studio2s Posted January 31, 2007 Share Posted January 31, 2007 http://www.studio2s.com/studio2s/gallery/images/10%20copy.jpg Can anyone tell me how to get rid of the noise? I have done everything I can thing of from tweaking the material to the lights and I still get those dang dots. I have figured this much out...I am lighting the scene with an mr Area Spot (sun) and an mr Area omni for additional light. If I delete the omni, I still have the noise. If I change all the arch+design materials to a standard white max material AND delete the omni, it looks perfect (the lighting is off, but no noise). Any ideas here would be extremely helpful. thanks. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
studio2s Posted January 31, 2007 Author Share Posted January 31, 2007 I am doing more tests. Everything I have read says to use the Mental Ray A+D materials as much as possible and it should speed things up as well as work well with MR. I am replacing all of my MR materials with standard materials, and my noise goes away. It seems like the MR A+D materials are causing this. My question is do I have a bum copy of Max? My office deploys an image and they don't know how to test Max like a user would. Could I be missing an update or something? We had a problem with our RPC's that they would not activate if deployed on our image and they had to manually install. Could there possibly be some sort of deal like this with MR? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
studio2s Posted February 1, 2007 Author Share Posted February 1, 2007 Hi Scott, Can you post up a couple of screen grabs showing all the settings for your A&D shader? Saves poking around in the dark to try and solve the problem. Regards Bri Ok, let's start simple and I can work out from there The ceiling and far walls are this material. http://www.studio2s.com/studio2s/gallery/images/settings-03.jpg I only changed the setting I am showing, as I don't feel comfortable with the other settings. This was based off of the matte material. Again, the look is right, or close for now, but the noise is what's killing me. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AJLynn Posted February 1, 2007 Share Posted February 1, 2007 Keep in mind that the A&D materials are more complex than the Standards. Higher quality, more computation, more glossies, more noise requiring more sampling to kill requiring more time. A lot of those glossies could be done with Fast (Interpolate) turned on, which would speed it up a lot while killing noise. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Justin Hunt Posted February 1, 2007 Share Posted February 1, 2007 See my reply here http://www.cgarchitect.com/vb/21725-mental-ray-max-9-a-3.html#post150325 JHV Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Justin Hunt Posted February 1, 2007 Share Posted February 1, 2007 be careful where you use glossy reflections, use sparingly. JHV Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
studio2s Posted February 1, 2007 Author Share Posted February 1, 2007 Yes, we are cookin' with gas now! Thanks to everyone who pitched in. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nisus Posted February 19, 2007 Share Posted February 19, 2007 Hi, I looked at your material settings for your wall... Reflection 0.1 glosiness 0.1... If you have such a LOW and GLOSSY reflection it doesn't make sense to calculate your reflections correct... Glossy shadows benefit from the interpolate option... low reflection can do with use highligh and FG... My advice would be: RTFM! and your rendering times will be a lot better ;-) rgds, nisus Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Justin Hunt Posted February 20, 2007 Share Posted February 20, 2007 I agree with the FG and highlight comment, but did you get out of bed on the wrong side this morning? JHV Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nisus Posted February 20, 2007 Share Posted February 20, 2007 lol... must have.. but today is even worse... anyway... RTFM has been quite popular a few years ago (with STRAT - remember the old days budy?)... It's just anoying to see people ask questions that are 'solved' on the first tutorials available... For MR, there are NOT a lot of tutorials... so people starting out, would not have a problem doing (all) the few that are around... The manual about the new materials and MR is - really! - extremely good, very simple and not a lot! It doesn't take a lot of time to study it... I just notice that people don't do that... (lazy?stubborn?stoned?chickenshit?) Imho, people who want to learn 3d better need to have a good attitude towards learning, and it is not 'you teach me, tell me what I need to learn, make me a master...' To me it's about patience and devotion... and hard work... Unfortunately too many people have forgotten about this... But than again I'm getting old, boring, miscontent etc. myself... maybe it's time for the young blokes to take over ;-p Oh no wait, I'll get myself a facelift! ,-) Well... so pls people: RTFM... otherwise, it's a waste of time, energy