3ds MAX and vray renders!, (Help Needed!)

its with cc to match the config im using
using vray anyway, mental ray is crap

yes. choose "very low preset" in irradiance map.
you can find the irradiance map and light cache rollouts in the "indirect illumination" tab

Adjust them from there.

edit: i mistyped something that might cause confusion on your end. with very low preset i mean "very low" in the irradiance map rollout

edited 2012-01-02 16:30:49

(for me) it doesnt matter what you punch in , in my 3ds max version it interpretes "." as "," because my keyboard settings are german i guess (and in germany we use "," instead of ".", yes , we are weird)

so 0,02 = 0.02

I only noticed that in 2010 version though, all other versions i used did infact use the decimal point, i dont like that my version sets commata instead because as a programmer whos used to using decimal points its strange that the program uses commata. However as i said for me it doesnt matter if i type 0,02 or 0.02, its the same. Probably just something i'd have to setup in max, havent had it installed for ages

about your 4 p problem. save the preset you are working with at the moment and upload the preset file, link it so i c an have a look

edited 2012-01-02 17:08:54

I really doubt it should take that long with the low settings i recommended and judging your secne there are not many reflections or bumpmaps that would slow the render down. Should take 1 minute max with those settings. if you would use a medium preset that would be imaginable. Are you sure you properly assigned vray as a renderer and changed the values properly?

edited 2012-01-02 17:16:20

you are creating an exterior scene. Never use artificial light for exterior (the only artificial lights in an exterior scenes should be streetlamps, building lamps (if the scene is a nightscene)) . You will want to use one light source (sun comes to mind ).
Use vray sun or a directlight. The advantage of vray sun is it also creates a sky map (if you click yes when you are prompted) that changes by the position of the sun so you can set a noon or evening mood, however you want to with just changing the height of the sun. You will have to check "GI Environment (skylight) override" in the vray:Environment tab under the vray tab.
I recommend vray sun because you basically won't have to change any values besides the multiplier (if you render from a normal camera or perspective you will have tho change the intensity of the sun a lot, lower it to like 0.1, even less if you need. I dont think you are using a vray cam because its pretty complicated to set up if u never did it and have no idea about photography because it uses those real-life camera values like f-stop shutter speed etc. However, normal camera should do.)

If you have time you can still upload your scene and post or pm me a link so i can have a look at it. I don't know if i have time to check soon because im working on a fragmovie atm and just typing this here

alright, i just loaded your file to max. First of all if you open the 3ds file (the model of the map you captured) and use vray right click in any viewport -> vray scene converter -> yes, then wait a bit. This will convert all the materials to vray materials, that are optimized for the vray renderer

This will reduce render time quite a bit. Second of all, you will expect pretty high render times because all the material is having detailed bumpmapping (like the stonewall for example, you can see its incrdibly detailed in its bumpiness. You can try to reduce the bumpiness. I hope you are familiar with how to get materials into material editor, if not , refer to the max manual, its explained perfectly in tehre ( would just take too long to write here).

Once you loaded the material into the material editor you can edit its different maps like bump, on this stone-wall material the bump map was a whopping 240,0. Thats a lot.

After adjusting the bumpmap to 100,0, decreasing the roughness to 25 (altough you could leave this a bit higher)

my rendertime went down dramatically from ~25 minutes to 6(!) minutes. With quality settings you could probably aim to reach 12-15 minutes rendering time per frame(really hard to judge of course, some frames will render very fast, some very slow, depends on the viewing angle of the camera i.e what is visible. If there are lot of flat faces, it will be fast. if its bumpy it will take longer, which is fine for such a szene. If you do the math, of course the final animation will take some days to render, but thats perfectly normal. I have seen people dooing renders that took 2 months and more to render ;D . If you want to test-render animations fast i would recommend rendering without maps, so the bump and reflection channels are left out.

With low settings, reduced bump map, sun value of 0.025 (could probably do 0.035) i ended up with this:


(click for "bigger" size)

edit:
It's a bit underlit, btw that black line on the left is the flag, just looks a bit weird from this postion
The placement of the vray sun you added was ok btw. Just too intense. as i said if u dont use a vray camera you have to reduce the intensitiy A LOT. (you probably noticed with the plane lights aswell). For production render set shadow subdivs to 8, leave rest as is.


edit2: You may have noticed i rendered to a way smaller resolution than you, thats just my test render settings so it goes faster. With 1920x1080 you could well end up with 40 minutes per frame. This is normal, good renderings take time.

edit3: And for your scene, you would want to add an omni light (or even 2) in the tunnel in the back,make it not drop shadows and adjust its intensity to give an ambient light feel (check ambient only on the light option) to light it a bit because the light wont bounce enough to light it perfectly even if u have good settings.






edited 2012-01-02 20:29:37

sorry for bump, I just thought I'd try this out, and when I do the vray scene converter, quite honestly, nothing happens, and the material editor remains with the same static grey materials. :$

i'm not sure, but this may be because I imported the 3dr into max 2009, saved it as a .max and re-opened in 2012?

any help would be appreciated.

edit: solved through xfire, thanks so much :D

edited 2012-01-24 23:30:09

This reply is actually for verse, threads prior to the hardware failure seem pretty weird now.

youu will have to open material editor , get the material from the surface with the eyedropper , then click "show standard map in viewport", it's a bit of annoying work but shouldnt take that long. You might have to go down a level in Material editor though to make the icon clickable.

edited 2012-01-24 23:37:15

i dont really have any scenes, i pretty much wiped my pc of anything not related to WoW when i stopped playing 2 years ago >:(. After i finish this movie i might start modeling for fun again. But really, it's not that hard to learn lighting your scene properly, Especially if they are premade scenes like ripped ones from games. You even have the games as kind of a preview of how the light should be ;p there are super-many free tutorials about lighting out there + max comes with a super big and easy to understand manual with training tutorials, also about lighting and more complicated stuff

yes ;)

no problem, keep us posted about your project