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odouble

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  1. That's a ton of power in that farm. We have a render farm of (4) dual quad xeons and (5) dual 6 core Nehalems for 4 guys. The benefits for us are instant/on demeand use. It really shines when we have to make last minute changes on huge animation scenes. this can happen on 2 or more concurrent projects in different stages. It's hard to imagine that we could push all our necessary assets back and forth easily to a cloud service in crunch time. I really can't think of any downsides to having a farm at my fingertips.
  2. odouble

    mr proxy trees

    http://www.itoosoft.com/freeplugins/glue.php
  3. Also uncheck the maximum sampling radius parameter under the Global Illumination tab and the Max Num. Photons per sample parameter from 100 to 500 which is the default. That should do it.
  4. Just enable global illumination under the under the Caustics & Global Illumination tab. Do not enable caustics. Check optimize for FinalGather. All other default settings under this tab should be fine for now. The biggest optimiztion comes from making sure the photon radius on your daylight system is just enough to cover your model so its not shooting photons everywhere so adjust that.
  5. The shadow samples/subdivision samples should be higher than 16. 64 would probably do the trick. I hardly use skyportals for interiors as they tend to require an unbearable number of shadow samples to produce clean looks. You might want to try the Final Gather + GI (Photon Map) approach without portals if you're concerned with render times because the Mental ray sky portals currently exposed in 3ds max kinda use a Brute force approach.
  6. The artifacts look like artifacts from a low number of subdivison samples on a portal light. Increase the subdivisions on your sky portals and see what it does. I think your render times will sky rocket but it should clean things up.
  7. What does this dynamic texture filtering script do differently than using the current mental ray map manager option in the translator options tab? Is it more for reflections and refractions?
  8. That is one (the old) way to do it in Mentalray but not the most effecient way since you can use the rendertime displacement in Mentalray also. You do not need to subdivide your mesh to an insane level just like in Vray. You can do pretty much anything in Mentalray that you do in Vray with the exception of memory issues with tons of proxies. That really sets Vray apart. Your dynamic displacement in Mentalray is controlled by the displacement (Global Settings) under the Shadows & Displacement drop down in the renderer tab. It has similar settings to the VraydiplacementMod controls like the view dependent, Edge Length and Max. subdivs. The Max. Displace settings are the closest thing to the water level parameter in the VraydisplacementMod I think... not completely sure but it looks like it clips the displacement to the specified height. Vray keeps these settings in a modifier which allows you to assign the displacement per object. Just use an Archdesign material and plug your map into the displacement slot and that's it. Take a look at the link to get more of an explanation from Jeff Patton's post. http://www.mrmaterials.com/jeffs-blog/94-grass-displacement-faq.html
  9. From my experience, the limitation seems to be with Mentalray and how it handles memory and not with Forest. It might also just be the 3ds max incarnation of Mentalray... can't really speak for other packages. I used another popular scatter plugin that was originally made for Vray, but Forest seemed to be much more optimized for Mentalray (I did think the other plugin was more intuitve to use though). As for the reason I used proxies... The file size started to become an issue and that affects load times over the network with backburner. I never could render the scenes with pure mesh geometry also. The proxies just make me sleep better too...Huge difference in the file size. I have settled on Forest for this project because it's doing what i want. that is not to say that there aren't other solutions that work. A really good thing to do if all else fails is to separate your Forest scatter elements into as many differerent entities as possible. For example I have a Conifer Forest scatter that's separate from the ground shrubs(multiple scatters), deciduous trees, rocks etc. I have about 7-12 Forests scatter elements in each scene. It makes it easier to control and more straight forward to render out in passes to save memory and time. I use the "render subset of scene/masking" in the camera shaders lens slot to render out each pass. You can also just use the matte/shadow/reflection material or separate matte render elements using pre-assigned selection sets for each Forest. Hope it helps.
  10. I see you are using Forest and Mentalray. I'm currently working on 5 scenes that have over 100,000 tree/plant instances in each scene viewport at any given time. The itoo website says there are issues with the plugin and Mentalray's memory management when you get over 500,000 instances or proxies. It has no such issues with Vray. Here's the link to itoo's technical notes: http://www.itoosoft.com/forestpack/reference/rendering.php When I started this project, I went the road of vue and carbonscatter but settled on our geometry tree/plant library. The issues with vue trees in Forest was the opacity maps in the leaves. You can turn off the filtering or even use them in the reflection slot with a 1.0 ior trick but they still don't render as fast as full geometry trees and with geometry leaves that have no opacity maps. I also converted all my trees to proxies before scattering with Forest. Another thing that helped was using the camera clipping distance and density falloff parameter in the Forest plugin under the camera tab. I couldn't render my scenes without breaking them into passes for each forest object before but they render in one beauty pass now in about 25 mins at 3k. I find that adjusting the aliasing even to 16/64 does not crash max. My original issues seemed to stem more from opacity maps and Mentalray's memory limitations with tons of instances(even proxies). A good thing to do is have your Render message window open to see where your bottleneck is.
  11. This might help http://area.autodesk.com/blogs/maxstation/n1_mental_ray_licenses_in_3ds_max
  12. I am guessing that you are using the default gamma settings in max. If you change them to 1.8 or 2.2 your lights should be more predictable.
  13. I believe the clipping plane in 3ds max (when using Mentalray) is based on the scanline algorithm; it does not work with raytracing the first bounce. It basically uses the the near and far bounds used to optimize scanline rendering to clip your scene. The Mentalray scanline algorithm does not sort objects in a bsp tree like the raytracing algorithm. It sorts objects by using a direct line of sight from the cameras perspective (kinda like zDepth). It is this ability that allows the clipping plane to work with scanline and not raytracing as far as I know.
  14. Go to "Rendering->Render Message Window..." and then generate photons again. My guess is that it stops generating photons after a certain amount of photons has been reached. You should see any error in the render message window.
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