Hello, my name is Charles, and welcome to this new 3dsmax zombie modelling / creation tutorial. This is going to be a very effective tutorial, in the sense that I’m going to show you how to QUICKLY create a fully-textured 3d zombie for your games or renderings, complete with a biped rig.

If you find this tutorial useful, I highly appreciate that you support us by visiting our sponsors, by clicking on the following links, thanks, I appreciate it!

Anyways, let’s move on to this tutorial.

Getting the mesh

Notice how in the introduction to the tutorial I mentioned this was going to be an EFFECTIVE tutorial, meaning that in it I will show you the FASTEST way to create cool zombie in 3d. Well, the FASTEST way to make a zombie is to find a FREE mesh on the internet for our model.

Since zombies are based on the Human body, we can easily download a “man” mesh from a free 3d meshes web site and make changes we want to the model to make it look more zombie-like, and then make a texture for our mesh and apply it with 3dsmax’s UVW mapping tools. In this tutorial, I’m going to take you by the hand and show you pretty much every step needed to model, texture and rig our zombie.

Step 1 – Find a free mesh (easy)

1. Zip over to www.turbosquid.com, a free 3d meshes web site, and use their Search Box to look for the word “man” in their 3d models collection. You will get a list of resulting 3d meshes with thumbnails. Now, on the left column of their web site, find the “PRICE” column, and click on “Set custom price range”. Fill in “0,0″ to find all FREE 3d models (that cost $0) on their website, then click the APPLY button.

2.  Scroll through the results, and find a model that looks the most like a zombie to you. IMPORTANT:  The model must be in a T-Pose pose, meaning with his arms stretched out and feet slightly apart. This is for character rigging purposes later on, when we finish the model.

3.  A good example of a usable mesh I found on turbosquid is this one: http://www.turbosquid.com/3d-models/human-base-obj-free/483277 . This human model is free, is detailed enough, and will work for our purposes. Go ahead and download the model. You might have to create an account in TurboSquid, but go ahead and do it, since it’s free and easy.

4.  The model will be in OBJ file format (if you downloaded the one from step 3). Save it to your project’s directory.

5.  Boot up 3dsMax, start a new scene, then click on File > Import, select “Wavefront Object (*.OBJ)” as the file type, and select your zombie mesh you just downloaded.

6.  You will get the following OBJ Import dialog, make sure you check “Single” and the other options shown in this screenshot. “Single” makes 3dsmax import the entire model as a single mesh, which is useful when you skin the model since your mesh won’t “rip” between body parts when you animate it. (it helps).

7.  Once you import the model, you will have something like this in your Perspective viewport :

8.  Now we have to check that the model has the correct size / scale. A zombie should be around 1.80 meters tall, or about 5′10″. Before we can check his height. we’re going to change 3dsmax’s working units. Go ahead and click on Customize > Units Setup.  Then select either “Metric” and Meters if you like to work in Meters, or select US Standard if you want to work with inches. Whatever makes you comfortable.

9.  Now that we have our working scale set, we have to check the actual size of the zombie. To do this, in 3dsmax go to the Utilities tab (last tab on the Create /  Modify toolbar) , then click the “Measure” utility. If you don’t see it as in the following screenshot, click the “More” button and find it in the list that pops up.

10.  The “Measure” utility shows you the real-world dimensions of the selected object. You can see the sizes of the object in all 3 dimensions, X Y and Z. For this example, the Z dimension represents our zombie’s height, so this SHOULD be around 1.80 meters or 5′10.. If it is not, move on to point 11..

11.  Adjust the zombie’s height. How, you say? Easy. Click on the UNIFORM SCALE TOOL, or press the R key on your keyboard to auto-select the tool.  Now, click drag on the zombie while watching the Measure utility’s Z value until the zombie is resized to its correct height (1.80 meters or 5′10″).

12.  Now that we’ve resized our zombie, let’s count its polygons. If our zombie model looks blocky and smooth enough, we can easily fix this. Cick on 3dsmax’s Modify tab, then click on the Modifier List, and select TurboSmooth modifier. Instantly, your zombie’s polygon count will be doubled and smoothed, with a nice, smooth result, like this :

Sculpting details into the zombie.

