5401
Gallery / Re: Field House
« on: 2016-07-06, 16:27:32 »
Nice! TY for sharing!
2024-05-15, 13:35:24
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5402
[Max] I need help! / Re: transparent plastic bottle material
« on: 2016-07-06, 16:14:33 »
Was wondering about the thickness too, it does look like it doesn't have any and that will make a difference.
On the AO, lots of settings can be used to adjust the AO. A lower Max Distance will stop the rays looking so far for occluding surfaces, a higher Ray Directionality will keep the searching rays more focused rather than spread (and again "tighten" the results), and Colour Spread could help too. This video here goes through the settings, is using it as a dirt map but the principles of controlling the results of the AO are the same -
That said, AO might not be the solution here - generally it is used to highlight the shape of geometry by creating fake shadows to make things pop, but, a transparent / reflective material doesn't have any diffuse so doesn't catch shadows like that. Most every effect that lets us see the shape comes from reflection and refraction.
If you are free to make the scene any way you like, you could add a texture to the ground surface, and remove the back wall and let an HDRI image show there (like the object is placed on a kitchen countertop for example), could add some other objects on the counter top, even just more than one bottle. All of this would give things for the bottle to reflect and refract without having to fake anything. Attaching an image of the previous sphere (distorted it with an FFD modifier just so it has some shape), with the fake black cards and softbox turned off, and the Corona lights made less intense - with the background visible, their shape can be clearly made out without tricks!
You could use a very out of focus background for your HDRI to keep attention on the bottle.
(and yes, I was lazy and didn't fix the water in the rotated sphere - welcome to no gravity!)
PS - I did lower the reflection Glossiness to .5 on the plastic material here, so it has softer reflections than the water, felt it looked better with the background in full use.
On the AO, lots of settings can be used to adjust the AO. A lower Max Distance will stop the rays looking so far for occluding surfaces, a higher Ray Directionality will keep the searching rays more focused rather than spread (and again "tighten" the results), and Colour Spread could help too. This video here goes through the settings, is using it as a dirt map but the principles of controlling the results of the AO are the same -
That said, AO might not be the solution here - generally it is used to highlight the shape of geometry by creating fake shadows to make things pop, but, a transparent / reflective material doesn't have any diffuse so doesn't catch shadows like that. Most every effect that lets us see the shape comes from reflection and refraction.
If you are free to make the scene any way you like, you could add a texture to the ground surface, and remove the back wall and let an HDRI image show there (like the object is placed on a kitchen countertop for example), could add some other objects on the counter top, even just more than one bottle. All of this would give things for the bottle to reflect and refract without having to fake anything. Attaching an image of the previous sphere (distorted it with an FFD modifier just so it has some shape), with the fake black cards and softbox turned off, and the Corona lights made less intense - with the background visible, their shape can be clearly made out without tricks!
You could use a very out of focus background for your HDRI to keep attention on the bottle.
(and yes, I was lazy and didn't fix the water in the rotated sphere - welcome to no gravity!)
PS - I did lower the reflection Glossiness to .5 on the plastic material here, so it has softer reflections than the water, felt it looked better with the background in full use.
5403
Gallery / Re: The Mattress Reloaded
« on: 2016-07-06, 16:10:41 »
lol to the image, that just makes it even better!
5404
Gallery / Re: The Mattress Reloaded
« on: 2016-07-06, 00:48:20 »
Looks great - and awesome thread title too :)
5405
[Max] I need help! / Re: transparent plastic bottle material
« on: 2016-07-06, 00:45:52 »
Aha that is looking better, glad it has helped!
- Render passes tells Corona when to stop, when you use the Render button (not when you use the Interactive Renderer). With a value of 0, Corona will keep adding more passes until you manually hit stop (so you can watch it until the noise cleans up to a point you are happy with), while I had the scene set to stop after 10 passes as that seemed good enough. I did enable Denoising as well.
