Mental Ray facade Lume shader, does it work with max 2010 ? because i cant get it to!

[djwang]

Hi all thankyou for reading my thread.

i am currently trying to implement the facade shader that ships with max 2010 and mental ray but for the life of me cant get it to work properly.

i just want to render some trees with it, as modeling trees is a pain in the butt.

Does any body know how to do it ?

Is their a descent tutorial out their as ive searched high and low but with know joy.

Thanks

 

DJ

[jinsley]

did you find this? it explains it pretty well.

 

http://www.lume.com/manual/html/Tutorial-LumeLandscape.html

 

google is your friend.

[djwang]

ive just logged on ill take a look

 

thankyou mate for your time.

[djwang]

i noticed its for soft image i use 3dsmax and have tried to follow it but failed does any body have a working copy of the shader ?

[jinsley]

are you being forced to use the shader?

 

if you are rendering trees, why not use proxies???

 

I finished these a while ago and it uses hundreds of high-poly trees (alond with grass, flowers, ferns, stones, etc. with low memory usage (2500 - 3000 ish) rendered at 3000 px wide.

 

 

[ATTACH=CONFIG]40164[/ATTACH]

 

[ATTACH=CONFIG]40166[/ATTACH]

[djwang]

i have not tried MR proxies i dont even no what they are am new to mental ray been using it for about 4 weeks used to use vray but nothing advanced. those images are what am looking for in terms of effect in regards to the trees. the grass looks amazing. i hope i can do this one day soon.

i have played around with the facade shader and have discovered that in the shadow section its important for the bitmap to have a alpha channel. ive kind of got it to work now. but am always looking to learn new things. heres am image of what am doing. its a bathroom scene but am struggleing to put something in the back ground that looks convincing. you see what i mean. i first used a elm tree from the 3dsmax AEC collection i think but as you mentioned it kills my scene. i am also struggling to texture the tree convincingly. so i thought about using the facade shader to simplyfy this effect. Could you point me in the right direction about MR proxies ? Where did you get those trees from ? is the grass modelled and then scattered ? then MR proxied ? Am blown away with your work. heres an image of my project.

thanks for your help it was almost in real time...8-)[ATTACH=CONFIG]40167[/ATTACH]

[djwang]

when you say 2500 - 3000 is that MB ? i have 24 GB Ram can i get mental ray to use all of this ? or at least more.

 

DJ

[jinsley]

The scene looks really nice so far, what are your render and fg settings? seems to be a lot of aa issues...

 

A link to a great resource for some xfrog foliage...

 

http://seek.autodesk.com/search/xfrog?source=QuickLinks&resetft=true

 

and I talk about the mental ray proxy use and creation here:

 

http://forums.cgarchitect.com/37505-grass-test-using-particle-flow-mr.html

 

if you go towards the end of the thread I get more into proxies and how I am designing them for use...

[jinsley]

when you say 2500 - 3000 is that MB ? i have 24 GB Ram can i get mental ray to use all of this ? or at least more.

 

DJ

 

You have 24 GB of RAM??? and you are having issues with one elm from the aec library? are you sure it's not 2.4 GB? are you running 64 bit max and windows?

 

That makes no sense.

[jinsley]

please post your settings and scene info...

[djwang]

I use windows 7 64 bit pro

2x 5650 xeons

24 GB ram

nvidia FX 4800

OCZ revo drive PCI-E SSD

 

when i say kills my scene i mean in terms of moving in the view port i ve not as such had any memeory problems when rendering.

here are some screen shots of my settings i hope this helps. ill check out the links you gave me.

thanks pal[ATTACH=CONFIG]40175[/ATTACH][ATTACH=CONFIG]40176[/ATTACH][ATTACH=CONFIG]40177[/ATTACH]as i said i really want to learn as much as i can as i spent a shed load on this machine.

[djwang]

WOW ! their are so many trees and other folage to choose from thanks. Am still reading the other links but i know one thing " i have alot to learn !"

 

Thanks again.

[Justin Hunt]

your photon and FG settings are a source of issue

 

Photons first,

you are trying to fit 8000 photon in a sample radius of 25mm which it way too many samples for such a small area. Most of the time anything over 1000 is more than enough.

If you uncheck the max sample radius and open the message window, mentalray will tell you what it thinks is the best radius size should be.

1500000 photons is also alot. If you set a photon emit radius on the mrsun to be slightly larger than the area of interest in the scene, you can focus photons and use much less photons.

 

Final Gather

 

firstly if you are using Photons then leave the diffuse bounces at 0, any more are automatically discarded.

Even If you dont use Photons, 2 to 3 bounces is more than enough. If you feel you need more then its a good time to use Photons.

Personally I like to increase the interpolation to smooth out the lighting soultion, but that is up to you.

 

Sampling

 

Usually 1 16 is good enough, 4 16 takes significantly longer to render

Turn off Scanline and set the BSB to BSB2 when you have large object count and especially so when you start using proxies.

 

 

hope this helps

 

jvh

Edited December 1, 2010 by Justin Hunt

[djwang]

thanks you for your response, i basically have no idea what am doing .lol so your advice is a god send. ive struggled to understand the relationship between FG and Photons. So i presumed haveing a beast of a machine and putting setting up high will be ok. obviously not now from your clear explaination.

 

thanks for the help, its kind of exciting and daunting at the same to time to know i have so much to learn about mental ray.

[jinsley]

Justin is the man and helped all of us many times.

 

Those are some pretty good settings to start with... I think the only difference to my daily set-up is the sampling ratio. I use

4 - 64... and a smaller spatial contrast.

[djwang]

smaller spatial contrast.

Whats that ?

See you can tell am a noob. ha ha

[djwang]

Turn off Scanline and set the BSB to BSB2 when you have large object count and especially so when you start using proxies.

 

 

hope this helps

 

jvh

whats the function of the scanline & also BSB & BSB2 what do they do and what are the differences ?

thanks

[jinsley]

(someone please correct me if I am wrong...)

 

spatial contrast is a measurement of difference between two neighboring pixels values and how different they have to be before 3ds decides to re-sample them...

 

by dropping the spatial contrast numbers I am telling max to aim closer to the max. 64 samples rather than the min. 4... the trick is to find the "sweet spot" where you are getting the most out of it without greatly increasing your render times.

 

Honestly, I would expect that you could use the analysis tools to find the "sweet spot" for a render and that for each scene and the expected outcome of the scene, the values for spatial contrast would differ.

[Justin Hunt]

jinsley - Yep your right in your understanding,

 

djwang - No problem, the bsb and bsb2 relates to how mentalray divideds and organises the geometry behind the scenes to balance the memory and reder times. ( a simplifies explination). bsb2 was developed when proxies came about. It helps mental to load and unload geomerty from memory on the fly, ie as its rendering. Scanline basically is a methode of calculating reflections (and other things) that are not raytraced. However it cant unload memory on the fly, hence its best to turn it off when using bsb2

 

The tutorials that ship with max are an excellent source as well the pdf docs on the arch&design in the additional help. It is also well worth your time to search out tutorials by Jeff Patton, Mental bout Max and Master Zap.

 

Always glad to help

 

jhv

[djwang]

thanks guys ill keep my eyes peeled for these dudes. 8-)