1.  We might notice our zombie lacks something: He’s too skinny. A zombie should have thick arms legs and chest, right? Let’s make it so! Go to the Modify Panel, and verify that our model is of Editable Poly type. If he is not, then right-click his type and click “Editable Poly” from the list. This will convert him into an Editable Poly type object, which makes it easier for us to work / sculpt on him.

2.  Now we’re going to add some bulge to his skinny arms. Expand the Editable Poly level in the modifiers, and select the Vertex sub-object mode, then click on the vertex in the center of his arm, as pictured :

Now move that vertex up in the Z direction, so as to make a bulge in the arm. This will make our zombie a bit more muscular.

3.  Proceed to make the change in the other arm of the zombie, legs, chest, and all other areas you would like to be more muscular / bulging.

4.  Once you’re done with the zombie’s polygonal detailing, it’s time to texture him… The fun part

To be continued …

If you are having trouble configuring vray, optimizing your vray render times, or have a huge scene where the rendertime is just taking too long, then have a look at this free tutorial :

Let’s get started.

If you just received VRAY or are new to max, remember you need to set VRAY as the current renderer before you can access its settings.
1. Open the render scene dialog box.
2. Expand the Assign Renderer rollout.
3. Click the box for the Production render shown in red.
4. Select VRAY from the list.

VRAY Frame Buffer

The VRAY frame buffer is a cool feature of VRAY. Basically it allows you to render your images in a different window other than the default rendered frame window of 3DS MAX. Also it has some features that the rendered frame window does not.

VRAY Global Switches

Lots of important things here. By checking or un-checking the boxes you can easily enable or disable many of VRAY’s key features.
Note: I often use this section to globally control displacement, lighting and the override material.

To assign an override material simply drag a VRAY material into the box that says “None.”

VRAY Image Sampler

Here you can choose the type of Image Sampler as well as the type of anti-aliasing filter.
Note: For the most part I use the default settings here (Adaptive Subdivision with area filter)

VRAY Indirect Illumination (GI)
This is where all the magic happens. I typically will use the default Irriadiance Map (IR Map) for primary bounces and Quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) for secornard bounces.

Notice you also have some options for post processing and GI caustics.

VRAY Irradiance Map (IR MAP)

The IR map is one of the methods VRAY uses to calculate global illumination. You can pick from any of the pre-defined presets or manually enter settings for a custon IR map.
Suggested IR map settings…
Test Renders:
Min Rate: -5
Max Rate: -3
HSph subdivs: 30
Interp samples: 25
Production Renders:
High preset is usually good enough for me…usually.
Mode: For stills, single frame is fine but for animations, Add to current map or Incremental add to current map works well and speeds up the IR map calculation.
Under options I like to have “show calc phase checked” just so I can visually see the IR map calculation.
Note: If you plan to not use an IR map in your GI calculation, these settings wil not be available. For example if you have QMC for primary and Light cache for secondary, this rollout will be replace with a QMC settings rollout followed by a LC settings rollout.

VRAY Caustics

Use this area to control the VRAY caustics in your scene.
Caustics – In optics, a caustic is the envelope of light rays reflected or refracted by a curved surface or object, or the projection of that envelope of rays on another surface.

VRAY Environment
This is definately an important rollout. It your environment is to high it can cause your scene to look washed out. Too low can cuase it to look dull. I find that .3 works well in most cases of course that all depends on your scene.
Note: Environment light does not pass though geometry unless the geometry is transparent.
If you want to use HDRI lighting simply drag the VRAY HDRI from the material editor into the open slots (”none buttons”)

VRAY Camera
Here you have global control over all the VRAY settings.

VRAY System

There are lots of useful options in this rollout. For the most part I stick with the default settings.
Notable Settings:
Render region division: changes the bucket size. (the box that draws the pixels at render time)
Region sequence: The path the buckets take when rendering the image. I prefer top to bottom but there are many options.
Frame Stamp: enabling this automatically embeds useful information at the bottom of your image such as VRAY version, filename, frame #, rendertime…etc.
Object Settings: use this to enable or disable VRAY features for specific pieces of geometry.

Note: this can also be accessed by selecting geometry, right clicking in the viewport and choosing VRAY properties.

