A Sketchup to 3ds max & Vray discussion

[steelers05]

Re: A Sketchup to 3ds max & Vray discussion

ok to add something new to the discussion and maybe open up some questions...here are my recent attempts at this SU - vray for 3ds max workflow. Ive found many benefits, as well as, additional steps that may be adding time to the whole rendering process, but I guess it is too early for me to tell as I am still new with max. Feel free to critique the images, but definately do not hesitate to ask any questions you may have....I will do my best to answer them.

[stevebo]

Re: A Sketchup to 3ds max & Vray discussion

Feel free to critique the images

The woman in the second image looks far too happy ;D.

Seriously though, looks good. However, I feel like there isn't much depth to the images, particularly the first one. Maybe it's the people? I've never been a huge fan of using real people. I prefer silhouettes.

[40th]

Re: A Sketchup to 3ds max & Vray discussion

Looking goood
One critic i have is on the DOF image, or is it just for concept ?...
I love the orange lamp, can you tell how you produced it?

[steelers05]

Re: A Sketchup to 3ds max & Vray discussion

thanks guys. Steve: I am not too huge of a fan of those people either. I wish my work would let me buy a package of people, because now I am stuck finding things wherever I can and making them myself and that is becoming a big pain in the butt and they just arent as nice as what you find out there...thats part of the reason I use silhouettes as well in many of my renderings. Its funny....I anytime I post renderings with silhouettes though, there are more people that dislike them than like them so it is nice to hear of someone else that likes them. Thanks for the feedback.

40th: The DOF was just something I was playing around with in photoshop...we didnt actually use that image for any submission. I was trying to focus the attention on that steel sign. The orange lamp was made up of two orange materials: One had just an orange color for the diffuse slot and the other had a patterend orange image in the diffuse slot. Then they both had the same setting from there: they just had a refraction layer with the IOR at 1.6 but the refraction color was a very dark grey to give a bit of a transparency. Hope that helps

[stevebo]

Re: A Sketchup to 3ds max & Vray discussion



Clipmapped people always look very fake and that's the reason I don't like them. Having silhouettes shows that you aren't trying to put in real people but only indicatively showing people.

I think maybe you should try upping the contrast in the image and lowering the brightness ever so slightly? Or increasing the gamma correction on PS. I think that might increase the depth to the image a tad.

[steelers05]

Re: A Sketchup to 3ds max & Vray discussion

i think this may be of some interest to anyone checking out this thread

http://forums.sketchucation.com/view...0cb729#p183364

[40th]

Re: A Sketchup to 3ds max & Vray discussion

Wow, Adam Hails's tutorial is sot on. I'll watch it in the firs free minute i'll have :P

What place/forum would be good for questions about 3d max? Just like this forum is for VfSU, and anyone can ask a question on it.

[steelers05]

Re: A Sketchup to 3ds max & Vray discussion

Ok here is somewhat of a problem that I am now running into and i think this is something that will be helpful for both SU & max users: My problem is that I am trying to run an animation from the previously posted interior shots and I did all the recommended steps of collecting the light cache and iradiance maps, but when rendering the final outputs, vray finishes the first frame and then crashes max entirely when starting the second. My system resources are running to the max so I am assuming there is a memory problem, but I am not sure why or if I am missing something? I am using a 32 bit, quad core with 4 gigs of ram and this scene is not too large so I am a little stumped as to what could be the problem. Does anyone have any thoughts, because I think a similar problem happened a bit ago with one of my SU animation attempts.

This leads me into a resource management question for 3ds max when using SU models. Does anyone know if it is better to use groups or components when modeling in SU with the intention of exporting and importing into max? If so, why? and is it bad to nest objects within one another in SU? Would one of these things be contributing to my problems mentioned above? I do know that when importing into max, none of your "groups of groups" are held together and the models get "stripped down" you can say to being one group at a time (hope that makes sense).

And this question is for any vray users wanting to have better resource management....does anybody have a standard for material sizes and resolutions that are feasable within renderings? Part of me feels I have a material that is too large of a file for the scene I am currently working with and I was wondering if anyone has found success or horror stories of using materials that were orginally too big or too small (even bump maps and etc...) I think it would benefit everyone if we knew a comfortable file size range to maintain proper resource management so that are scenes dont get killed by materials, because I keep reading around how they can really have an effect on rendering times.

Any insight into these matters is greatly appreciated, an I will see what I can come up with as well.

[40th]

Re: A Sketchup to 3ds max & Vray discussion

Attaching the 3ds Max Connection Extension demonstration.
http://www.youtube.com/v/ERYOl5ttzh4&hl

Steelers, you have important questions, which i would like to know answers to as well.
Regarding the material's image size, 1400px is my limit for an usual texture. Of course if you gonna look on it from a close distance you should consider larger resolution. Large image resolution = Large image size. So if the more texture images you have the more Ram memory it will take on rendering.

[40th]

Re: A Sketchup to 3ds max & Vray discussion

Does anybody know if it's possible to import scene from 3d max which has v-ray materials, to SU and keep the UV of the texture?

[nomeradona_cg]

Re: A Sketchup to 3ds max & Vray discussion

i think its possible, if your export them in 3ds, provided the texture and the 3ds file are in one folder.

[40th]

Re: A Sketchup to 3ds max & Vray discussion

Tried that, that didn't work. It's how i always import from Max to SU, but v-ray materials in max doesn't gets converted to 3Ds.... ???

[nomeradona_cg]

Re: A Sketchup to 3ds max & Vray discussion

really ok i will look at this too.

[steelers05]

Re: A Sketchup to 3ds max & Vray discussion

I would think there has to be a way...especially consider some of the imports from the warehouse and places like formfonts....they have very detailed mapping on some of their models that I assume were dont in max and then converted for SU. Unless they use something else like z-brush. But I will see if I can come up with anything as well.

[remon_v]

Re: A Sketchup to 3ds max & Vray discussion

yeah and also the 3ds files and textures can only have a few characters.... 3 to 7 (letters only).