshing size" to 3" (3 inches). If you have a slower PC you might want to go only to 6" or 8" – I wouldn't want to be responsible for crashing your PC! Hit the start button. Notice how VIZ takes longer to read the geometry and process the solution. This process can be painfully slow if you have a large scene and downright impossible for really large scenes. Since we're working with a smaller scene, we can afford to use a meshing size this small. While you wait, (and you'll be waiting about 10 minutes or more) here is something that you might find interesting.


a. As a general rule of thumb, large flat surfaces do well with a larger mesh size but smaller, more intricately detailed objects will need a smaller mesh. Until now, we've been using a "global mesh" which controls the mesh size for every piece of geometry in the scene. You can control the meshing size for individual objects by right-clicking them in the viewport and opening their properties panel and then navigating to the radiosity tab within. There is a setting that allows you to override the global mesh setting and use an individual mesh setting. This is a much more efficient way of subdividing your scene. It may take a while to set the properties individually, but it will save you loads of time in the final radiosity calculation. To make this easier, you can select multiple items that need the same meshing size. When you right-click to change the properties, you are changing all of the selected items' properties simultaneously!


28. When the solution is done, hit the render button. Notice how the subtle shadows become defined! Who said radiosity was difficult? Let's move on to something a little more advanced – refining the solution.


29. DO NOT reset your solution. Open the radiosity panel and look for "Refine Iterations (All Objects)". Change this to 20 and hit START being careful NOT to hit reset. The refining process begins after the initial quality is done processing, which is why you don't need to reset. This process will take a while; perhaps another 10 minutes as it displays "Refining Solution". The progress bar will slowly creep to full.


30. When refining is complete, Render the scene. Notice the huge difference in quality when compared to the last rendering. Most of the artifacting has been removed and the lighting is much more accurate. (figure 16)



[Click Here For Large Image][Figure 16]


31. Increasing your refine iterations even higher will produce even better results. If you were to increase the value to 25, the refinement would be relatively fast (because it picks up where it left off – at 20). As you work on other projects, you will have to determine the refinement value for yourself. Sometimes 20 refines works well and other times 100 refines won't be enough. Every scene will be different. Experimentation, tweaking, and patience are the keys.


You will notice that, even though refining looks good, regathering looks the best.


I've got a nice little surprise for you! Furniture! If you have time, and your brain isn't fried from all this reading, click on the "Display" tab on the right panel and then click "All On". This turns on the furniture that I've had hidden this whole time. The furniture models in this tutorial were downloaded free from www.ultra3d.com.


Yes, even the furniture is off-white. (figure 17)





I don't usually apply an all white material to my furniture, but I did so this time to keep things consistent. I usually introduce 1 piece of furniture at a time into my scene, texture it and do a lighting test for each individual piece. If you pile a bunch of pre-textured furniture into your scene you run the risk of compromising the accuracy of your solution and tweaking can be a nightmare. Take things slow when adding furniture.


Practice the things you've learned with the furniture and molding. Processing time will surely be longer now that we've added some more geometry into the mix. Below are the results from a regathered render (figure 15) and a refined render (figure 16). Which looks the best to you? See if you can get similar results.



[Click Here For Large Image]


STATS: (regathered render)


Initial Quality: 90%

Refine Iterations (All Objects): 0

Filtering : 3

Global Meshing Size: 1'

Solution Time: 08:50 (min:sec)

Render Time: 15:35

Total Time: 24:25



[Click Here For Large Image]


STATS: (refined render)


Initial Quality: 90%

Refine Iterations (All Objects): 20

Filtering : 3

Global Meshing Size: 3"

Solution Time: 41:43 (min:sec)

Render Time: 00:25

Total Time: 42:08


As you can see, the regathered render took less time and looks better! As I said before, (and confirmed by the render times) regathering is the best choice for still shots and refining is the best choice for animation.


I hope that this tutorial helped you in your quest to understand radiosity. We covered the essentials here. Now you have enough information to begin getting good results with other projects. If you run into a problem that you cannot solve, please post the question in the vizdepot user forums and we will get you back on track ASAP.

source: NGUYỄN MINH TUỆ