And hopefully without taking a week to render a single frame. I'm using 3DS Max, and I've never really had much luck with rendering, light set up, or pretty much anything involving hitting F9.

Because I am so bad at it, for the most part I avoid rendering all together, or just take viewport screencaps. This is really hurting my presentation and portfolio though, but I don't know how to get the really nice high quality renders you see places like here on polycount or cghub.

Does anyone have any good tutorials, tips, pointers, hints, anything about how to do renders, that would be appreciated, because when I try to do anything, all I get is a shitty scene that looks worse then a viewport screencap, that takes six months to render.

What are you trying to render?

Tricks:
Don't use a lot of lights. Learn to use lighting correctly.

Reduce your texture to sizes that are specific to your rendering sizes. What i mean is If you are rendering the front of a house which takes up 1/4 of the screen and you're rendering at 1024x768. The texture doesn't need to be any bigger than 512x512 as thats how big it is when it renders. A bigger texture would just be wastful and take longer to render.

Keep the polycount of objects in the scene relative to each other. I remember a friend of mine made street lamps for a scene. The lamp posts were about 500 polys each but each of the bulbs for the lamps were about 5K each!...

There isn't one single be all end-all rendering method for models? At the moment I just have a flat highpoly model with no texture but I'd like to learn how to render more or less everything, from models with normal and spec and difuse, blank highpolies, whatever else.

I mostly meant the technical aspects of setting up the render itself within all the menus and choosing render types and stuff like that I need help with, tricounts and texture sizes are no problem.

I feel your pain madmuffin - rendering is really hard
much easier to set up a real time shader IMHO if you are
presenting games work at least

all renders have a manual that gives an explanation of each option in the render dialogs. you have to start there. your not going to understand anything until you start to understand what the options do. v-ray and mental ray have rather good documentation.

you need to do tests. start small with a teapot and experiment with some feature until you understand what it does.

build you scene slowly light by light.work with a flat shaded then add textures.

don't flip on a bunch of GI and ray tracing features you don't understand. until you understand them.

go get a gnomon video on lighting rendering and compositing.

it can take years to really understand a render like mental ray or prman at a deep level.

^^^
Excellent advice. Can't recommend this approach enough.

We have some rendering and lighting links on the wiki, might help you get started.
http://wiki.polycount.com/Model%20Presentation

Do tests on each setting/light/etc. in isolation from other changes (one change at a time), this helps you isolate what each thing is doing. Also render as small as possible when you're tweaking settings, saves a ton of time.

This book is cheap and is the best about this subject, in my opinion.

Amazon.com: Digital Lighting and Rendering (2nd...

I just use a directional light and an ambient occlusion material in Maya to get good renders. For example this.
http://img269.imageshack.us/img269/2204/scifinamed.jpg
It is literally a directional light, and a ambient light in the far hallway to add that bright effect. Then I just made a dark semi reflective surface for the floor, and a lighter non reflective surface for everything else. It takes literally 5 min to set up my materials and lights to get solid looking renders.

I don't use 3DS Max so it might be a tad different, but it has mental ray, so it should be translatable.

Even before placing a single light in your 3D package and even before reading renderer help docs, it might be wise to have a precise idea of what you want to achieve. Is there a specific image that feels just right that you want to emulate ? Maybe a movie with a specific CGI feel ? A real life photograph of a clay maquette ?

Once you have such a target clearly defined, then it's time to ask yourself how to produce the effect - not the other way around.

Working that way makes it surprisingly easy to achieve a wide array of looks. Show us what you want!

^ These are all really good advices. The bottom line here is: Start with the fundamentals. Having a little bit of Color theory theory helps a lot (here's a nice book about it : Amazon.com: Itten The Elements of Color: Johannes... ), having a basic understanding of the different light behaviors, and stuff like that. I also found photography (as a side hobby) to be really helpful to understand a bit better notions like Depth of field, composition and camera angles.

In term of software, if you're looking for a really fast (but expensive) solution to render your stuff (not game art related), I'd suggest you to take a look at KeyShot (they have a trial at http://www.keyshot.com/ ). For game art models, there are plenty of game engines out there (UDK, Cry Engine, Marmoset)

Good luck.

Just woke up, awesome lots of replies. I'll check these books and links out post-haste.