Well that explains almost every important V-ray settings panel.
We hope you learned from this tutorial or found it useful. If you did, then

Please support our sponsors, they make this site possible!

Thanks!

This is a tutorial that introduces you to Vray’s Caustics capabilities. Caustic can simulate how light refracts and reflects through a surface in a realistic way, casting light and shadow in a similar manner as to how it would be cast in the real world.

Let’s take a look at how to set up Caustics in 3dsmax + Vray.

First

off download the scene :  Click here for scene.

Next

Start max, load the scene if max asked about a missing HDR image, goto the material editor and correct the path.

I setup the scene, create a box, and a torus knot
added a spot light
- shadows on (vray shadows)
- under vray parameters check the smooth surface shadows

i’m not gonna explain everything what i did, you can see for you self if you download the scene

and render the scene out, you should have something like :

Now first off we’ll create some materials, so get into the material editor and seleect a new material, change it it vray material
- change reflection and refraction color to white
- check Fresnel reflections
- choose a very licht blue color as Fog color
- set fog multi. to 0.01
- check Affect shadows

assign it to the torus knot

now create a other material, also a vray material
for diffuse color select a light grey

and if you render you have something like this :

now we are missing the caustics, here we go:
get your vray renderer and goto vray:system
click light settings and select spot01

click “generate caustics” on
subdivs : 2500
multi : 100000.0

now go back to the render dialog and search for vray:caustic tab
click “on”
multi. : 4
search dist. : 0.4
max photon : 2000

and render it out you should get something like :

to get some better caustics change to
multi. : 2
search dist. : 0.4
max photon : 2500
also change the under vray:system -> lightsettings > spot01 caustics subdive to 5000

also add a meshsmooth to the torus (render Iter. 2)

then render it out

this is gonna take long, calculating the caustics but well,

And that completes our basic Caustics Tutorial.

We hope you enjoyed the tutorial or found it useful,

if you, please don’t forget to Support our Sponsors,

they make this site possible, Thanks !

Original tutorial source: Emre Goren
.

Ok , here is the first tutorial, I will try to keep it simple and short.. Its not so hard and after this tutorial you will see that it takes only 5 mins to setup a scene.. As the topic says this is a car rendering so you will need car model to render.. Fot this lesson, I will use an Audi TT.

Go to Luma Server of Brazil settings, turn on Skylight, choose white color and 1.6 value (Fig. B)

Scroll down to Brazil CSG Server, enable Ground Plane and select a dark grey color (Fig. C), go to environment and select white for the background (Fig. D) These colors wont be the final ground and background colors, we will play around with them later..

Create a box over the car, this will be our reflection source and it will be white after we assign a material , so lets call it white box.. (Fig. E)

Right click on the box and go to the properties, un-check visible to camera, receive shadows and cast shadow (Fig. F)

You are free to create a camera and set a nice angle… Now we are going to the materials section..

Materials Section
For the body of this car, get a Brazil Material, dark green for diffuse and Falloff map for the reflection. The diffuse color is upto your choice and you will see that it will need adjustment after the first test render (Fig. G and H)

SIMPLE CAR GLASS
Now we will create a simple car glass material. Get a standart max material,
shader type : blinn, 2 sided
Ambiant and diffuse color : black,
specular color : white,
opacity :40,
Avanced Parameters : AMT=15 and Filter color : 84 , 104 , 107 (RGB)
In the maps section, select Falloff map for the reflection slot and choose Fresnel for the Falloff type leave it 1.6 in Index of refraction..
Apply this material to the glass objects of the car.

WHITE BOX MATERIAL
(for reflection on the car body)
Get Brazil Utility material and select Output map in the white color slot, increase RGB level to 3.0 in the output map parameters.. Apply this material to the White Box that we have created..(Fig. i)

Okay now its your turn to create other materials… But for now we will take some test renders..

TEST RENDERS & FINAL ADJUSTMENTS
When you hit render you will see something like this

As you can see the dark grey ground plane (CSG Server Module), became brighter, thats the result of white skylight and its 1.6 value… but that plane ends at the edge of the horizon and our white environment background color makes this image nasty.. To fix this, right click on the rendering window, and get the RGB value of plane that meets with white color.. (Fig. j)

Go to the environment settings and change the white color to R,G,B to 207 (Fig. k)

Hit render again , now your image should look like this

When you play around with the settings and create nice materials, you can have images like these :

Thanks for reading our tutorial, we hope it was useful for you!