and words... moeah! nisus Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Justin Hunt Posted February 20, 2007 Share Posted February 20, 2007 I hear you, I have stopped counting and read the posts asking for the "Magic" settings and used RTFM far too many times. I wasnt having a go at you in any way, its just that you sounded grumpy:cool: Without starting a flame war I partly blame the bloat of tutorials for Vray. Many of them say the same thing byspell out what settings to use instead of giving the idea and methodes to touble shoot to get better. The Vray community is fantasitic and one the Mentalray users need to improve on. The tutorials that ship with Max are some of the best for any software out there, since Dos days. The way I see it is the more we help each other the larger the user base will get, the better the learning content will get, the better the images will get. You are right, start with what is available right there in the manual and if you are still stuck then ask. I am now at the stage in my 3D career where I feel that I have something to give back. Share the knowlage so to say. You in fact have helped me out quite a few times and I am very grateful for it. I just hope that I can do the same for others iun this instance the problem caught my attention and it was rather fun sorting it out. JHV Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nisus Posted February 20, 2007 Share Posted February 20, 2007 Hi Justin, Tnx for your kind words. Well, we are all on the board and trying to help people out. I myself have not been doing anything else actually, but I must admit I'd rather put the time into usefull things that 'have not been written down', than the same old stuff over and over again. ;-) This caused my almost 2-year burnout on CGA... I might be back for the MR-community... one never knows ,-) rgds, nisus Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
studio2s Posted February 20, 2007 Author Share Posted February 20, 2007 lol... must have.. but today is even worse... anyway... RTFM has been quite popular a few years ago (with STRAT - remember the old days budy?)... It's just anoying to see people ask questions that are 'solved' on the first tutorials available... For MR, there are NOT a lot of tutorials... so people starting out, would not have a problem doing (all) the few that are around... The manual about the new materials and MR is - really! - extremely good, very simple and not a lot! It doesn't take a lot of time to study it... I just notice that people don't do that... (lazy?stubborn?stoned?chickenshit?) Imho, people who want to learn 3d better need to have a good attitude towards learning, and it is not 'you teach me, tell me what I need to learn, make me a master...' To me it's about patience and devotion... and hard work... Unfortunately too many people have forgotten about this... But than again I'm getting old, boring, miscontent etc. myself... maybe it's time for the young blokes to take over ;-p Oh no wait, I'll get myself a facelift! ,-) Well... so pls people: RTFM... otherwise, it's a waste of time, energy and words... moeah! nisus What the hell? I feel this is quite rude. I'm very adept at Max and multiple rendering engines. I have gone through every tutorial that ships with Max and I have tried to use my knowledge of other engines to try to translate what I am seeing in MR 3.5. I think you need to try not to be so rude and try to put yourself in someone else's shoes. The only tutorials I have found for Max 9 Mr 3.5 are the ones it comes with. Now, imagine that you have never even opened MR, you don't know ANY of their lingo. Go read those tutorials again, not with experience of the product, but with fresh eyes. When it tells you things like adding an MR Sun and click yes for the physical sky, there is no explanation of what that could possibly mean, and what are the benefits of this over something else. Think about questions like this...add an MR sky...ok, once you find it (because it doesn't tell you, and again, if you have not used those tools, there is a learning curve) it seems to have a directional component due to the target. A regular skylight only requires your to add it to the scene. So now, you have to unlearn what you know, and try to figure out if it truly does have a direction and how that effects your scene. This is not a simple matter of being lazy. The tutorial is great in explaining how the various parts of the FG work, but only the basic parts. Once you start to get into it, you tweak one setting and test render 5-6 times until you think you like it. Then you tweak something else....before you know it, you are many hours into digression from the tutorial. No matter how many notes you take, and I take all sorts of notes while teaching myself a new program, you often get lost when you start to make tweaks in concert with others. I thought this board was here to help people. Yeah, there are a lot of questions that are "teach me to make me a master", but none of mine were like that. I was neck deep in a scene that I thought was going pretty well before I asked a single question. As far as your RTFM...GFY. Have a nice day. