slanier

wish i could get drunk at that bar! great work, i really like the sand and the water. what did you use for foliage, and was this v-ray?

really cool, i like this shot. I like the small study area in the back. things i would work on for your final: maybe add some slight volume light fog coming from the open ceiling? I noticed the ceiling planks running from left to right and to the back have a lot of repeating, maybe spend some time randomizing the uvs to breakup the pattern. I don't know how well the white cutout rug is working, I didn't know what it was at first... then again I'm not too keen on contemporary interior design. Other than that I like it, cool lighting, lots of interest. great work keep it up!

I think in this case it adds a lot to the "watercolor" effect. cool stuff!

I think as of now you have a good base to start from. You have an ambient setup going right now, so you really just need to build on that. I would start adding some additional lights so that you can start getting some cast shadows, and some bouncing light in those ambient shadows. If you want to try shooting a light through the window to simulate some sun, or have some light fixtures in the ceiling or walls to get some additional lighting. I personally like using target direct lights for sun simulating because that light shoots parallel rays, similar to the sun. Basically what your scene is lacking right now is casting shadows, more light & dark areas, and some more color. I think when you begin to build on your base you will start seeing some nice effects, and more reactions from your materials.

I think you have a good start with the lighting. One thing I would suggest is to start experimenting with some artificial light. Add some ceiling lights, maybe a standing lamp, something to add some interest. I think overall the lighting is nice, it's just a little too even & ambient. Adding some more lights will give some more contrast in dark / light areas. Keep it up!

I found this thread to be interesting and helpful. I wanted to post one of my renders to get some feedback and see if you guys could draw anything from my experiences, and give me some help on my work. First of all, I am pretty new to V-Ray, and am currently using the demo version 1.50sp2. The render I attached contains just under 1000 speedtrees. None are instanced with v-ray proxy... all are created with speedforest, and I am using 5 different tree models. I found it very helpful to go back through the speedtree materials and "adapt" them for vray... change all materials from standard to vraymtl, and set all the bitmap filtering accordingly. For this render, all my bitmaps are set to 0.35 blur for diffuse maps & bumps... and 0.01 for opacity maps. Pyramidal filtering on everything. I am using a vray sun & sky, and a vray light, set to dome. I am using light cache & irradiance map, irradiance map set to very low... adaptive dmc AA, area filter 1.7 min 1 , max 4 sampling no environment overrides, and I am using Reinhard color mapping set to 0.5 burn value. also using vrayphysicalcam. all that to say that i was able to get a render out @ 10 minutes. The one question I have is... is speedtree able to create vray proxies? I am wondering if this would speed up the renders even more so that I could raise some of the quality settings without taking a huge rendering hit. Thanks! EDIT: After checking some more tutorials I scraped my vray sun idea, in exchange for a vray dome light set to sphere, and i created a sky dome with a vraylt material applied to it. With this setup I was able to get my scene down to 6.5 minutes, with about 1500 speedtrees and 30 rpcs. I also changed my color mode to HSV exponential, dark 0.5 light 1.5 gamma 1.0 any help/comments/questions are welcomed

right right, here are my specs: windows xp 32-bit dualcore 2.7gHz 4GB RAM 3ds max 9 SP2 32-bit Radeon x800 - direct3d backburner 2007.0.1 SpeedTree 4.0