- Render selected, this generally should be Disabled, so that everything in the scene renders. As the tooltip notes, with it enabled, it will only render the selected objects (but keep indirect lighting from other objects affecting whatever is rendered). Usually used to "fix" a render by re-rendering one (or a few) objects, without re-rendering the whole scene.
- GI vs AA balance, must have tweaked that back when I did the original scene. If I remember right my thinking was that the AA (anti aliasing) wasn't too critical in this scene, but I wanted any noise in the lighting to clean up faster. Wouldn't be a major player in differences in your render and mine.
- Max Ray Depth, I did raise that as part of messing around with the scene - it controls how many times a ray can bounce, I was curious in terms of the reflection and refraction going on as to whether it made any visible difference. As I recall, it made no difference at all raising it to 50, I just forgot to lower it again! The default of 25 should be fine, and render slightly faster.
- Image Filter, don't think I changed that, or if I did I don't recall. Wouldn't really affect the look of the material, just the overall image sharpness, with a lower value being slightly sharper.
- The missing HDRI comes from a stray unused bitmap in the scene. I had several HDRIs originally for the bottle on the black background (no ground or wall behind it), but before sending the scene over just narrowed it down to use one since there was a ground and wall. The other image Max remembers, but isn't actually being used anyplace so the message can be safely ignored.
Objects with refraction and reflection are hard to render against plain backgrounds, as most of their shape is defined to the eye by the reflection and refraction, and with nothing to reflect / refract, it is hard to make it look good. In photographic studio set ups, white cards, lights (positioned as much for their reflection as for their lighting angle), umbrellas, softboxes, black cards, etc, are used to overcome this. This does mean the shape of the object will play a large part in where to place these elements, or their 'fakes' in this case! Usually you want them placed so that they show up in the edges, for instance I like the right side of the bottle in your image, but the top left side has a bit too much of the card showing, so moving the card causing that would make its refraction nice and "thin" like on the other side of the bottle.
If you are allowed to have something other than a plain background (other objects, etc) then that might make life easier, but depends on what the client wants for the image!
- Render passes tells Corona when to stop, when you use the Render button (not when you use the Interactive Renderer). With a value of 0, Corona will keep adding more passes until you manually hit stop (so you can watch it until the noise cleans up to a point you are happy with), while I had the scene set to stop after 10 passes as that seemed good enough. I did enable Denoising as well.
- Render selected, this generally should be Disabled, so that everything in the scene renders. As the tooltip notes, with it enabled, it will only render the selected objects (but keep indirect lighting from other objects affecting whatever is rendered). Usually used to "fix" a render by re-rendering one (or a few) objects, without re-rendering the whole scene.
- GI vs AA balance, must have tweaked that back when I did the original scene. If I remember right my thinking was that the AA (anti aliasing) wasn't too critical in this scene, but I wanted any noise in the lighting to clean up faster. Wouldn't be a major player in differences in your render and mine.
- Max Ray Depth, I did raise that as part of messing around with the scene - it controls how many times a ray can bounce, I was curious in terms of the reflection and refraction going on as to whether it made any visible difference. As I recall, it made no difference at all raising it to 50, I just forgot to lower it again! The default of 25 should be fine, and render slightly faster.
- Image Filter, don't think I changed that, or if I did I don't recall. Wouldn't really affect the look of the material, just the overall image sharpness, with a lower value being slightly sharper.
- The missing HDRI comes from a stray unused bitmap in the scene. I had several HDRIs originally for the bottle on the black background (no ground or wall behind it), but before sending the scene over just narrowed it down to use one since there was a ground and wall. The other image Max remembers, but isn't actually being used anyplace so the message can be safely ignored.