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AJLynn Posted February 20, 2007 Share Posted February 20, 2007 Good, now that everybody's being rude everything's better... Anyway, yeah, that mr sun/sky system thing is a bit odd but it's definitely in the docs somewhere - it's one of the first things I read in the docs on the new mr. I think the reason it seems strange and hard to find is that it's actually implemented well, being part of the Max sun/sky system (of course it's directional - it needs to be oriented on the globe and then put the sun in the right place). All of this stuff is in the docs somewhere. It's better organized than it used to be. You need to bring up the 3DS Max 9 help files (the User Reference) and type in the obvious search term - e.g., if you typed mental ray sun and sky into the search it would take you to an in-depth page explaning the sun and sky systems and how to use them. If you type in mental ray noise you'll get to some somewhat useful pages but if you type in mental ray grain you'll find a bunch of mentions in the explanation of the Arch&Design material of where you can use samples values to tradeoff speed to reduce grain. This is what RTFM means - try, at a minumum, the most obvious help file searches, and if it's not in there or the question is too complex to figure out that way, ask on the forum. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
studio2s Posted February 20, 2007 Author Share Posted February 20, 2007 And I did all of these things, and I had a very nice scene. If you look at the image I posted, the scene looked great...except for the noise....not artifacts, but noise. The thing that really makes me upset is that there is so little info for the new MR. So when MR makes these new default settings (draft, etc), and you are trying to read about them, look at other tutorials, and in general, get an complete idea from multiple sources (and no one can argue this isn't good practice or being lazy) that some things aren't translating. Settings are moved and things are tweaked so that higher settings aren't required. And the other point you are missing is that if you don't know the lingo, you can't very well use the search. The best example of this is if you learned to model in CAD, you would use the revolve command to make something like a column capital or spindle. So, you happily go into the help and search for revolve. Guess what you get? NADA! Something on cameras and something on NURBS. What you really wanted to know was LATHE. So then, some jerk is going to tell you RTFM. Awesome! Thanks for your help. I don't have an ounce of problem with the help that people gave me on this board. Justin was EXTREMELY helpful, and I was able to learn a ton by reverse engineering his scene in comparison to the choices I made. Telling someone to RTFM is complete BS. Either help or don't. And it came from a moderator, so that is even worse. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nisus Posted February 20, 2007 Share Posted February 20, 2007 Hi Scott, If I pissed you of for any reason, I'm really sorry. I didn't mean to do this in any way. I'll tell you how I feel about the manuals though. You mentioned you've read the tutorials. From my point of view: ANYone who has tried the daylight system with MR sun/sky has immediately GOOD results. Add the marvellous interior tutorial that explains EVERY parameter in the FG section VERY WELL, one does not NEED MORE to understand MR. It also gives rules of thumbs to work with, what more can one expect? One might not know the lingo, but doing the tut and just play around with the sun for one hour, can GET YOU THERE... (meaning: to a basic level of understanding ALSO knowing the lingo)... Questions that are about 'anything BEFORE this level' just seem ridiculous to me... I have done these tuts and excersises myself. On previous max/MR versions, I agree it's somewhat weird to find MR-stuff... But in max9... it IS SO SIMPLE... it's VERY well intergrated... the reasons not a lot of tutorials exists, is because THEY ARE NOT NECESSARY. I do agree somehow there is a HYPE op MR being difficult, well it's not... it's VERY straightforward... i don't even need to choose different light solutions for first or second bounces, no QMC etc... just plain, simple... I do acknowledge that this simplicity (which is GOOD) added with the 'talk of MR being so hard to learn' and the previous non-implemented versions SCARE people, but the people who worked on max 9 have done an INCREDIBLE GOOD job implementing MR. *applause* Anyway: you wanna learn, here is my advice: - to get an understading of what shaders are: --> autodesk E-learning Course on MR - to get a basic understanding of MRSun/Sky --> help + play around - basic interior light setup --> tutorial in help - good understanding of A+D materials --> help file (the tip I gave about the LOW reflection and GLOSSINESS is litterally in there) There is no more to get to an intermediate level imho. rgds & srry, nisus Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
