New workflow/pipeline pointers please

[Garryclarke]

Hi,

Looking at the way I work I've decided that I need to make a few changes to my workflow, first a bit of background.

I was a long time Brazil user and switched over to Vray at the begining of the year, I didn't have a lot of time to fully experiment with Vray, I got things working as best as possible and pressed on, probably did a lot of things sub-optimally.

Now I have the time to properly sort things out, find the best settings for my needs and create a material library etc. First of all I have a few questions and if anyone could chime in with a few tips that would be much appreciated.

I work mostly on offshore oil rigs and industrial plant, so 99% of my work will be exterior renders. I have set up a LWF and I've happy with that. I also use a bit of Afterburn and FumeFX

1. System Unit
Most of the oil platforms I work on are pretty big (100m x 70m x 100m tall) When I started using VRay I was getting 'scene too big' messages, everything rendered OK but I always had a few problems getting Afterburn to render decent looking smoke so I had to scale my model down 10% which causes problems if I want to enter dimensions directly into max. I work with metric units most of the time.
What System Unit would you reccomend I set my scenes to?

2. Lighting
Well big subject. What would be the best way to light my exteriors. I've tried using an HDR + a max directional light and it looks OK. I also had a go with the Vray sunlight system and played around with exposure etc, all this was new to me. Render speed is quite important as I have to produce animations rather than still images.
Which would be the best way approch my lighting?

3. Sampling
This is where I got very confused, I've settled on what I think is a method that works for me. Adaptive DMC (2,4). Indirect Illumination on, default settings, Irradiance map set to Medium-animation preset. I must admit I find all the different settings a bit overwhelming.
Are these the best settings or can I make any improvements?

4. Materials
I've read through Grant Warwick's materials thread and I must admit they look great. However most of the materials I use are viewed from a fair distance and these are probably overkill for me, I would just need a load of dull paint work and a couple of bare metals (for exhaust ducts etc). In brazil/scanline I just used to adjust the curve in the specular hilights to get a slight sheen on things, what's the best was to achieve this in Vray? (reflection with glossiness?).
Regarding LWF, should I use VRayColor instead of just a plain colour setting?

5. The sea
I have to do a lot of sea, what would be the best way to approach this? A large tesselated plane with a displace modifier or a flat plane with displacement? I would also like to add a little atmosphere at the horizon to help blend the join to a sky image, what the best way of doing this?


I'm not after a set of answers that I can just plug into Max/VRay, I really want to try and understand what's going on so that when I tweak things I know what I'm doing.

Thanks in advance.
Garry Clarke

[Morbid Angel]

1 - no real limit in unit size for vray is specified, it works with any unit. However 3ds max has limitation of a scene scale size, have the scene is real world scale can throw max off, can cause some odd behavior in the view port and during rendering, maily to do with the scene boundng box being too large for raytracing. So if you know you wont have huge scens then you can stick with cm, where one grid uniy = 1 cm.

2 - ligting is a subject of skill and the need of a project. I would suggest to pick a visual target of an animation you are going for like another 3d render or a video from a real oil rig and try to match that using whatever method works best for you. For exteriror renders the typical way would be dome light with hdr and a key light like you tried already.

3 - samplig is quite extensive in vray it will be difficult to wrap your head around it in the beginning but when you work with it for a while you will get a hang of it. In general you want to choose either let the dmc sampler do all the work by not adjusting sampling anywhere else except in the dmc (look up universal settings) or manually give more samples to lights and shaders accirdingly to improve image quality.

4 - with materials you just need to play around with them a bit more to get a hang of it. Remember materials are physicslly accurate in vray so you have to think about them as such, if you with to ncrease highlites, consider increasing reflection and glossy values things like that.

5 - seas are a tough thing to make real, there are a few threads on this forum already about it, there are things like houdini ocean tool kit in 3ds max as a plugin i believe and phienix ocean texture is just a few options you can consider.

Remember the vast number of features and options n vray does not mean you need to use them all or turn them all on, they simply exist there to accomodate every possible situation and every possible scenario.

I suggest start simple and work your way from that, as you encounter problems, look them up on the forum or write to support, that will be a way to learn it but it will take some time

[Garryclarke]

Thanks for the reply, I'll ask more specific questions once I start looking into things a bit closer.