First off, this is a two-part problem, and I was not sure which forum to post this in, so move if needed. First problem is with backburner. I am just diving into using a renderfarm and so far I haven't had any issues, spare this one. I am using only 1 machine so far in the renderfarm for testing, and it's the host machine. So basically I have one machine running backburner server, manager, & monitor, and I am net-rendering to myself basically. Everything seems to work fine, but one scene I am working in has had major issues. I am using Speedtree, with a few people RPCs, a few lights, & a skydome (not an environment background image). If i do a straight render without netrender, I get a fine image that I am happy with. If I submit that same scene to netrender, I get a drastically different return. The skydome is no longer filling up the background but is basically showing the 'plate' and I am missing geometry, it seems to be getting clipped by something. I have included two images, one rendered from max & one rendered through backburner. One render does not have the sky plate, but you should be able to tell visually the problem I am having when you compare the images. This is the first issue I am having. Any ideas what would cause this drastic of a difference? The 2nd is with SpeedTree. When I open max with a scene that has speedtrees, sometimes the trees will appear 'exploded', where as they are shooting lines everywhere. The only fix I have found for this is to select one of the trees, and hit 'compute'. The trees then 'gather' themselves and appear properly. This normally wouldnt be too much of an issue, except when I submit to render over backburner, I do not get the chance to re-compute and I get renders with exploded trees. Basically black splines shooting everywhere... I have no found any help for this issue and I am hoping that it's just a corrupted speedtree file or something. I have tried to just replace it in the past, but I may need to go back and actually re-plant all the exploding trees. This is becoming really frustrating, and I can't figure out what I should do about the tree issue. I have tried to just replace the tree type with a different .spt file but it hasn't solved the issue. I can only think that those trees are corrupted and need to be deleted and totally re-planted. I have included 2 images as well for this, one normal render, and one with exploding trees. Something I also noticed, is that my native graphics engine for 3ds max is Direct3d, but whenever backburner opens a copy of max for rendering with backburner it always uses OpenGL... is this possibly the problem, and is there a way to fix this? Sorry for the wall of text, I am just having some major issues so i tried to be descriptive... any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

I have had this happen before when using terrian creation from splines. It's usually faces overlapping or having drastic elevation changes. When you use the terrain function to create geometry, MAX will create a TIN, Triangluated Irregular Network. This is basically MAX doing anything it can to create a congruent mesh out of the linework that you present. This can cause geometry issues, because the mesh is never elegant. I would go back through the model especially in areas that are coming out "black" and see if you can't do a little clean up. More times than not, the areas that turn out black for me, are usually areas where tons of geometry comes to a single point. It's frustrating, but one way to reduce that is to reduce the number of points or steps in your splines. If you can reduce the verts in your splines, your TIN terrain will not be so dense. Hope this helps.

one thing to note as well, is that the terrain feature is one of max's more intense features. This will crash max more often then not if you are not mindful of setting it up. Pay attention to the contours and how many steps, or points they have... It is worth it to spend some time in this step to eliminate excess points that you wont need to complete a curve or line. It will translate into lower poly counts when creating the terrain. Also as stated there are multiple avenues to achieve your goal... if you have access to GIS you can simplify the contours there to help reduce and control poly counts... also moving into Sketch Up works as well..

claudio i am liking your approach to this very much... I think I understand how this effect is achieved... I have only messed with itoo's forest plugin only briefly.. Can the demo get me a good idea of what to expect from the full product? My only concern is using Onyx... as I do not have access Vray which might make this method not practical... Do you know if I can still achieve these Othrographic renders out of mental ray or SL renderer using Onyx or does it really only work when using Vray proxies? Also is this really only effective for stills or does it work great in animations as well? Thanks for your time

I am currently the 3d artist on a large scale environment project. I am at the point where I need to start filling this environment up with foliage and natural elements. I have been researching the various software for approaching this but I still dont have a good idea on the best solution. Here are my needs, what I have looked at, and what I am working with. Any ideas or suggestions will be much appreciated. I am looking to populate many many acres with trees... I am dealing with specific tree types so having the actual tree is a bonus, but I can always use a tree editing software to get close enough. I need to populate areas with certain tree types based on percentage... so filling up a designated area with a mixture of tree types... similar to RPC where you can populate proxies based on a percentage. I am using 3ds max 9 32-bit. I have tried Vue 6 infinite, Groundwiz, and speed tree demos... and I am still not sold on any of the products... I have done reading on Nat Fx and Onyx tree, and I am curious about how these perform on large scales... Just by reading these forums it seems that many people are running into trouble with onyx tree... the site looks great but its always a different story when you dive into the program. So the long and short... I need tons of trees in my scene without crashing max, and to get some decent quality render results. I have access to a large render farm so I am less concerned with render times and more concerned about the scene becoming so dense that max cant even handle it. Thanks for any feedback and sorry for the long post.