3ds Max - Kaolin Plant Still

[stusic]

A still from a WIP kaolin plant walkthrough animation.

[stusic]

Messing with the lens effects, so I thought'd I'd render the whole scene to post here. One frame of a 90-second walkthrough. 50 lights and 5,512 objects with 2.3 million faces; takes about a minute to render. I'm trying to cut that down without sacrificing quality, but I don't have time to mess with the materials. I didn't use any vray since it was taking about 2:30 per frame.

[dellis]

Phillip,

Very cool! One thing that i would do though is change your Bias settings in your shadow map parameters to be something like .1 or .2. You probably have it set to 1 which makes things look like they are floating a bit. Another thing you could do is increase the size and the sample range....but this is only if you want to increase the fidelity of the shadows. Settings of 1024 and 10 should work good....though you might see a bit of a hit in render time. Great stuff though....you going to texture it too?

[stusic]

Phillip,

Very cool! One thing that i would do though is change your Bias settings in your shadow map parameters to be something like .1 or .2. You probably have it set to 1 which makes things look like they are floating a bit. Another thing you could do is increase the size and the sample range....but this is only if you want to increase the fidelity of the shadows. Settings of 1024 and 10 should work good....though you might see a bit of a hit in render time. Great stuff though....you going to texture it too?

Thanks for the tips I'm trying now to cut down on render time, so I'll try them and see how much they affect it and go from there... Good things to know though (my creations are sooo trial & error ).

As far as textures, I'm trying my hand at using procedural textures instead of bitmapping. I'm just using some basic glossiness on the equipment, muted dark grey on the hoses, and you can see the dent map on the floor (I think I'm going to add some speckle to it to add some color variance).

From what I understand (never really did a side-by-side comparison), is that procedural textures cut down on render time because they don't have to access the hard drive for the material. Is that right? Anyways, I've seen some really amazing stuff using only procedural textures. I know you can't replace a lot of things like labels and such, but if I could reduce them by using procedural maps for things like concrete, steel, painted walls, etc. I could effectively work in a single program, trather than being split between max and photoshop.

What do you think?

Thanks,

[dellis]

Well...i would say that one should always be best friends with Photoshop!!!! It is a really good idea to get good at procedurals first but from what i've always been tod concerning procedurals against images is that procedurals are calculated (CPU) while images are loaded (RAM) so its just a matter of what else ya got going on in the scene, high cpu usage or ram usage would make one better then the other, but not one always better then the other. I would say that its best to combine them about 50% of each.