If you liked this tutorial and you learned something, we would greatly appreciate it if you Support our Sponsors, they are the only source of income for us and make this site a reality!
Thanks for your support!

Original tutorial source:  Emre Goren

The more I use HDRI the more I prefer it to other methods of GI. HDRI stands for High Dynamic Range Imaging. It uses 360 degree photos taken from a reflective sphere, a series of pictures with different exposure settings that capture the ratio between dark and bright regions as represented in the real world.
Mapped as a spherical environment, HDRI illuminates the scene with different levels and colors of light based on pixel information. The result is more realistic than other methods of generating global illumination, and the amount of light can be altered through the exposure settings.

Final Render ships with one .hdr file, outside.hdr. You can download other HDRI files from Paul E. Debevec’s site.
http://www.debevec.org/~debevec/Research/HDR/

1. Create a ground plane and two spheres. For the ground I used the grydirt1.jpg included with Max. For the sphere materials I used a specular level of 74 with the glossiness level set at 60.

To continue reading this tutorial, please click here.

.

Sub-surface Scattering Tutorial

3dsmax + Vray
Welcome to our 3dsmax + Vray human skin sub-surface scattering simulation tutorial. In this article, we will be explaining a bit about what SSS (Sub-surface Scattering) actually is, and what it does in your renderings.

What is Sub-surface Scattering ?

Subsurface scattering (or SSS) is a mechanism of light transport in which light penetrates the surface of a translucent object, is scattered by interacting with the material, and exits the surface at a different point. The light will generally penetrate the surface and be reflected a number of times at irregular angles inside the material, before passing back out of the material at an angle other than the angle it would have if it had been reflected directly off the surface. Subsurface scattering is important in 3D computer graphics, being necessary for the realistic rendering of materials such as marble, skin, and milk.

In more common terms, let’s take a look a these images to understand SSS :

Three-dimensional object with subsurface scattering

Example of Subsurface scattering.

Now we can see that SSS simulates light going into a non-solid object, such as skin. Now let’s take a look at how we can integrate SSS into our 3dsmax scenes using Vray.

VrayFastSSS Material

Open up 3dsmax, select Vray as your renderer, open Material Editor, and create a new Material of type “VrayFastSSS”

You will get these initial settings in the material properties. Now let’s tweak these a bit.

Notice the two main parameters, shallow radius & deep radius, highlighted in orange for you in the picture. These control how much light scatters through the material. In general, when applying SSS to a human model, and working in Meters, it’s a good idea to set these to a default of 0.01m for the Shallow Radius, and 0.03m for the Deep Radius.

Now, change the skin shallow and deep colors to shades similar to the human skin, as shown in the following image :

Notice how i’ve changed the shallow and deep radius to 0.01m and 0.03m, try these settings yourself, you’ll see that these work well for human-sized characters. Lastly also notice the shallow texmap and deep texmap, which are textures that can be used as skinmaps, which is exactly what i’ve done here.

Since i’m using a Poser model (Jessi) for my mesh inside 3dsmax, the mesh already has UV texturing coordinates for the Jessi_Body.jpg skin texture map, and therefore, the model needs no UV work. If you wish, and you have the files from Poser, go ahead and create Bitmap maps for the shallow and deep texmaps.

Now, light your scene with GI (dont know how?  read our other tutorials on architectural photorealistic rendering..) , and do a test render…

Not bad for first try. Notice how light is scattering mostly inside her legs, in this lighting situation since lighting is coming from below.

Now let’s try to render her inside a daylight scene.

Using the same parameters, render her inside one of our previous tutorial’s daylight scenes using XRef Object instancing.

We can see that the results are consistent once we have set up VrayFastSSS material correctly. When working in a real scale (meters), using the correct Shallow and Deep parameters works incredibly well in Vray. We only have to tweak the material once and voila, instant, picture-perfect SSS every time, in almost any lighting situation.

Thanks for reading our SSS tutorial.