Objects with refraction and reflection are hard to render against plain backgrounds, as most of their shape is defined to the eye by the reflection and refraction, and with nothing to reflect / refract, it is hard to make it look good. In photographic studio set ups, white cards, lights (positioned as much for their reflection as for their lighting angle), umbrellas, softboxes, black cards, etc, are used to overcome this. This does mean the shape of the object will play a large part in where to place these elements, or their 'fakes' in this case! Usually you want them placed so that they show up in the edges, for instance I like the right side of the bottle in your image, but the top left side has a bit too much of the card showing, so moving the card causing that would make its refraction nice and "thin" like on the other side of the bottle.
If you are allowed to have something other than a plain background (other objects, etc) then that might make life easier, but depends on what the client wants for the image!
5406
[Max] I need help! / Re: Substance Painter and 1.5 daily
« on: 2016-07-05, 15:17:23 »
lol with the Mario Galaxy image, someone should do a Mario model like that ;)
I grabbed that profile for my tests for sure, haven't touched Painter's own as it seemed way off track even before 1.5 - I was wondering how 1.5 changed the process from that thread though, as the GGX curve fix should no longer be necessary, which was what I was experimenting with when I came up with the results above. Seems like it is true that the imported Glossiness is just fine, but that the Fresnel is an issue, at least once Roughness in Painter gets above certain values.
Thanks!
Tom
I grabbed that profile for my tests for sure, haven't touched Painter's own as it seemed way off track even before 1.5 - I was wondering how 1.5 changed the process from that thread though, as the GGX curve fix should no longer be necessary, which was what I was experimenting with when I came up with the results above. Seems like it is true that the imported Glossiness is just fine, but that the Fresnel is an issue, at least once Roughness in Painter gets above certain values.
Thanks!
Tom
5407
[Max] I need help! / Re: transparent plastic bottle material
« on: 2016-07-05, 14:57:37 »
Sure - had to take the bottle model out, since it was purchased and I can't share, so replaced it with spheres.
Also, no textures included so you'll need to use your own HDRI - in this new image, I used the free Newport Loft from HDRLabs siBL Archive collection, but though free I can't re-distribute it, link is here http://www.hdrlabs.com/sibl/archive.html. Probably could find a more suitable image anyway, something more like a studio rather than a room, but all depends on how it looks in the reflections so feel free to experiment!
The texture I used as the softbox type glow is attached though it was made in 2 seconds and you could do a better job :) A rectangular style glow would be more realistic.
Saved it from Max 2017, as a 2014 compatible file (the earliest 2017 would offer). Corona is 1.4.
Hope it helps!
Also, no textures included so you'll need to use your own HDRI - in this new image, I used the free Newport Loft from HDRLabs siBL Archive collection, but though free I can't re-distribute it, link is here http://www.hdrlabs.com/sibl/archive.html. Probably could find a more suitable image anyway, something more like a studio rather than a room, but all depends on how it looks in the reflections so feel free to experiment!
The texture I used as the softbox type glow is attached though it was made in 2 seconds and you could do a better job :) A rectangular style glow would be more realistic.
Saved it from Max 2017, as a 2014 compatible file (the earliest 2017 would offer). Corona is 1.4.
Hope it helps!
5408
[Max] I need help! / Substance Painter and 1.5 daily
« on: 2016-07-04, 20:46:17 »
Been exploring Substance Painter for the first time, with particular reference to the new Glossiness in daily builds for 1.5.
Since this is my first time trying this, wanted to post some findings and get some feedback, advice and comments on what I am doing wrong / could do better. Hoping at some point to know enough about what I am doing to make video tutorials about it, if I can understand it better :)
Glossiness
I started with just the Gold Pure material from the Painter Materials library. The only way I got it to work at present was:
- In TextureSet Settings in Painter, set Roughness to Linear (I used L8)
- Use the Converted Maps Glossiness as the output to the Glossiness file
- Save to EXR. If I saved to PNG (even with an RGB value in the TextureSet Settings rather than Linear) then things were not coming out as expected.