The more lens flares the better!
To keep iteration times down start at a low resolution 480x360ish and turn down the number of samples until you get the lighting right, then you can crank up all of the "make it pretty" settings. If you are doing a complex scene, render in layers and passes, then composite them in PS/AE. Also, don't be afraid to get it pretty close and then adjust the levels in post.

@JonathanLambert

any relation to Johann Heinrich?

It's possible, I was born with a strange N dot L birthmark on my ass and I love pi.

Try to smooth the edges of right angles and add polygons/accents to those. Good examples are close-ups in architectural renderings (raytraced, non-realtime) where if you notice, most of the hard angles are smooth. Why? They add geometry more to those areas than to flat walls. For an interactive real time example, there is a computer game called Team Fortress 2, and in it there is a map called Degroot Keep. The faces of the walls of the entire keep are one flat stone texture But, each corner has stones running up and down it that are by themselves 30 vertices with their own texture, and they are only about 1' long, so a large part of the polygon budget is spent accenting the corners, but it looks phenomenal. I would say that having detailed accents usually don't turn out, but are great when you get them to work. Also, you need to learn about better lighting. Try changing the lighting color to a soft yellow instead of just white to simulate sunlight.

get max, switch to iray renderer, put an hdr in the environment slot, apply some A&D materials, hit render.

don't get me wrong - understanding all the fancy tricks and what mental ray gi setting does what is certainly nice, but if you just want a pretty-ish render that works for almost all settings with minimal tweaking, then iray makes it easier than anything else.

I agree iRay is pretty much MentalRay dumbed down and can get you some good results, if you have the hardware and the time.

It solves two main problems, not knowing when it will finish and not knowing what settings to tweak. It still takes about the same time to process quality renders but you save the time you waste guessing settings and trying to balance quality with render time.

It's aimed at giving you a full render and the sharpness depends on how long you let it go. Unlike other renderers that solves bits and pieces and leave holes if you stop it after a min. You can region render but that is like looking at a tapestry with a magnifying glass, its hard to see the hole thing.

If you set iRay to a min it solves the entire image in rough quality, which gives you a lot of info you might be looking for as you work on the scene. Stuff like how is the ambient light level, are materials and reflections working, how does the scene fit together as a whole, are shadows in the right places, how is this one light affecting the whole scene. The longer you let it go, the less fuzzy it will be.

So instead of saying "I want this quality, finish it whenever. I'll wait..."
You are saying "give me everything even if its fuzzy, at least it will be fast".

As you work with lower render times, it helps if you squint.

1min


Long rendering time, probably several hours


"Extended" probably more than 8hrs


So now the difference is time and processing power iRay is also designed to take advantage of your GPU's CUDA cores (sorry ATI) so unlike traditional rendering that leaned heavily on the CPU, iRay will use all of your hardware.

Like divi pointed out it works only with Photometric lights and A&D mats so those take a bit of time to learn and adjust to, but honestly they aren't very hard to learn and they do give more realistic results even if you use only scanline. Don't get me wrong there is a lot you can do with the default lights in max to make them almost as good with less bugs and glitches but you do need to know what you're doing.

I tried what divi said (was I supposed to add lights because I didnt?) and everything sort of went well, up until I rendered, it reached '100.0% Baking Environment...' and then never went anywhere after that, it just stopped. My computer isn't frozen, but I can't do anything in Max, and it hasn't gone anywhere in over an hour. The preview frame thing is totally black, is it supposed to be black? I set it to render for only one minute.

Maybe I messed up the HDR part? I went into environment, chose bitmap, and used a *.hdr file that looked like a really warped 3d sphere. If I try to hit cancel to end the render, the whole program locks up and starts to eat more and more memory until my whole computer starts chugging, can't do anything, and comes to a stop.

There might be some errors in the render report window, it should pop up when it starts rendering, if there is red text there will be problems. I'm pretty sure you need at least one photometric light to have it work.

Even if you don't have any lights in the scene, there is always one max light behind the viewport camera lighting the scene. That light isn't photometric so it won't render correctly.

Where do I find the render report window if it doesn't pop up? Or maybe it did and I just don't recognize it as such, but I didn't see anything with red text in it.