Please see our other tutorials, we hope you enjoy your stay in our web site. Lastly, feel free to drop us a line.

This is a beginner-level tutorial on how to model and light a simple, photorealistic room with Vray. In this tutorial, we will take you step by step in the modelling, texturing, lighting and rendering processes required to create a photo-real room in Vray and 3dsmax.

Well, let’s get started !

1.  You will need some texture files for this tutorial, download them here.

2.  Boot up 3dsmax, start a new scene, select Vray as your renderer.
3.  Now we’re going to set the working scale to Meters. Click on Customize > Units Setup as so :

4.  Now we’ll create the floor of our scene. Create a Box object near the center of the scene, usng the following measurements :

5.  Notice how the box has a NEGATIVE height value. This will be very useful for creating objects later on, that land ON our floor because the floor surface is exactly at 0.0 units in the Z vector.

6. Now let’s set the material for this object.  We’re going to make the floor a light wood tileable texture , which is included in the zip file above. Extract this file to your project’s working directory on your hard drive. Then, in the 3dsmax Material Editor , click this button :

Clicking the button labeled 1. created a new Map or Material. Make sure that “New” is selected in the “Browse From:” list in the window that appears (labeled 2.). Now. select “VrayMtl” which stands for “Vray Material” click OK to close the window.

The material now converts to a Vray Material type, as shown in this screenshot :

7.  Now that we have a Vray Material created, we’re going to assign a wood bitmap into its Diffuse slot. To do this, click the small gray button highlighted in the screen above. Then, select “Bitmap” from the list that appears and click OK.

Next you will be presented with the Bitmap options. Select the bitmap texture file named Wood_Floor.jpg from your ZIP file, and click OK.

8.  At this point, you will see that the material has been updated with the texture file covering its diffuse channel. Now, we will apply this material to our Floor object. Select the floor object (Box01) with your mouse, then click the material in the Material Editor once to select it. Now, click on the Material Editor’s Material menu > Assign to Selection. You will see the floor updated with the texture assigned.

9.  Now we will adjust the UV coordinates of the floor object so that the wood texture looks better on the object.. To do this, select the floor object, and click the 3dsmax MODIFY panel.

Click the button highlighted above. Next, we will add a MODIFIER to the object. Click on the box labeled “Modifier List”, and a very long list of 3dsmax available modifiers will appear. These are ways of modifying our object that 3dsmax provides. For now, find the “UVW Map” modifier and click it.

The following will appear in theModify Panel :

Notice that these are the parameters for the UVW Map modifier… These let you control how the modifier acts on your base object. Now, to make the wood look more realistically, set the U Tile and V Tile to 5.0 and 2.0, respectively, as seen in the picture above.

Now the floor looks a little better according to its proportions of 5 x 4 meters.. It’s a small room anyways. Adjust the wood tiles to your liking, feel free to experiment with the UV Map’s modifiers.

Creating the Walls

Well, that was easy enough! Let’s continue creating the walls for our scene.

1.  Switch to the TOP viewport in Max.  Now in the CREATE panel, select the Box primitive, and in the TOP viewport, click-drag create a Box object as seen in the following image :

2.  Next we will make a simple cream-colored material for the wall. Open your Material Editor, select a blank material, convert it to a VrayMtl (as seen in the process above), and set a Grayish Cream color material for the diffuse. Apply the new material to the wall.

3.  Creating more walls. Now do the same for the bottom wall (facing the first one, parallel to it) . TIP: Instead of drawing a new Box object, you can just select the current wall, in the TOP viewport, then select the MOVE tool (W in your keyboard) , hold the left SHIFT key, and click-drag a copy of the wall into the bottom part of the room. When you RELEASE the drag, a dialog will pop up, make sure you select the COPY option inside it and click OK :

4.  Now that the two first walls are created, you must create the side walls. To do this, using the Create panel, draw new side walls. Make these the same height (2.65m) as the previous ones, and make sure they align nicely, like this :

5.  Now that we have the walls set up, click-select the floor, and using our Right-SHIFT Move trick, MOVE the floor holding SHIFT upwards in the Z axis, duplicating a copy of the floor and positioning this new copy where the ceiling will go. Also apply the Wall material to the new roof object :

