A fresh start!

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I have not posted in a year. I found a great new job in Tampa at a place I had been applying to since 2007. Im not in the 3D Department how ever.....it's not all butterflies and rainbows but I'm working hard and as soon as they can they will move me into that department. So I have spent the past year trying to learn a new craft and neglected my postings, updates, and just plain not working on any new 3D that I can put up. So I am going to dedicate this year and perhaps the better part of the beginning parts of the year to finishing the many things I started last year. I think I have around 4 things that I started work on....got to about a 33% completion point then stopped. So I have been doing 3D for a year just....not very...umm....well.....not as dedicated! 

So here is a scene I have had in my head for a year but hadn't ever started it. It's a pretty simple lay out. A leather couch as the center piece with a row of massive windows to the left running along the wall. The plant is the only thing I didnt personally create. It came from some sort of 3D World Mag down load if I remember correctly. It's almost there. I'd give it a good 40% mark. I want to add some more props to the scene. A nice lamp on the table to the right. Some books and knick-naks on the shelving over head, add textures, lighting, render....done.

A fresh start!

Posted by : Sourpickle

Date :Sunday, February 3, 2013

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Tag : 3DS Max, Mental Ray

Escalators!

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Well I couldn't find 4 of my 3D World disc. They were from a long ways back and I'm thinking I left them at TE aka Hell..... which I'm beginning to understand why they called it that there. So I had to make my own! I found a site that gave measurements for me to use. I used a 30 degree incline for these. I guess they go from 30-35 degrees just in case you wanted to know. Once I get the modeling done I'll get to texturing these, which is hard for me to wait cause I think they'll look really good once I texture them! Next is the garden area around them then might get some tiles down on the floors and walls. I'm moving along well. I'm at an additional two hours of work.

Escalators!

Posted by : Sourpickle

Date :Saturday, July 10, 2010

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Tag : Mall, Mental Ray

Mall small update

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So woke up today and wanted to get a little bit of something done before I started my Monday. So I did the store fronts. I laid out the entry ways and the window placement throughout the scene. Took me maaaaybe an hour for the whole thing. It was fairly easy. I laid out the bottom floor first and did my insets and extrusions in bulk. After that was done I copied the bottom left side to the top left side. I took a piece from the right to make the top right. Then I moved some thing and created the others that I did not copy. I have a little cylinder in there for scale to help me out but so far so good. I decided to move the escalator away from a wall that I was going to place it on over on the bottom right side 45 degree angled wall. I started to realize as I made this that it has the exact same lay out as the Cherry Creek mall in Denver has so the escalator will look perfect in the new scooted up location! Anyways that's all for today. I got a bunch done in a short time so I'm very pleased with what I have going. All in all I think I've spent maybe 3 hours on the whole thing the past 2 days.

Mall small update

Posted by : Sourpickle

Date :Monday, July 5, 2010

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Tag : Mall, Mental Ray

New Project!

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So going to start a new project. It's been about 3 months since I finished my kitchens so I been really wanting to start something new. So I had two ideas of something I'd like to make. One was a camera match and to put some sort of office building down and the other was a interior of a mall. So I choose the mall. I did a couple sketches to give me an idea of what I'd like it to look like and I've started to block it out now. So far I have the interior walls and ceiling as well as the floor down in place. I have a model of a actual working escalator in one of my 3D World discs so soon as I can find that I will use that for the scene. Think it even had some peeps attached to that scene! So my goal is to try and get a little some thing on this done every week as usual and to post up the screen caps as I go. I think what I have for a lay out is a pretty modern looking lay out. You can see from the screen grab I have a nice floor plan and will have sun light coming in from the ceilings windows up above. Hoping this comes together really nicely! I'm also planning on getting into Illustrator to come up with some nice signage for the store fronts! Wish me luck!

New Project!

Posted by : Sourpickle

Date :Sunday, July 4, 2010

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Tag : Mall, Mental Ray

Flicker

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So I read Master Zap's blog fairly often. It's how I've learned so much the past year. That plus lots of surfing the internet for anything to help me out when I got stuck. One of the things that was killing the animations I am making here was the flickering and I had read his blog on how to fix it but it never came up as something that bothered them here but I could see it. A animation I recently created with an overpass had tons of flicker problems because of the amount of shadow you saw so I figured great time to try his solution.
It's pretty simple actually. As far as I have read about the new Max 2010 they have this fixed but if.....if you still need to fix it Zap's way works wonders. All you need to do in Mental Ray is set your Final Gather settings all the way down and dumby down the rest of the quality. It's not needed. The section under Final Gather Map needs to be turned on to Read/Write File. Render the animation out. You dont save any files but the Final Gather Map. Then when its done (which should be rather fast since it's a basic render) you uncheck the Read/Write File and check on the Read Only. This file from how I understand it has now saved your FG maps from every frame and doesn't make it create one for each render which speeds up the render time I noticed some but also now gives the render no flicker.
My animation is great and clean! Awesome short cut and if Max 2010 fixed this I hope it works as good!

