Ink and Paint

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

Does anyone have tips for rendering using the Ink and Paint shader in 3dsMax?

 

It renders fast in Mental Ray, but slow in Vray. I don't know if there is a trick setting or something.

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

No takers? Hmmm.....

[Eric Sosa]

can't realy come with ideas here travis, I have only been trying the ink & paint for fun and for only some minutes, although I could imagine that vray ougth to be as fast as mental ray or even faster.

 

isn't it a matter of how precise & big you need to make your render?. certainly a suitable renderpreset would help.

 

good luck mate.

 

if I come to try it again and your thread is still going on, I would post something.....if I beleive it'd help.

[Ricardo Eloy]

Haven't done any tests on that lately, but my guess would be that Ink & Paint being a raytrace material, it was designed to work with scanline and mr, so VRay or any other raytracer might, indeed, have a bit of a hard time dealing with it. I remember using it with success, but that was back in 2003... A lot has changed since then.

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

The Raytrace concept makes sense. I am managing to get 6000 pixel wide Ink and Paint images out with MR in about 10-15 minutes. The same image in Vray is taking multiple hours. I was hoping there was just a check box I was missing or something.

 

I would just use MR for the Ink pass, but the Vray camera was a bit off. It dawned on me last night that I may have twp point correction applied in the Vray camera that MR does not see. Perhaps I can add a Camera Correction modifer to the Vray camera to allow that Vray camera to render the MR image while keeping the linework directly over the image. And therefore giving me a perfect match in photoshop/

[Ricardo Eloy]

Turning the VRayCam into a perspective view might help, I guess. Normally, you wouldn't have any distortion when doing that. You could then CTRL+C and make that view a new standard cam, which you'd be able to correct with the camera correction mod.

Then again, you must have tried that already... ;-)

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

Nope, haven't tried that. I was stil using the Vray camera with Mental Ray. It is my understanding that the Vray camera will act like a standard max camera when used with a different render engine.

 

The cameras seem to translate seemlessly for the most part, but I have a custom film gate, a vertical shift, and in a few cases, a horizontal shift. At least 2 of those 3 are not supported with standard Max cameras, and the third may not be translated from a Vray to Max camera. I am guessing that is what is causing the Mental Ray image to come out with a slightly different perspective than what the Vray image is.

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

I take what I said back about the Vray camera and Mental Ray compatibility.

 

I am guessing something was shifted in the one view, but every other view has been a perfect match. I was even using both vertical and horizontal camera shifts, and custom film gates.

 

The Mental Render'd Ink and Paint matched the Vray underlay exactly.

[Justin Hunt]

Would Vrays Edge Texture shader not give you what you want? or are you doing something different with the ink and Paint?

 

jhv

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

I think Vray Toon might, but I don't think the edge texture would. I think the edge texture is simply a uniform, computeresque line based on a pixel width or percentage dimension.

 

Ink and paint has more attributes that allow the line work to have varying width, and to act differently as it approaches other material, edges, and other characteristics of the geometry.

[Devin Johnston]

I think this might be what your looking for.

http://www.the3dstudio.com/product_details.aspx?id_product=193116&id_affiliate=420945

[Ricardo Eloy]

Talking about VRay Toon, since the lines are added as an effect, you can save them in separate, using the alpha channel. Then, you should be able to do whatever you want with them in PS, without having to worry about messing the original picture. You could even create a "toon pass" rendering everything without materials nor lights, if you will.

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

Talking about VRay Toon, since the lines are added as an effect, you can save them in separate, using the alpha channel. Then, you should be able to do whatever you want with them in PS, without having to worry about messing the original picture. You could even create a "toon pass" rendering everything without materials nor lights, if you will.

 

 

Rick, ....do you know of any easy step by steps for Vray Toon? I was briefly looking at it, but saving the pass didn't seem obvious to me, and it didn't seem to be effecting the image.

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

I think this might be what your looking for.

http://www.the3dstudio.com/product_details.aspx?id_product=193116&id_affiliate=420945

 

When this was first released we copied it in the form of a ambient occlusion shader in Mental Ray. It was fairly effective, and useful. For the time being I am just using edge lines and boundary type lines as an overlay on top of a rendering in Photoshop.

 

Maybe I am limiting my thoughts on the process to much, and need to revisit them.

[Ricardo Eloy]

It's not really that difficult. You can simply add the VRayToon effect and render you scene without the regular materials and even lights. I normally use the override material (global switches) and put a VRayOverrideMtl, setting the alpha contribution to zero. When you save the render as a PNG with alpha, you'll get the lines over a transparent background on PS, ready to be used as a "pass".

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

I will try and give it ago on a simple scene tomorrow. I think part of the problem is that tried to apply it to the scene I was working on, which wasn't super intense, but still was about a hundred thousand square foot office building with site. Maybe I will start with a chair sitting on a plain.

 

Oh, ...and I rendered that same camera view again, and once again the Ink and Paint using MR was shifted. There is some parameters inside of the Vray camera that is not properly being read.

[Scott Erstad]

We use "Illustrate" which works very well for what you are trying to do, the only problem I've had is in trying to render out real high res, but it might be the lack of RAM on the particular machine where the plugin is loaded tho.

http://www.davidgould.com/

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

We use "Illustrate" which works very well for what you are trying to do, the only problem I've had is in trying to render out real high res, but it might be the lack of RAM on the particular machine where the plugin is loaded tho.

http://www.davidgould.com/

 

Hi Scott. We looked into Illustrate about 3 months ago because ti would solve a lot of our problems, but we could not get the 64 bit demo version to work properly so we moved on. Maybe they have solved those issues by now.

 

Are you suing 64bit or 32bit?

[Scott Erstad]

32 bit on the machine where that plugin is at. You should call those guys, they are really responsive. One thing I've found is that I need to reset the "precision" or "quality" or whatever is it lower, and then dial down the memory allocation so it doesn't crash on me. Then it works great.

 

Or if you would like me to render something for you, just ask, happy to help.

[tec]

[... setting the alpha contribution to zero...]

Hi Rick

 

Where do you set the alpha contribution to zero? In all objects properties?

 

Thank you

Chris