Week 10, 3Ds Max Lighting Tutorials

Learning 3ds Max

Week 10   -  3Ds Max Glow Tutorial 

          Week 10 I ended up choosing to work more on lighting in 3Ds max rather then the modeling aspect. Glow effects and Volume lighting and Volume lighting (rendering) are the three subjects I picked out to wrap my learning's with 3Ds max. 

This is the effect I want to learn 

             First tutorial gave me the basics on how to apply your materials not using V-ray. It also taught me how to add effects to objects. In the effect panel there are many options and here is where you can change them and add other properties such as an glow. This will go to your mesh that is attached to you object. There are other ways to do it , but it doesn't look the same.

             Volumetric Effects & Virtual Lights can be used you create an unique atmosphere and sell shots. I always wondered how to create these effects. I thought this would be a good starting tutorial for basic lighting before creating my own scene with these effects.

Working on effects in 3ds max, 

Once Volume light effect is place on 

           Seeing as I got the basics of how to create this effect. Next was to  move on and create my own inside window scene with this lighting effect. 

Week 9, Self Directed Study Helicopter Season Finale

Learning After Effects with 3ds Max Files 

Week 9       -  Helicopter Season Finale

          The 9th week of of 3ds max tutorials was a wrap up video that explained how to do everything. He went over all the step we did in the first 8 weeks to properly prepare a scene for a 3D model. He didnt give out the assets this week to follow along with, but instead he just went over everything that needed to be done to track your shot that we could go out and record. 

         For this week I decided to follow along and simply work on the tools he used and the steps for importing a simple 3D object. There was a few camera tricks that was helpfully to know when recording . This way you know how to record something easy that's simple to add the 3D object. I'm practicing adding an simple square to my scene and tracking it, I'm not worried about to much else on the way it looks. But this has been what I wanted to learn in the most after proper lighting. Tracking is something hard and but looks really good with a proper track. 

          Using helicopter's can be difficult sometimes but can look really good if you can make it look right. For most helicopters when assigning the rotation of the blades , The rotation controller is set to Euler XYZ, Changing this to TCB Rotation, This will allow you to set rotation wind up. Rotation wind up with allow you to go more then once around your object and allow you to set rotations to 75. 

         Having a camera movement in your scene will help your model come to life when you track it. It's a new  thing to learn and a little bit odd to set up the camera in the right way.  After now after modeling the scene it self making camera movement for your object become so much easier and with a less gap for error. 

Week 8, Self Directed Study Compositing 3d Elements

Learning After Effects with 3ds Max Files 

Week 8       -  Compositing 3d Elements 

            The 8^th week of myself directed study I watched the 8^th video of the of the “Let Learn 3ds max season 1” videos on BrandonJLa. This tutorial is all done in after effects and nothing else was done in 3ds max only are rendered out files where. Something that i have been doing wrong and why some of my work could have looked better was because of my project setting of my color setting's. I should have been working in 32 bits per channel and sRGB iec61966-2.1. If i would have changed this in my setting blending on my objects would have been smother looking. 

      We learned this week how to change setting or your image in after effects. We use the color picker to find out are values of the Skye and compared it to the ball sky, here we are making sure that both images have the same light value. In the video he goes through the tool for color correcting and what he does to get his scene looking good. Something that I learned and I never did was matching the scene saturation. I didn't know the color picker tool had all this information built in it. This is much easier then trying to match by using your eye. Shadows are the same thing you but only a little bit different. He duplicate's his shadow's' and use the add and screen mode on both layer so he can tune in his effects easier. This ended up working for my scene . The final result for my first time trying to use multiple renders. 




Here are some photo's of the results I got before and after my my corrections.

Image Before Effects 

Image After Effects 

Week 7 , Self Directed Study - Overcast Lighting 3Ds Max

Learning 3DS Max

Week 7          -  Overcast Lighting 

            The 7^th week of myself directed study I watched the 7^th video of the of the “Let Learn 3ds max” videos on BrandonJLa. Here he talk's and show you how the lighting is different in each scene. He show's you in the control's of what to change and what the settings are so we can use are eye's and match to are own scene's we went out and create. 

          There are different colors of light more blue and some more yellow, This light is important to understand and will effect on how your scene looks. So i took the photo of the ball of and avengers ball and placed it int he scene. One thing I learned was indirect illumination is very important for reflections. Its an easy thing to do and you can turn it on by going to the render setting in the project window by pressing F10 to access them in the V-Ray box. 

         Getting your scene and models to scale is a important thing and a good thing to know when modeling in the industry . People like when you model to scale of the actual object. This is save time for people and glad they showed you how in this video.  In every scene he make a reflective ball and a gray ball. Its a great way to set up your scene for editing , It becomes very easy after a while of learning how to do everything. In this one video you go throw all the steps of what I learned in all the other tutorials only thing different is we have already done it before.  Creating are planes and using camera map to pixels and bitmaps adding you sun and the 3 balls to the scene. Your first render will be very over saturated and this will be because of the V-ray exposure control. This is a key for getting scene lighting right. 

