Any sugestion will be wellcome...

[Obi Wan]

This render use mental ray from 3D Studio MAX 2008.

I get this render. Is not final because I want to learn to do better...

I'll apreciate any sugestion and/or discussion about.

Thanks everyone.

[Coolhand]

First of all, switch your shadows on! you may want to research the different shadow options available to you, mental ray shadow maps might be a good place to start.

set your lights decay to 'inverse square' this will simulate the way the light loses energy over distance. the lights may have to be turned up in the multiplier to get enough light into your scene.

enable global illumination and final gather, this will let you bounce light from one surface to another which increases the realism, the settings can be tuned a lot and all the features are well documented so you may want to look at each options function and experiment to give yourself a render thats as fast as possible without visible artifacts. remember though that this is a sample based renderer, you may need to turn things up quite a lot to get a nice clean output.

Aside from the renderer, the metal material could be darker, i like the blurry reflections though they could do with a higher sample setting and you could add some subtle texturing to the surfaces to stop them looking too clean and cg. you could also try and make a skin shader using one of the sss shaders for the characters .

[Obi Wan]

Originally Posted by Coolhand

First of all, switch your shadows on! you may want to research the different shadow options available to you, mental ray shadow maps might be a good place to start.

I have shadows on Render. I just don't know why they are "invisible". And I'm usin mental ray shadow maps. When I tried other shadows maps they had a very unreal look. At the time I haven't enable Global Ilumination and Final Gather. I'll try again.

set your lights decay to 'inverse square' this will simulate the way the light loses energy over distance. the lights may have to be turned up in the multiplier to get enough light into your scene.

I was using Inverse.

enable global illumination and final gather, this will let you bounce light from one surface to another which increases the realism, the settings can be tuned a lot and all the features are well documented so you may want to look at each options function and experiment to give yourself a render thats as fast as possible without visible artifacts. remember though that this is a sample based renderer, you may need to turn things up quite a lot to get a nice clean output.

That is a lot of work but it will amusing.

Aside from the renderer, the metal material could be darker, i like the blurry reflections though they could do with a higher sample setting and you could add some subtle texturing to the surfaces to stop them looking too clean and cg. you could also try and make a skin shader using one of the sss shaders for the characters .

About the characters the skin is a mess... I have to do all again and I have to do too their uniforms. I'll work on after I finished with lights.

For the masks, I pretend to use them around the "Push to Open" signs and the lower darker plates at both sides of them. The others parts of this corridor, exception due too the walkway itself, are out of the way.

About metal be darker, less darker means less ilumination energy used on a starship, so is natural the choice for this lighter surfaces. On other hand the motion detectors to lit the lights will be too used to save energy too. I did the rest of the corridor back darker for this reason.

Thank you very much for the help Coolhand, I'll post after the results or more doubts about... Best regards.

[Coolhand]

you need to switch the shadows on for each light. also, if you have for example, a row of overheads, you may want to instance copy each light - so when you adjust one the same adjustments are passed on to the other lights

[Obi Wan]

Originally Posted by Coolhand

you need to switch the shadows on for each light. also, if you have for example, a row of overheads, you may want to instance copy each light - so when you adjust one the same adjustments are passed on to the other lights

You didn't see my other topic here. I discover that the Instance copy on 3D Studio MAX 2008 has a bug. We lost the instance copies when we export them to .3DS format archives to use them on other applications.

I have the same problem when I use Effects and want to glow a material. It work if the copies aren't instance. So you have to do a normal copy.

Anyway UNTIL now it seems that its work for lights on 3DS MAX rendering. I didn't try on other programs as Vue or POSER.

Now writing about your post suggestion. Actually I used shadows are "on" on every spot of the first picture. All lights are spots targeted, rectangular cone too. I just changed "Inverse" by "Inverse Square" as you said.

Always the shadows seem to be wrong, I don't know why.

[Obi Wan]

It was a lot of work...

The bizarre it is I had to lower the lights intensity on the process... All first 4 lights have 0,5 intensity. The door light too (at the door you have a shadow misplaced). All other lights have 0,15 intensity.

The metals on walls are OREN-NAYAR-BLINN. The signs are BLINN but they don't seem to be correct. You can see this on the reflection on the first EMERGENCY sign.

I used just Caustics and Global Ilumination. Multiplier for Caustics is 0,1 and for GI is 0,1.

