I need HELP!!!

[Dave Bond]

Attached you will find a military site I am trying to render out.

This image will have to be poplulated with lots of pine trees around the site and about 60-75 different tanks and trucks that will go on the gravel roads and lots.

All we have is 1 license of MAX so I can't use Mental Ray as I want to be able to distribute the rendering task. Would this be possible to pull this off with the scanline renderer using global illumination?

Does anyone have any suggestions for a scene like this. I may have to put in for a VRAY purchase as this seems the most cost effective.

 

 

The rendered pic was initially done in VUE5 Infinite....but we can't export all the vehicles out to that program from MAX....too big!

[Brian Cassil]

 

Would this be possible to pull this off with the scanline renderer using global illumination?

 

 

Are you using light tracer? That's the only GI solution that ships with max unless going with MR. Or you might be using radiosity. I would forget both at any rate. If you are concerned about your scene getting too big and not being able to render the file, fake it! There are lots of threads on the site here for faking GI in exterior scenes and you can get pretty darn good results with it in a fraction of the time. As far as the trees go, I'd photoshop them. As far as the tanks go (lucky!) I'm assuming you already have models for them. If so how many polys are each one? Obviously you will want them to be as low as possible and maintain the detail you need at the scale they will be scene. If it just becomes too much, they could be rendered in seperate passes and composited in. I hope all this helps and good luck!

[lambros]

I suppose that you want to do animation, because otherwise you should not worry too much about distributing the render.

Sure you can do it with scanline, try these two options:

Lightrace plug-in: do a skylight (for ambient occlusion) and a direct light (for sun). You could also use fill lights if needed. Use more that 1 bounce will take too long to render, but will make the render more appealing. There is one disadvantage to this method: First, specular does not render well with lightrace, you should consider rendering another simple scanline pass without lightrace and skylight just to get specularand then composite in PS or AFX.

Radiosity plug-in: Create lights as needed, do a radiosity solution calculation, then use regathering.

Vehicles will prove to be less a prone than trees. Are you planning to export trees as 3ds files from Vue into max? If yes, the polygon count will hit the ceiling. You could try to exclude trees from advanced illumination in both scenarios, a real time saver.

Keep posting!

[STRAT]

funny you should mention this, as i too am working on a military site which is being converted to a civic site.

 

the quesion is, is how detailed and realistic do you want to get?

 

this is a small view from my job. this is actually a frame from an animation.

 

 

no gi used (obviously) but i semi-faked it in the scan liner using several infill omnis. all the people and trees are opacity mapped bill-boards, the cars are low poly, and the buildings and site are basic models with basic maps applied.

 

this is obviously far from realistic but the client wants this style of rendering, but i could easily up the faked gi levels a tad and make the textures more realistic if needs be for a better job. also, a regular dirt map/ambient occlusion shade could be used to 'real' up the scene.

 

it's originally modelled in acad and sketchup with minimal faces, and scanline rendered in c4d. the render times at 800X600 are between 1 and 2 mins per frame. so pretty fast.

[jucaro]

convert the tanks and other repetitive objects to vray mesh and use vray proxy on those meshes. render as you would in vray.

 

relax. dont panic

[Msamir]

Strat i think the one who modeled this forgot to create the space for the cars to get on the parking on the roof.

[William Alexander]

Dave,

 

Try this....a real decent & free alternative to gi for large scenes such as yours

'e-light' plugin for Max

http://www.3dgrafix.net/plugin/plugin_e.htm

 

Cheers...ever hang out around Cedar Rapids?

WDA

[Brian Cassil]

Oh yeah! I second the nod for using e-light. It's a nice simple, flexible tool for faking GI.

[Dave Bond]

"Cheers...ever hang out around Cedar Rapids?

WDA"

 

 

Yea, I live in Iowa City area, so it is just a quick 20 min ride for me.

We eat there alot and got to various entertainment stuff in downtown area of C.R.

Do you get there much WDA?