6.  Now we’re finally going to create a CAMERA for our scene. Using the TOP viewport, go to the Create Panel, then select the CAMERAS button,

Click the buttons above in order from top to bottom. This will set your pointer to a tool with which you can DRAG a camera into the viewport. Try drawing a camera in the TOP viewport, from one corner of the room into the next, like in this screenshot :

7.  Now select the Camera base object AND the tip of the camera (Camerao1.Target). With BOTH objects selected, right-click on the MOVE tool and the following dialod will pop up :

8.  In the Absolute:World area, in the Z: box, type in 1.6 and hit Enter. This will position the camera at 1.60 meters above 0 in the Z Axis, or the approximate equivalent height of a human being’s eyes while standing up !

Presto, we have created a “human”-level camera. But there’s a few settings I want to tweak to get a better field of view effect, especially for architecture scenes. We’re going to adjust the FOV (field of view) of the camera.  To do this, select the Camera01 object, WITHOUT its Target (just the base camera object alone) , then , in the MODIFY panel, set the camera’s attributes to match this screenshot :

Set the Lens to 28.0 mm, the FOV to 65.47 .  This creates a camera with a wider angle of view that is better suited to small rooms.

Great, so our camera is set up!  Wanna do a quick test render?  Of course we have still not set up lighting and rendering up, but just to see what it looks like, do a QUICK TEST RENDER by clicking anywhere inside the Perspective Viewport, presscing the C key to select the only camera in the scene, and finally pressing F9 to quick-render ! …

Ok, we get this plain-looking flat room with no lighting and barely some color. I agree, our room is kind of dull right now, maybe frankenstein’s room haha, but don’t worry, we will be fixing that very shortly!   Soon this room will look like what we intend it to look like :  A storage room with a window shining bright beautiful sunlight into our scene.

So let’s light this room and put a Window in here shall we? 

Lighting the Room

AWESOME job, so we’ve made it this far! Congrats on getting this far. Now this is where the fun starts.  Now we’re gonna make one nice-looking lighting setup for our room. Let’s get started.

1.  We’re going to carve a Window into one of our side walls. To do this, draw a 1.0m x 1.0m x 1.0m Box primitive in the TOP viewport. This will be our window hole.

2.  Move this box to cut into our side wall so that it looks like an actual window. Maybe use a 1.0m height in the Z axis , to be more realistic (right-click the Move tool with the window box selected to do this).

3. As you might have guessed, we’re going to CUT a window into our side wall USING the Window Box object we created. To do this, select the SIDE WALL you want to make a cut into, then, go to the Create Panel, select Compound Objects from the Creation List (”Standard Primitives”) . Now you will get some new buttons that belong to the Compound Objects list . In them is a button called “Boolean” button.

4.  SELECT the Side Wall object you wish to cut a window into. With it selected, click the BOOLEAN button from the Compoun Objects.

5.  With BOOLEAN selected, you will see a “Pick Operand B” button. Go ahead and click it once. Now, with the tool selected, click the WINDOW BOX you with to cut the wall with.

6.  Presto, you’ve created a hole in your wall, representing a window!

Setting up lighting & Global llumination

Nooow we get to the fun part. But in this part, you will also need to stay close to my instructions so it’s easier for you ok? Deal? Deal.  Good. Let’s start lighting our scene beautifully…

1.  We’re going to create a Direct Light that will act as our main Sun.  To do this, in the Create Panel, click on the LIGHTS icon, then select “Standard” from the drop down list. Finally select the “Target Direct” button. This will put you in click-drag light creation mode.

2.  Go to the Top viewport. In it, click-drag a directional light just like in the picture below :

Set the settings of the Directional Light as in the screenshot. 2.0 for multiplier, light yellow color, and VrayShadow turned to ON.

3.  Now we’re going to override Max’s environment lighting. To do so, press F10 to bring up the Render Scene dialog. In it, click the RENDERER tab to access the V-Ray Rendering Settings.  Here’s where it gets fun…

V-Ray Settings Workflow.

Ok, we’ve made it this far. We’ve modelled a simple room with the proper Vray Materials set up, and one light in our scene to simulate the sun. We’re still missing some Vray magic in order to make this look real. It’s important to note that every artist has a different workflow to set this up, but in this special tutorial I am showing you my personal workflow. Why? Cuz i love to help other people lol, wish the whole world would do the same. Anyways !