Flicker

Posted by : Sourpickle

Date :Wednesday, May 6, 2009

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Tag : Mental Ray

Room rendering

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Well I sent off a render last night and here is what I got. There are a few little funky things going on here on the couch but over all it looks pretty nice. Sent it off on the highest settings. Still going to try an clean up a few spots but I think it looks pretty good over all.

Room rendering

Posted by : Sourpickle

Date :Tuesday, February 10, 2009

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Tag : Mental Ray, Mental Ray Room

Mental Ray skies

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Here's another tip I just recently learned from various websites. Very nice pretty clouds built directly in Mental Ray and not with a panorama back ground image. As shown to the left it can come out pretty nicely with some tweaking.
So how is this done? First you need a sky map. I read that you can use either color or black and white, I seem to have better results using the black and whites better. Make sure to play with your brightness and contrast settings though to make the image pop. That will help give you more blues and whites in the render. I made this one with a standard panorama, doubled the height and added a small gradient under neath. You need to have it look this way in order to have your horizon line be in the correct spot. First time I tried this I used a plan panorama and it just didn't look correct at all.
Now open your Max and drop in your day light system. turn your mr daylight system on. Under the Environment tab you'll need to drag the shader into the Material map. From there you'll get all the settings you'll need to make your sky.

The first set of settings you must adjust is in the mr Physical Parameters. Un-check the Inherit from mr Sky box. This will get you access to all the Haze settings, which is what you use to create the skies. First one is the Haze setting. Iused these settings to get my image the way I wanted but you's may be different depending on the image files. By razing the Haze level you begin to show off more haze... so this way your cloud image with be shown. I believe this maxs out at 15. From there you must select the bitmap and head to the output dialog box. The RGB level is what brings out the color. Go to high and your image becomes very saturated. In my case with this image it becomes extreamly yellow at around the 12-13 mark. I have at times found that playing with the other settings such as RGB offset and the multiplier controls for the haze have given me decent results, but you can generally get something nice without using them.
One thing to keep in mind is the over all image controls in the Environment tab. Changing the contrast, saturation, and so on can have a vast effect on the render of the image as well.

Mental Ray skies

Posted by : Sourpickle

Date :Wednesday, February 4, 2009

With 1 comments:

Tag : Mental Ray, Tips

Gamma corrections

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I just wanted to add this both for I and anyone that may be looking for a reason as to why this is happening. What I am talking about is a color looking very bland and faded when rendering in Mental Ray. What causes this is the Gamma fields being incorrect. To fix this problem you simply have to add a Utility Gamma shader before inserting your bitmap. So here's what I am talking about and how it's done.

To the left you can see what I am talking about. The ball on the left is faded and not the same as the one on the right, the correct color. Again it's just a simple shader that you can add to correct this. Just before you add your bitmap to your diffuse layer make sure to add the 'Utility Gamma & Gain (mi)' as shown to the right. By adding this it will color correct you to the correct intensity. Wood looking dull? Add the Gamma and Gain shader! Red's looking pink> Add the Gamma and Gain shader! It instantly places your Gamma at a 2.2 setting. From the best I can tell from reading it's almost always the correct setting. I haven't read much that says you should change it. But by adding this shader you will correct your texture like the image above of the 2 red balls.

Need another way to do this? Maybe you need the entire scene to be corrected and you don't want to place this into your texture stack every time? Well you can go into your 'Preferences' tab and do this as well. By activating this you will turn your Gamma settings on in the same way that you did when adding it just before your bitmap is in place! One thing I noticed when doing this is every time I open Max up it would have the settings still the same as I left it. So if I activated the Gamma then when I opened Max it still would be and in the new scene I'm working on everything may be rendering incorrectly now. So just keep in mind when using this way of correcting your Gamma settings!

Gamma corrections

Posted by : Sourpickle

Date :Thursday, January 22, 2009

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Tag : Mental Ray, Tips