           Its better to change an overcast day to light day but much harder to change a Sunny day to an overcast day. Most of the setting's you change to change the scene are setting's in the VRaySky and Sun . Changing the Sky model to CIE Overcast Rather then Preetham et al.  It changes your sky from a sunny day to overcast and it will give you a goofy result at first but it slowly starts to make your day over cast in the sky and in the lighting. The Size of the Light source will depend on the shadows feather so increasing the light size will help this allot and we will acquire a overcast day once the lights so big. Lowering the Intensity multiplier really low will help darken your scene and give it a better final result. 

Week 6, Self Directed Study - Render Prep In 3D's Max

Learning 3DS Max

Week 6           -  Render Prep

            The  6^th week of myself directed study I watched the 6^th video of the of the “Let Learn 3ds max” videos on BrandonJLa. This week video focused on getting ready to render your different pass’s in 3Ds max. It is a very important thing to understand your different renders and to create different renders. Having different passes on your video will create a realistic effect with proper shadows and light information. It will also allow you to adjust things easier and save time rendering if changes are needed. Normally you have 2 or 3 passes depending on the scene. First pass is for the objects and the second pass would be for your shadows. 

              This week was pretty easy compared to other weeks because have most of my scene settings done and i just getting ready to render. We used V-Ray material Wrapper for a composite and this allowed use to change the light and get values of the light. After playing with a few setting it allowed you to select you object and add V-ray to them. This will cause you to create an alpha mast on the object so you can adjust them easier as seen in this photo below.

       Rendering just the objects   first then he makes another pass for the shadows is the best thing to do. Now it is not required to do this , but its is a good to know how to separate the shadows from the objects. Now a little trick when rendering it out,  the color's will be off. So you have to click SRGB to get the correct color values so the colors will match you scene. This now will great your "beauty" pass. We render out the shadows but as an PNG so it would be a smaller file size and because PNG supports alpha channel and JPEG does not. This is one bug reason why people will render out the shadows on a different pass then the original objects.  

Render of the ball's in my scene
(Gray ball and 100% reflective ball) 

My Render pass of the shadow's

His Shadow's looking in 3ds max
(not rendered at PNG)

Week 5, Self Directed Study - Spherical Environments In 3D's Max

Learning 3DS Max

Week 5        - Spherical Environments 

        The fifth week of my self-directed study focused on Spherical Environments video, what I learned after watching and doing the tutorial this week was Spherical environments can cause you alot of problems. So far over the course of my project this has been the the longest I spent trying to figure out problems. He doesn't go step by step in his videos so the parts he didn't cover you had to use what you know to complete it. 

          Issues's I had in the video was knowing if my Vray Material Mesh was being applied to my objects. It took me forever to find out if was being applied or not.  After I figured out how to know if it was applied, it then became a problem when rendering. It wouldn't be there and nothing would change. After reaching for hours and re trying a bunch,  I then found some setting within 3Ds Max itself that had to change before it was to become visible on the camera's render.  

          There was 3 buttons I learned to know after this video and they were 8 , M and F10. These button's open up my Environment and effects ,  Material Editor and Rendering options. You use these buttons more then ever in 3Ds max. It makes things fast to access. 

             Everything is dark after adding your spherical photo because there were no information on the lighting. We worked on changing the environment map and the exposure and are camera temperature. I also work on bounce lighting where objects colors will effect the lighting on the objects.  Your exposure control is important in this video and same thing with your offset and tilt for adjusting your image in the scene. Next week's video i will be rendering out the different passes of my image. 

Week 4, Self Directed Study - Camera Mapping In 3D's Max

Learning 3DS Max

Week 4           - Camera mapping

        The forth week of my self-directed study focused on getting a proper camera mapping done in 3D's max. It is a fundamental thing but is very important. Reflections and shadows make object's and break them too. Without good reflections your video or picture will seem fuzzy or too sharp. This i found would cause a unwanted and unrealistic effect on the video.

         Good reflections will blend it in to the original one smother and more accurate with the curvature better with real projections then just with a simple spherical environment. This will allow you to change your camera angle and the the curves will automatically, Without editing you spherical enviroment. Using a texture overlay such as V-ray with 3d's max helps allot to adjust your image of your environment. In this weeks video he talked about the tools and settings he uses to set up a proper camera using V-ray.

        It wasn't to hard to get the camera in the sky and set the shadows but when he got to changing set setting and understanding what everything did , this took a bit. But is very useful , I now can apply this my own footage.  When it come the the reflections , it was  told to think of them like projectors and where every it says camera it really means projector. This was helpful to kind of wrap your head around the idea of how  the  effect actually are being used. So in the end i learned that it does come down to the right direction of you shadows, and it is important . Also the fact of changing your photo to a more spherical will sell the effect allot more then not having it.