1.  We’re going to be working with several different Vray Rollouts, which are sections of the Vray Rendering Engine Settings, such as “Global Switches”, “Global Illumination”, “Frame Buffer”, and more. I’m sure you’ve located them already since you’re following this tutorial step by step . If not, go boot up Max and good luck trying to catch up to the lesson.

Go ahead and open the Global switches settings rollout, and change the Secondary Ray Bias to 0.01.  This makes Vray render imperfect surfaces (such as two boxes sitting really close to each other) without visual artifacts.

2.  Now open the Image Sampler: Anti-aliasiang rollout. In it, change Image Sampler Type to : Adaptive QMC. This is a faster method than Adaptive Subdivision with sharper image results, at least in my experience. Also select the Anti-aliasing Filter to Mitchel-Netravalli for soft, natural-looking renderings. Feel free to play with this setting later on.

3.  Open up Indirect Illumination( GI ) .  Here you must turn on GI (main checkbox in this rollout), set the PRIMARY engine to IRRADIANCE MAP, the SECONDARY engine to LIGHT CACHE. This is by far the fastest combination for great-looking GI at a fraction of the time it takes to use Quasi-MonteCarlo…

4.  Open up the Irradiance Map rollout.  Here’s where it can get tricky. I use these settings :

Current preset:  Medium – Animation
HSph. Subdivisions : 32-40 (32 for previews)
Interp. Samples :  20
Show calc. phase: TICKED
Mode : Single Frame (must be changed for animations, see another tutorial for this..)

5.  Open up the Light Cache rollout. I use these settings for good results :

Subdivs:  350-700 (350 for previews, 700 for final renderings)
Sample size : 0.03
Use light cache for glossy rays: TICKED
Mode:  Single Frame (must be changed for animations)

6.  Open up the Environment rollout. Here we can override max’s default environment.  Environment light is light that enter the scene from all angles, just like light entering a room through a window. It is automatically computed by the vray engine as coming from all directions. Environment light provides an easy way for us to light our scene, by simply raising the multiplier value in this rollout.

Go ahead and CLICK the Environment checkbox (GI Environment Skylight Override) to a good initial value of 5.0.  High values such as this (and higher) help light INTERIOR scenes correctly (!). Why?  Because just like a real-world camera needs lots of natural light in order to take a correct photograph of an interior, vray also does need lots of light coming in from the outside to light an interior scene so that it looks REAL.

This is one of the secrets of Photorealism… To simulate  just the right amount of light inside a scene. Secondary to this is the quality of your modelling, but that is an obvious statement. If your 3d models are not realistic, your scene won’t be, either.

7.  Now that we’ve enabled the Environment Override checkbox and set a value for it, we’re going to open the Color Mapping rollout.

Color mapping is CRUCIAL to your render’s realism, since it controls how colors are DRAWN to the screen. I will not go into an in-depth explanation of this works, I will leave it up to you to search for how the different settings work, but a in a nutshell :

- Linear multiply :  Will make your renderings use pretty much no color correction. Makes renders be super-bright and overshot. We don’t want this.
- Exponential :  Limits the output of black and white colors to a maximum, BUT makes your renderings muddy and requires image post work.
- Reinhard mode: Exactly what we’re looking for.  A mix of Linear and Exponential modes.

Go ahead and select Reinhard mode as your Color Mapping type. When you do so, leave the Multiplier to 1.0, set the BURN value to 0.65, and Gamma to 1.0

Here’s the secret to great vray renderings: Reinhard mode’s BURN value lets you interpolate between Linear and Exponential modes, providing a “mixed” mode, that is, providing ADJUSTABLE BALANCE between the two modes. Setting this value to 0.65 gives us a great balance between the two modes. Go ahead and set this value.

Now you are done with the Vray Settings.

Go ahead and save your work.

Additional 3dsmax settings

Now we’re going to set the sky color to a realistic white. Press 8 to bring up the Environment and Effects dialog. In the background: common parameters rollout, click the Environment Color color box and select a pure white color (100% white).

