Just wanted to let everyone know that I updated my Eden Hotel images post.  Turns out the script I ran left behind about half the images I wanted to put up, so the collection is even larger than what you saw before.

P.S. Sorry about the recent downtime.  My host is having some trouble keeping the site up.  We’re running PHP on windows hosting on a shared server, and that stacks up all kinds of complications.  I’ll probably migrate this thing early next week so that’ll clear up a lot of issues (and maybe even speed things up a bit).  Also, I know I owe you another Monday Movie- I’ll try to hammer out that extra one as soon as I have extra time!

Hey everyone,

So I took a trip to Argentina about a month ago, and I wanted to upload some of the sweet photos I took of the Hotel Eden.  It’s basically this massive hotel that was built back in the late 1800s and early 1900s and it just screams spooky steampunk from every angle.  I took as many shots as I could.  The originals are in high resolution (2500px wide) but below you’ll find some thumbnails that click through to the higher resolution versions. Be sure to click the “More” link- there’s TONS of images!

Eden Hotel Balcony 01

Eden Hotel Balcony 02

Hey everyone!

Well I’m back on my feet, and hammering out videos again.  This week we’re taking a shallow look at using render elements to help accent your rendering in 3dsMax.  There’s so much you can easily do in post work when you have the right images that would be so difficult and time-consuming to do in the native mental ray render.

I’ve also got another video that’s compiling now and I’ll post that tomorrow or Wednesday, as promised.  I’m still fooling around with VRay so I’ll have something on that hopefully next Monday.  I want to really get enough exposure to it to give you a good primer.  :)

Transcription

Monday Movie #67: Basic Render Elements

Hello, everyone. Welcome to another Monday Movie. I’m Mr. Bluesummers.

So this week I’ll be giving you a basic introduction to render elements in 3d Studio Max using the mental ray renderer. Render elements allows you to render parts of your scene not as in objects or lights, but as in different passes of the render like “specularity” or “diffuse. This allows you to get much much more control <i>after</i> the render by recombining elements in, say, Photoshop- and that’s exactly what we’re going to do today.

So let’s get started.

I have a simple scene here, and I’m illuminating it using photometric lighting. The materials are mental ray ProMaterials and one thing to note is that I’m not using any exposure control. This actually causes problems when you’re rendering with elements because the elements are not passed through the exposure control itself and so sometimes you can get blown out highlights. It can actually cause severe difficulties with certain elements like lighting- so I just wanted to make you aware of that.

So let’s set up render elements for this scene. I’m going to open up my “Render Setup” panel and click on the “Render Elements” tab and that’s going to open the render elements rollout. I’m going to click on “Add” and that’s going to open up “Add Render Elements”. I’m just going to pick out a few that I know I’m going to want later:

• Diffuse
• Lighting
• Reflection
• Specularity
• ZDepth

Now most of these don’t require any kind of setup but ZDepth does. Let me show you a quick trick on how to set up ZDepth. What you need to do for this render element is tell it the minimum and maximum depth to consider. The minimum depth being pure white and the farthest depth- the maximum- being pure black. So how do I know what values are appropriate? Well, I’m going to minimize this here, and if I go back out to my perspective view and select my camera, we can actually use the environment ranges in the camera settings in order to find out what those values should be. The near range might be something like about 2.3 and the far range I might want to capture something a little farther away. About 10 feet. That’s my minimum and maximum.

I’m going to re-open my render setup panel and punch those in. 2.3 feet for the minimum and 10 feet for the maximum. It looks like I’m all set.

I’ll go back to my camera view and hit render, and now I’ll have my render elements.

So what we have here is the final render as we would see it normally. What we also got was several render elements and this is the information we wanted so that we can use it in compositing later. Now I’ll leave it up to you, but go ahead and save out each one of these as a .tif file and make sure that you save them as 16-bit. So for example “final.tif”, save. And you want 16-bit color and be sure to save that alpha channel.

Then click “ok”. Now let’s switch over to Photoshop.

So what I’m going to do is click and drag my Final.tif. Now just as a note, one thing that you <i>can</i> do, if you’re feeling hardcore, is to recreate the final image using just the render elements. I tend to recommend against this since I don’t think it’s really a time-saver. It does give you a lot of control and if you can do it or want to do it then go for it. But in my opinion, I like to start with the final image and work from there into what I want.

I’m going to select my specular image and click-drag that in. You can see here that I’ve got this darkness but there’re small sections of light. That’s the specularity in my render. I’m going to use the Move tool in Photoshop, click-drag, into my final image. Get that into place. Then I’ll change the blending mode to screen and that’s going to make those details pop. If you’re going to be doing any postwork in Photoshop, usually you’re trying to bring out the specularity. You’re trying to make those bump maps really appearant. And this is something I like to do in my renders as well.

You can do this kind of technique for each one of these elements so, for example, I’m going to bring over ZDepth. Same process- click-drag into the final image, adjust it into place, and then I’ll choose the layer blend mode in order to get the effect that we’re looking for. So I need to ask myself “what would I want to do to this render that’s based on depth?” Well, I might want to darken up the background a little bit so I’ll change this to overlay.

Ugh. That’s a little extreme. So I’ll back it down a little bit- opacity and fill. About there. Then I’ll bring it back up slightly. That really makes that teapot the center of attention in this particular render. So I’ll leave the rest to you- try going through each one of these render elements and experiment with it. See what it makes the image look like.

Using render elements can give you an incredible level of control over the final render of your scene in 3d Studio Max. Try to do it whenever possible and especially when you’re working on that final, final image.

Mr. Bluesummers. www.MrBluesummers.com.

Thanks for tuning in to another Monday Movie. You can find all of my Monday Movies as well as tutorials, resources, and downloads, on my Web site: www.MrBluesummers.com.

Hey all,

This week doesn’t have a Monday Movie lined up just yet. I got pretty sick over the weekend, so I haven’t done the recording. I just slept and didn’t eat anything. I’ll try to make up for it next week with a two-parter to keep week parity. Maybe two videos on VRay?

Sorry!

First Attempt at VRay

Hey all,

I’ve been having trouble finding someone who has VRay that would be willing to let me borrow it, so I’ve decided to just download the trial version and work from there.  Within the first 20 minutes of fooling around I managed to create the image on the right.

My first impression of VRay is positive.  The interface is tight and flows smoothly from lighting, to materials, to GI and depth of field blur.  I felt at home very quickly since everything feels like it’s in nice, logical places and the settings respond in reasonable ways.  On the downside, I’m noticing a distinct lack of presets and quick settings that prevent you from really going into second gear.  This is something that the mental ray renderer discovered several versions ago and corrected for.  Also, it has a really annoying habit of turning off GI and caustics settings between renders.

I’ll add more as it happens, but so far it looks like there may be VRay video tutorials in our future.

EDIT: I noticed also that the demo version is SP2 while the documentation is for SP4.  There are a lot of features missing- I’ve e-mailed the ChaosGroup to see what we can work out.