If I did the above, then glossiness seems to map 1 to 1 on export from Painter and import into Max, meaning that as best as I could tell the new Glossiness is indeed working to standard. I used high Fresnel values (not importing Fresnel IOR from Painter at the moment, as not sure how that would work) and all was good for materials with a Roughness in Painter of up to about 0.6 (see images for .2 and .5)
However, as Roughness in Painter gets above about 0.6 or thereabouts, the material begins to render more brightly in Corona than it does in Iray or real-time view in Painter (see images for .8).
To correct for that, the Fresnel IOR value in the Corona Material has to reduce, and a reduction of the Reflection brightness is useful too (as at too low a Fresnel value, the Fresnel effect gets more pronounced in Corona than in the Painter material).
I set this up in a crude form - I took the Glossiness EXR, and set a curve so it remains at 1 until a Painter Roughness of 0.6 was reached, then it begins to drop off. With a Corona Mix I used that to multiply with a Corona Colour, and plugged the result of that into the Fresnel IOR so that the value drops with those values of Roughness from 0.6 to 1.0 in Painter. I did the same with the Metal Colour (going into Reflection Colour).
Is there a better way to do any of this? E.g. is there a way to avoid needing EXRs? Is there some better way to control the Fresnel IOR to avoid the overbright results for high roughness values? Is this related in any way to the topic raised elsewhere regarding unexpected results (when compared to other renderers) from Fresnel IOR?
Thanks!
Tom
Since this is my first time trying this, wanted to post some findings and get some feedback, advice and comments on what I am doing wrong / could do better. Hoping at some point to know enough about what I am doing to make video tutorials about it, if I can understand it better :)
Glossiness
I started with just the Gold Pure material from the Painter Materials library. The only way I got it to work at present was:
- In TextureSet Settings in Painter, set Roughness to Linear (I used L8)
- Use the Converted Maps Glossiness as the output to the Glossiness file
- Save to EXR. If I saved to PNG (even with an RGB value in the TextureSet Settings rather than Linear) then things were not coming out as expected.
If I did the above, then glossiness seems to map 1 to 1 on export from Painter and import into Max, meaning that as best as I could tell the new Glossiness is indeed working to standard. I used high Fresnel values (not importing Fresnel IOR from Painter at the moment, as not sure how that would work) and all was good for materials with a Roughness in Painter of up to about 0.6 (see images for .2 and .5)
However, as Roughness in Painter gets above about 0.6 or thereabouts, the material begins to render more brightly in Corona than it does in Iray or real-time view in Painter (see images for .8).
To correct for that, the Fresnel IOR value in the Corona Material has to reduce, and a reduction of the Reflection brightness is useful too (as at too low a Fresnel value, the Fresnel effect gets more pronounced in Corona than in the Painter material).
I set this up in a crude form - I took the Glossiness EXR, and set a curve so it remains at 1 until a Painter Roughness of 0.6 was reached, then it begins to drop off. With a Corona Mix I used that to multiply with a Corona Colour, and plugged the result of that into the Fresnel IOR so that the value drops with those values of Roughness from 0.6 to 1.0 in Painter. I did the same with the Metal Colour (going into Reflection Colour).
Is there a better way to do any of this? E.g. is there a way to avoid needing EXRs? Is there some better way to control the Fresnel IOR to avoid the overbright results for high roughness values? Is this related in any way to the topic raised elsewhere regarding unexpected results (when compared to other renderers) from Fresnel IOR?
Thanks!
Tom
5409
[Max] I need help! / Re: transparent plastic bottle material
« on: 2016-07-04, 20:16:23 »
Oops misnamed the materials for the dark cards, posting that again here :)
Also the bottle with and without those invisible objects, played with the tone mapping some too.
Also the bottle with and without those invisible objects, played with the tone mapping some too.
