btee

I find that there's a back and forth between rendering and photography, where doing each one improves your ability in the other. Personally, I took up photography a few years ago after working as a renderer for quite some time. Having used 3D cameras with real physical camera settings, I found it pretty easy to use a digital SLR in full manual mode. I also think that in terms of image composition, there's a complementary relationship between using virtual and physical cameras.

You're obviously attempting a Felice Varini single point projection. I wouldn't bother doing it in MAX personally. Rhino is made for stuff like this. My office has been using this technique for years and MAX can't compete with Rhino when it comes to clean, complex Boolean operations.

I use the object paint feature in MAX all the time to paint proxy trees, cars, people into scenes. It works really well. If I have to paint forests or huge expanses of planting, then I've found the best plugin is Gugila Groundwiz. It is freaking amazing and well worth the small cost of purchasing it.

I'd have to agree with crazy homeless guy here. I usually have to increase the intensity a LOT to get the right amount of light.

Those kinds of splotches are often caused by reflections and/or refractions when you're using interpolation. Might not be the cause in this case, but I've basically stopped using interpolation entirely for final renders, since these kinds of splotchy artifacts often arise.

Hi, I'm working on a scene and am having a problem that I've noticed on previous projects when using VRay. It's hard to describe, but I find that there's a "border" which shows up large expanses of glass; on one side of the border, my reflections/refractions work as intended, whilst on the other side of the border, they are stuffed up. Please see attached image: http://img220.imageshack.us/i/reflectionissue.jpg/ The curved nature of this "border" makes me think that it's an issue to do with angles of reflection to the camera. I've tried to counter this by changing the falloff parameters for both reflection and refraction and turning fresnel off completely. I've also tweaked just about every other setting possible in the material editor. I should note that the glass geometry I'm using is made up of planes with a 10mm shell on them, but I have also tried substituting planar glass with no thickness - I still get the same problem. I also came across this linked thread, which I thought would solve the problem for me, but didn't: http://vray.info/topics/t0106.asp I tried adjusting the "cutoff threshold" parameter (tried many different values) and I managed to make the problem more severe, but couldn't solve it. Whilst I've been using VRay for many years, I've never found a solution to this issue. I'm hoping that it's simple to solve and that I'm just a bit of a twit. Can anyone help me? Many Thanks, BT