studio2s Posted February 20, 2007 Author Share Posted February 20, 2007 Nisus-- I understand where you are coming from, but I took offense that you assume I did not do my homework. I spent 5 nights in a row until 5AM when I need to be at work at 8 tweaking testing and being patient. I completely understand the settings and what samples are, what AO is...all of that. Of course it is in there. MR is not difficult. It is quite simple. Getting a decent result "right out of the box" is straight forward. It's when you start to tweak and adjust and add things where the difficulty is. But that is just a matter of patience. There are things that need to be considered. For instance, if I use finalRender "right out of the box", I get a good result as well. I will probably get a faster result. So, then I look at MR, and I start lowering settings or start in the Draft mode and see what is tolerable to begin to create a work flow (which, I assume, will improve over time). Cool. No problem there. You have to expect some growing pains. Now, after using Vray, Brazil, + fR, I feel pretty confident that when lighting an interior scene with no interior light source, I'm going to need some bounced light. So as I'm testing those settings, I'm just not satisfied with the overall brightness of the image.Yes, I know full well that the documentation says to use the exposure controls. But, I have been at this for a while, and I have always been of the mindset that massive exposure control usage is a cop out for finding good lighting solutions. Using the other rendering engines, that rule of thumb still applies. In MR, you have to throw that rule out. You can gain all sorts of speed by riding that control. Instead of adding one or two more bounces, which I feel is a better approach and consistent with the other engines, and expecting to pay a slight price in the way of speed, every bounce in MR costs a lot more time....IMO, so exposure is the way to get it done. This is where the problems begin. I can copy the set up in that tutorial or import it into every scene, but that won't really improve my understanding like changing settings in a comparative manner. So, I use my knowledge of what I have previously used to try to guide me. If you read the other thread that Justin explained my mistakes, you would see that I was trying to do much more than just follow the tutorial, but find out what settings were going to do what to my scene. To tell me that my glossies are not high enough to warrant that approach but to try a different way comes with experience. I first read that and thought it was a good idea. Then you come back with RTFM. I thank you for your help, but with your experience, you should have been able to look at my scene and see it was more than just switching the rendering engine to MR and start complaining. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Angela Giladi Posted February 20, 2007 Share Posted February 20, 2007 ... if you learned to model in CAD, you would use the revolve command to make something like a column capital or spindle. So, you happily go into the help and search for revolve... What you really wanted to know was LATHE...[/b] YOU ARE NOT ALONE! Your vivid description of sleepless night and copious notes...chasing your tail, ughh, so familiar. Good luck with your work Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nisus Posted February 20, 2007 Share Posted February 20, 2007 In MR, you have to throw that rule out This I found is the hardest part switching to MR. You have to forget what you learned before. Whatever you know from other engines, workflows etc. CANNOT be applied to MR. And if you think MR is hard, it's the opposite... Having used other engines and ways to solve things, one is so used to tricks and workarounds that it is hard to think without them. One doens't even realise one is using workarounds anymore. MR is simply different... more basic. One better starts from scratch. This is what most MR-Users/Starters should realise. Strange world it is... btw, i had seen your scene before and really still recommend you check the section about the arch+design materials / glossiness and tips to use glossy reflections with the fast interpolation... also: switch on/off your bump while testing... rgds, nisus Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Justin Hunt Posted February 21, 2007 Share Posted February 21, 2007 studio2s - you are way off the mark in attacking Nisus in this way. So much so that I am now less inclined to help you out. I feel that nisus explained quite well where he is coming from, also bare in mind that we have been quite involved in this community for some time now and we may be a little jaded and tired of repeating ourselves. Having used Vray, Brazil, and a hole heap of other renderers MS is problably one of the simplest out there. When people complain about its complexity I feel that they are compaining more about the shader system rather than the