5410
[Max] I need help! / Re: transparent plastic bottle material
« on: 2016-07-04, 20:05:34 »
The advantage I had in my scene is no ground and wall behind the bottle, so the refraction was easy to do! With those needed I think there are two options
1. Set up the "studio" so that the refracted rays hit a dark background of some sort. Could be tricky, though realistic.
2. Cheat some using the Rayswitcher material, which I tried here.
- I created two planes (well, boxes, I was lazy and just cloned the ground plane) on either side of the bottle. In the Direct, I placed a Corona Material that was completely transparent, so the objects don't show up at all when viewed from the camera. In the Refract, I placed a dark blue material. This shows up in the refraction on the bottle. This I found easier than trying to adjust the background objects to ensure the ray hit something other than the ground and walls. These are highlighted in the screengrab
- I did a similar thing with a plane. Used rayswitcher to make it invisible directly, but for reflection I painted on a radial glow texture I made in Photoshop, with self illumination. I dropped in the invisible material to the GI too, so it didn't add lighting to the scene. Kind of to emulate reflecting a softbox somewhere in the studio.
- I changed my reflection environment to something more complex. The main bright reflections are the two Corona lights, rectangular.
- I upped the refraction IOR for the water to 1.5 or so
Of course, setting up the studio "properly" is also an option, so that genuine dark cards, softboxes etc are reflected and refracted, but this can be easier to set up quickly as then you can move the dark cards and softbox simulation around wherever you like to get a good result without worrying if they are in camera or not :) Again not a perfect final image, but may give you some ideas.
1. Set up the "studio" so that the refracted rays hit a dark background of some sort. Could be tricky, though realistic.
2. Cheat some using the Rayswitcher material, which I tried here.
- I created two planes (well, boxes, I was lazy and just cloned the ground plane) on either side of the bottle. In the Direct, I placed a Corona Material that was completely transparent, so the objects don't show up at all when viewed from the camera. In the Refract, I placed a dark blue material. This shows up in the refraction on the bottle. This I found easier than trying to adjust the background objects to ensure the ray hit something other than the ground and walls. These are highlighted in the screengrab
- I did a similar thing with a plane. Used rayswitcher to make it invisible directly, but for reflection I painted on a radial glow texture I made in Photoshop, with self illumination. I dropped in the invisible material to the GI too, so it didn't add lighting to the scene. Kind of to emulate reflecting a softbox somewhere in the studio.
- I changed my reflection environment to something more complex. The main bright reflections are the two Corona lights, rectangular.
- I upped the refraction IOR for the water to 1.5 or so
Of course, setting up the studio "properly" is also an option, so that genuine dark cards, softboxes etc are reflected and refracted, but this can be easier to set up quickly as then you can move the dark cards and softbox simulation around wherever you like to get a good result without worrying if they are in camera or not :) Again not a perfect final image, but may give you some ideas.
5411
[Max] General Discussion / Re: Bucket Renderer in 1.4 ???
« on: 2016-07-04, 17:48:52 »
Well that all may be the best laugh I get all day, all these F5 shennanigans :)
5412
[Max] I need help! / Re: Flame material
« on: 2016-07-04, 15:36:21 »
I'd have thought a texture map, fed into Self Illumination on a material. Works in most cases, and the object can then usually be a plane. Any specific use you were thinking of, as that may change how you approach it?
5413
[Max] I need help! / Re: transparent plastic bottle material
« on: 2016-07-04, 15:27:05 »
Most likely lots of different set ups for this, here's one I used - though this was for a standalone object against a black background, to be used in an animation (spinning on the spot, to be displayed in a hologram-style display), so the settings may not be so useful for embedding within an actual scene as things here had to be bright and bold - should give a starting point though.
Things to note
- It needs something to refract, for the refraction of the water to show up. You could add a Refraction Environment into the material for example - in this instance, I had an HDR image in the 3ds Max environment, and used Background Override to show a black background. With nothing to refract, it will lose the look. It also needs something to reflect too, but you seem to have that already.
- I've left Diffuse on in these examples, which gives a slightly "milky" look (and adds the blue colour to the bottle which was relevant given that the bottle was based on a particular brand). Removing that will give a much more clear, transparent look.
- Reflections here may be a bit over-bright, but they suited the purpose! If embedding it in a scene rather than floating on its own, may have adjusted that.