Our first test render …

Now let’s see what our scene looks like right now. We’ve got a window, a sun (Direct light), Vray GI enabled and configured, and some textured floors and walls.

Hit F9 to render your scene out. This will take anywhere from under a minute to 6 minutes, depending on your machine’s speed. Currently on a 2.0 Ghz Core2Duo, rendering takes a mere 2:23, thanks to our render setup detailed above.

The resulting render is not bad, check out the result of following each step in this tutorial !

However, our result is FAR from realistic. It needs more light. You can clearly see that there’s just not enough light coming into the room. Let’s fix that now. What we need is a VRAY LIGHT poking through our window.

8.  Go to the Create Panel, click on the Create Lights icon, then select the  “Vray” light type. Now select the “VrayLight” button.

9.  In the LEFT viewport, or a viewport where you can SEE our window in the wall from the front, draw a vraylight by click-dragging in the viewport, so that you create a light in this exact position :

10.  Use the other viewports to position the new light so that it sits right outside the hole (window) in the wall.

11.  Set the following parameters for the light :

Type: Plane
Units:  Default (image)
Multiplier:  9.0
Invisible: Checked

12.  Now we have much more light coming into our scene from our “window”… Let’s render it and see how it looks. Press F9 to quick render..

Now that’s better! The lighting in the rooms looks more realistic, almost natural-looking, like its 3 pm or something. Great! See the workflow? Good.

TIP:

Remember that if you feel that your scene is too dark, all you have to do is tweak the Multiplier value of your VrayLight OR change the Environment Multiplier in the Vray Render Settings. ! It’s that simple. You don’t have to mess with other settings (unless you really know your vray inside and out..).

Adding objects and life

Still reading eh? Good for you. At this point, our scene’s lighting is nice. But we have a problem… Our scene is kinda empty. You can hear the walls echo when you walk in this room. Creepy. Let’s fix that.

1.  Using your viewports and the Box tool, draw some boxes that fit your scene like this :

These will become a SLIDING CLOSET in our scene.
Go ahead and make these 2.50 meters tall. Make them sit on your floor, too.

3.  Now we’re going to make these have a LIGHT WOOD texture. Open Material Editor (press M), select an empty slot with no material assigned, click the Standard button, select VrayMtl to create a Vray Material, click its Diffuse box, select Bitmap, then go ahead and find the “Wood_Drawer.jpg” file from the ZIP file that came with this lesson (shown at the top).

4.  Now select your three new drawer doors you just created, and click Material > Assign Material to Selection in the Material Editor. Wham, there you have it, instant sliding closet!!

5.  Now we’re going to create a cool glass-like sliding panel to each box just for style.  Select all your doors with the mouse, then go to your FRONT viewport. Now here’s a neat new trick for you:

Press R to go switch to the Non-Uniform Scale tool.
With the boxes selected, RIGHT-SHIFT DRAG the transform gizmo in the Y axis downward.
This will create a DUPLICATE of all three boxes at once, scaling the boxes as you duplicate them at the same time !

Release the shift-drag when you’re pleased with the size of the new panels. 3dsmax then shows you the Clone Options , select the COPY method and click OK.

6.  In your top viewport, move the three NEW boxes (the sliding panels) in the Y axis just about 0.05 meters, so that they stick out just a bit. This is done so that the panels can be seen on TOP of the wood.

7.  Now we’re going to create a GLASS material for our new panels. Open the Material Editor (press M), select an empty material slot, then create a new VrayMtl with the following settings :

8.  Apply the material to our panels. Render the scene. You should have something like this :

Now our scene is improving dramatically. As we model more objects or add them from 3d libraries, your scene will only improve in photo-realism. You will NOT need to tweak the lighting with this workflow from now on.

Here’s an illustrarion of that. The following rendering was done with the same lighting setup, but more objects in the scene :

That concludes our tutorial. I hope you had fun and learned some things about Max and Vray. I really do.
If you learned from this tutorial we really do appreciate that you please support our sponsors, they make this site possible.

My name is Charles and I can be reached at :  charles@3dmaxtutorial.net

Thanks!

Please support our Sponsors, thanks!

Our partners – 3DLinks.com

Email: info@therendercafe.com