I put on Optimize for Final Gather and on Geometry Properties for all objects too.

I don't enable Final Gather yet.

The worst is for the light on the ladder shaft. No idea from it comes or what I have to do to "kill" that.

Any suggestion ?

[Coolhand]

Shadows look wrong? hmm, you still have no shadows in your scene at all as far as i can tell... you have shading, reflections... but no actual shadows whatsoever. Maybe try experimenting with a more simple scene with just a couple of lights to help you get to grips with it.

when you activate the inverse thing you should be putting up the values, i normally use much higher values with inverse square falloff than i do without. Remember you can also use photometric lights, so you can set them up as you would on a real set with the correct intensity, combining that with exposure control so your renders are properly 'exposed'.

I'm not sure what you mean about 'exporting achives' instances only work within max and .max files as far as i know, if you use an export format like 3DS then you're going to lose your instances... I'd be surprised if you could export lights into 3ds anyway, i don't see how they would emerge as anything other than junk data in another package - unless you're exporting to something thats specifically designed to interpret max point light data, like some game editors do.

btw, you probably dont need caustics for that scene, and your multipliers seem very low.

[Obi Wan]

Thanks, Coolhand, for your help, I always appreciate your work on SFM WIPs..

Originally Posted by Coolhand

Shadows look wrong? hmm, you still have no shadows in your scene at all as far as i can tell... you have shading, reflections... but no actual shadows whatsoever. Maybe try experimenting with a more simple scene with just a couple of lights to help you get to grips with it.

If you look on the floor you can see the shadows but they are very soft. They have a V shape or on the door on the backplane of the scene just back of the red haired character. If you look they seem wrong and I don't figure why.

... when you activate the inverse thing you should be putting up the values, i normally use much higher values with inverse square falloff than i do without. Remember you can also use photometric lights, so you can set them up as you would on a real set with the correct intensity, combining that with exposure control so your renders are properly 'exposed'.

Yes, but after I began to render with mental ray and GI they became brighter. Too much really. I'll try photometric.

I'm not sure what you mean about 'exporting achives' instances only work within max and .max files as far as i know, if you use an export format like 3DS then you're going to lose your instances... I'd be surprised if you could export lights into 3ds anyway, i don't see how they would emerge as anything other than junk data in another package - unless you're exporting to something thats specifically designed to interpret max point light data, like some game editors do.

Sorry, english isn't my language. What I tried to explain that I figure that if instance don't work fine when we export them may be my glowing problem could be by any problem with instance code. So I take every instance copy and delete them and replace them by normal copies... and the glowing began to work fine on every lamp. But this happens only on Studio MAX 2008, not on MAX 9 or earlier. That was an unexpected bug.

..btw, you probably dont need caustics for that scene, and your multipliers seem very low.

About caustics I'll try without. May be I'll try with Final Gather. But the shadows and this brighter light on ladder shaft are making me crazy. If I get from where this light is coming may be I can use higher values on lights intensity.

Any clue will be handful....

[Coolhand]

I noticed what you described as shadows before - i'm not totally convinced that's what they are and other parts of the image convinced me there were none in the scene. However, if they are, have you changed the default settings for the samples, photons etc, anything that affects the quality of the scene.

it's clear you're doing something badly wrong or something's wrong with the software because even on the default settings you should be able to get something that looks better than what you've got.

go back and start again i think, close max and re-open it, build a simple box about the size of a small room, flip its normals so it makes a little interior space and put a sphere and a light in there with either raytraced or mental ray shadow maps, enable the GI and Final Gather and make sure your shadows are on but don't change any settings from the defaults. render it and see what it looks like. once thats working you can merge your set geometry in and re-light it and hopefully it'll work too... you'll find your problems easier to solve if you work on a simple setup then expand it. a simple setup will also help you learn what does what since you'll get your results faster.

I'm wondering what the rendertime is for your current scene btw.

[Obi Wan]

and all work as expected...

So I render the same scene with 2 light spots, targeted, everyone in each side of the ladder and one more at the door.

This time I have to use an intensity of 6,5. And you can see clearly the shadows.

The shadows on the floor are almost invisible on original scene because of the distance between the light spots, they are placed each every 2º, to close one from the other. For this reason too I need less intensity on light spots.

Anyway I don't understand about the bright spots on the wall. The light spots are targeted to the center of the floor. The glow is 0.02 with an intensity of 50.