FG/GI system. In the past you really had to know a bit of programming to get the full benifit of MR. With the arch and design materials alot of MR's complexity is right there at your finger tips. It is a beast unto itself and requires the time and experimentation to get the most out of it. When I was learning Vray (for example) it took a week you to get my head around the interface and its masses of settings. Simple, I think not. Fast, you have to be kidding me. I work with some guys who have been using Vray for 2 years and they are still stuggling with it. I switched them over to MR and they were up and running in no time at all. Just by doing the tutorials and reading the manual. All I can say is pull your head in, you are not going to get any help by shouting at people. JHV Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nisus Posted February 21, 2007 Share Posted February 21, 2007 Hi guys, I understand I sounded a bit rude (for which I apologized before), but why don't we drop it and get back to the main issue of the thread? I mean, I gave tips on the materials and interpolations... so what are your findings studio2? Any progress? rgds, nisus Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
studio2s Posted February 21, 2007 Author Share Posted February 21, 2007 I was fine with the apology and I felt that nisus understands that I was doing my homework, I just wasn't taking some of the right approaches...like weighing my own experience over strictly adhering to the tutorial. As far as I'm concerned that was over. Justin, I'm sorry if you feel offended. I don't understand exactly where you are coming from saying that you've been here a while and are tired of repeating yourself. I mean, I do understand that, but why apply that frustration to a new member is odd to me. But that is neither here nor there. You were a great help to me, and I really appreciated it. As far as progress goes, I'm taking a different approach. Instead of trying to apply MR to a scene I need completed and have a vision in my head, I have created a new test designed for testing GI. I have placed multiple objects in there and each object gets a tweak from the matte material in coordination with each section of the A+D description in the help. I am in the same basic setup as I was in the other scene, with the manual window open in one monitor and my scene in my other monitor. It is a bit tedious, and a lot of overkill, but it is part of being thorough. After grinding it out in that other scene, everything is more familiar and test results are more predictable. I find the A+D material pretty straight forward. The GI is a little more difficult to control. I just don't have enough experience with what MR can do to know if 30 minutes for a test render is too long or if 5 minutes is better for whatever I am trying to do. The real point of that statement is that I don't know if an initial FG point density of 10 is way overboard or just the tip of the iceberg. Is the interpolate number of 400 too much? Am I just chasing my tail if I crank my rays to 1000 but then I need to up the interpolate number to smooth? blah blah blah... I just don't have a feel for it yet. One question for Justin...you told me to raise my Max Depth to 20 but keep my reflect/refract at 5 each. What are the extra 10 (assuming I max out the 5+5) doing for me? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nisus Posted February 21, 2007 Share Posted February 21, 2007 The real point of that statement is that I don't know if an initial FG point density of 10 is way overboard or just the tip of the iceberg. Is the interpolate number of 400 too much? Am I just chasing my tail if I crank my rays to 1000 but then I need to up the interpolate number to smooth? blah blah blah... I just don't have a feel for it yet. To get a good feel for this, use the interior tutorial again. It explains this VERY well, with all kind of examples and statistics... it even tells you tips to 'quickrender' several amounts of interpolation... gives rules of thumb etc... etc. etc. rgds, nisus Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nisus Posted February 21, 2007 Share Posted February 21, 2007 ow, i forgot to say... Maximum Depth of 20 is for the overall amount of bounces... The Refl/Refr values are only for transparant rays... --> so it gives you more bounced light = a lighter/smoother scene nisus Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
studio2s Posted February 21, 2007 Author Share Posted February 21, 2007 Yeah, that tut is nice as it even shows you the difference. I'm still not getting a feel for tweaking all the FG variables and the exposure control together, and then try to balance the render times. I understand what they do, just not a feel. Compare it to playing a guitar. I know the chords and how they sound, but I am not feeling the balance of playing the chords in this order or that order, etc. It will come. It's just an experience thing. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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