- The water isn't terribly obvious inside the bottle here (other than adding the refraction) but that was ok, as the bottle was tipped and for speed in the project I didn't want to get into modifying the model to make the top of the water surface angled as it would be with a tipped bottle ;)
- It was a purchased model, the bottle is not very thick at all. I didn't do anything with Absorption and Scattering for bottle or water.
- Bottle and water should be two different models (as they are here)
Hope something here sparks some ideas!
PS - the renders here are just quick grabs from the Interactive Renderer, didn't re-render properly for the sake of grabbing these images, which is why they are still noisy :)
Things to note
- It needs something to refract, for the refraction of the water to show up. You could add a Refraction Environment into the material for example - in this instance, I had an HDR image in the 3ds Max environment, and used Background Override to show a black background. With nothing to refract, it will lose the look. It also needs something to reflect too, but you seem to have that already.
- I've left Diffuse on in these examples, which gives a slightly "milky" look (and adds the blue colour to the bottle which was relevant given that the bottle was based on a particular brand). Removing that will give a much more clear, transparent look.
- Reflections here may be a bit over-bright, but they suited the purpose! If embedding it in a scene rather than floating on its own, may have adjusted that.
- The water isn't terribly obvious inside the bottle here (other than adding the refraction) but that was ok, as the bottle was tipped and for speed in the project I didn't want to get into modifying the model to make the top of the water surface angled as it would be with a tipped bottle ;)
- It was a purchased model, the bottle is not very thick at all. I didn't do anything with Absorption and Scattering for bottle or water.
- Bottle and water should be two different models (as they are here)
Hope something here sparks some ideas!
PS - the renders here are just quick grabs from the Interactive Renderer, didn't re-render properly for the sake of grabbing these images, which is why they are still noisy :)
5414
[Max] General Discussion / Re: Corona max materials?? and corona alpha??
« on: 2016-07-01, 22:56:00 »
The blog posts for each release also go into more detail than the videos, for instance this one about 1.4 alone is a long and extensive list!
https://corona-renderer.com/blog/corona-renderer-1-4-for-3ds-max-released/
Hope this helps!
https://corona-renderer.com/blog/corona-renderer-1-4-for-3ds-max-released/
Hope this helps!
5415
[Max] General Discussion / Re: Corona max materials?? and corona alpha??
« on: 2016-07-01, 22:51:19 »
It will work with several native shaders, though you won't get the same level of control as converting them to Corona Materials (and since that can be done with the included conversion script with the click of a button, no reason why not to do it!) With Corona as the selected renderer, the material list in Slate will show which are can't be rendered (quick grab attached)
Good grief on the list of improvements since the free alpha! Too long a list to mention :) The best summary would be to have a look at the road map at https://trello.com/b/EfPE4kPx/corona-road-map-3ds-max which shows from version 1.2 onward. Primarily, much faster, much more stable, much better handling of many lights, denoising, better scattering, better displacement, render regions in the VFB, and the list goes on, and on, and on....
You could also use, for now, the Speed page on the website, which compares the alpha to 1.0, while the road map above will take you from there to the changes of today (https://corona-renderer.com/features/speed/) - a page that will disappear at some point as it is rather out of date with where things are now.
And the YouTubes for each release
1.2
1.3
1.4
Good grief on the list of improvements since the free alpha! Too long a list to mention :) The best summary would be to have a look at the road map at https://trello.com/b/EfPE4kPx/corona-road-map-3ds-max which shows from version 1.2 onward. Primarily, much faster, much more stable, much better handling of many lights, denoising, better scattering, better displacement, render regions in the VFB, and the list goes on, and on, and on....
You could also use, for now, the Speed page on the website, which compares the alpha to 1.0, while the road map above will take you from there to the changes of today (https://corona-renderer.com/features/speed/) - a page that will disappear at some point as it is rather out of date with where things are now.
And the YouTubes for each release
1.2