I'll try adding a light though. Correct me if I am wrong but doesn't the HDR file thing cast some lights or something? If it doesn't, what purpose does it serve beyond something for the metal to reflect?

EDIT: Added a light and tried baking, reaches 100% and just stalls, goes no where. Is there maybe a dialog or something I am supposed to press OK its waiting for that isn't appearing maybe? It feels like its waiting for something. hitting cancel as usual slowly locks up the whole computer. Would seeing the scene file help maybe? Or should I try making a new scene from scratch?

EDIT EDIT: The red message came up this time!

IRAY 0.8 1206 MB error: not enough memory on device 0, not using this device for rendering


It didn't do that last time. I have lots of ram so I don't know what its problem is.

Tried it again with one single flat grey metal A&D and got:


IRAY 0.8 1206 MB error: not enough memory on device 0, not using this device for rendering
IRAY 0.8 261 MB error: CUDA device 0: may not have enough memory available to start CUDA kernel (estimated 474MB)
IRAY 0.8 305 MB error: CUDA device 0: may not have enough memory available to start CUDA kernel (estimated 474MB)
IRAY 0.8 309 MB error: CUDA device 0: may not have enough memory available to start CUDA kernel (estimated 474MB)
IRAY 0.8 324 MB error: CUDA device 0: may not have enough memory available to start CUDA kernel (estimated 474MB)
IRAY 0.8 323 MB error: CUDA device 0: may not have enough memory available to start CUDA kernel (estimated 474MB)

I'm not running anything else, I have loads of unused ram and my CPU isn't maxed on any of my cores so I'm not sure what's happening.

CUDA is for nvidia graphics cards, do you have one of those? If so its trying to access 474mb from the graphic cards memory not your systems ram. Do you have <512mb if you have an nvidia card?

What kind of video card do you have?

CUDA Cores are specific to Nvidia's video cards, iray is made by the people who make MentalRay which was bought by Nvidia. They created it specifically to work with the CUDA core technology so if you're running ATI you're SOL... Or if your card is old enough to not have CUDA cores then you are also screwed...

Ideally you want a Nvidia video card with least 1gb of video ram and as many CUDA cores as you can afford.

I have a Geforce GTX 275 which has 896MB of memory according to here, so I should have that much. It also says it has 240 CUDA cores so it definitely has them.

Googling around online some people mentioned CUDA drivers, do I need something special like that to make this work?

Originally Posted by madmuffin

I have a Geforce GTX 275 which has 896MB of memory according to here, so I should have that much. It also says it has 240 CUDA cores so it definitely has them.

Googling around online some people mentioned CUDA drivers, do I need something special like that to make this work?

I think you are putting to much effort into this program in hopes of getting some nice renders. You do not need professional level ILM type stuff here, you just need to learn to use 3DS Max effectively to show off your models. You have to remember you are not trying to get a rendering or lighting job, so why waste time going way to far in depth into it? Mental Ray in 3DS max can do everything you need, you just have to do a little research to find out how.

Check this realtime viewport shader out - http://www.laurenscorijn.com/viewportshader

Here are some really simple rendering setups that you can play with and setup in only a few mins.
http://www.secondpicture.com/tutoria...n_3ds_max.html
http://www.aleso3d.com/blog/?p=379
http://www.cgrats.com/mental-ray-int...ng-basics.html

For your game res stuff this is a often recommend program.
http://www.8monkeylabs.com/toolbag

I knew about Marmoset and Xoliul already but those are more for game-ready stuff was my understanding, right now I am working on highpoly.

I know I don't need professional level lighting skill or whatever, the whole reason I came here for originally was just some cut and dry straight forward 'Do exactly this, this, and this, and you'll get a nice render.' but everyone insisted its more important to understand the basics from scratch so I went along with that.

They were like iray is simpler and more dumbed down though so I thought that was the right thing to do, because I've never had any luck with mental ray before, it has 100x more settings and options that I don't understand.

Honestly all I want to do is re-render off pieces of my portfolio to look professional when I really don't know what I am doing and I'm really not very smart and I get frustrated and upset easily because nothing works for me.

Your tutorials seem like 30x more complicated with multiple pages and things way above me then anything they were showing but I'll try them out anyways to the best of my ability because I am not getting anywhere with fixing the iray thing on my own.