3ds Max Tips and Tricks

[darn42 1,268]

This is a thread for everyone to post whatever tips or tricks they feel would help other BATers; just simple little bits that improve quality or efficiency of making and rendering BATs.

Please, only post tips or mini tutorial requests here, no generic comments

The format should be:

What it is:
What program it is for:
What it helps with:
How to do it:

Please use pictures to help show how, but don't be excessive with them.

I hope this helps people BATing

[darn42 1,268]

Making Smaller Details 'Pop'

3ds max

This is a method to make smaller details show up much better in the Simcity preview.

When modeling small details, in this case a modeled concrete brick facade (very simple one), details can get lost very easily in the renders and turn into noise. Three things can be done to effectively increase the level of detail visible with the same render settings.

1. Enable ambient occlusion on a material. In the special effects tab, check ambient occlusion, the settings on my picture are off. They don't need to be that high, especially the distance. The samples should never go above 64, I like them between 16 or 32 usually, and the max distance should be the average distance between two opposite faced polygons (e.g. the distance between your floors). Enabling ambient occlusion first of all makes the shadows much more realistic and should be used anyways, but because of more realistic shadows, it makes the smaller shadowed areas much more well defined.

2. Chamfering edges; I'm not sure why, but this makes renders and shadows much more well defined as well. I tested this out when I learned it makes baked normal maps look better and it worked. As you can see in the example, it doesn't do too much, but it does make a difference.

3. The previous two can be done to a clay render as shown in the picture, but when using a material, using a special diffuse type can really make everything better. Instead of a generic bitmap like is generally done, the diffuse slot should be filled by an "ambient/reflective occlusion" map. This map changes the material depending on how much AO the object is getting in a certain spot. The "bright" diffuse should be the bitmap that you want to use, and the "dark" should be a color correction of that same bitmap, just with lowered brightness. This creates very well defined shadows and realistic highlighting of the details.

I hope this tip helps you guys, it's a technique I have used a lot ever since I learned it, and I think it adds a lot of quality to any rendering.

[AndisArt 2,066]

Great, thanks for sharing this! Also a great idea to have this thread. Too much tips and tricks are often lost within individual threads.

So anything generally helpful we find out during our own BATing battles we should share here.

About your post, point 2, chamfering edges, is there a reason you are not mentioning the "Round Corners" option in the "Special Effects" Rollout. Because this should do the job for you without you having to model the effect.

[kellydale2003 2,276]

Great thread! A lot of people have been asking me about my glass... this will be a good place to post in the near future! (:

[gutterclub 2,729]

Yeah, would like an insight into your glass and also would love Girafe to post a tut on his glass, as his recent buildings have been stunning!

[AndisArt 2,066]

Yes and also Darn42 your new nightwindow texture method, would be great to have a tut for that too!

[darn42 1,268]

Procedural Roof Grime

Ok, so I just thought this up recently while making wacker's roof. It's a really simple trick to get a great result on roofs, and really make them look personalized and more realistic.

For this you'll need some familiarity with composite map so check out my tutorial on that That tutorial uses the slate editor because it can get complicated. I will be using compact here because it is a much simpler material.

Anyways, this is the roof I made for 333 wacker, and I isolated it.

The roof itself is not finished, but I'm focusing on the tile texture. This is, surprisingly, an extremely simple texture. Made using composite map (of course) and something I'd never thought to use for this before: ambient/reflective occlusion map. The benefits of this are that it is completely procedural, eliminating the need to go into a photoediting program. It's completely procedural so if you add anything new you don't have to go into a photoediting program to make it fit. And it's completely procedural so it doesn't take long to add. Get the picture?

First off is the base material. I used an arch and design with a matte preset that a tweaked (the reflection). In red is the composite map. As you can see its made up of 3 layers.

The bottom, in green, is my tiles map, which you can see in green. It's pretty basic. I have a UV map set to 210 feet by 210 feet so I can make everything large and not as tiling. That's why you see the counts at 20 and the tiling still at 5 times. Make sure to raise the color variance a little bit, and to lower the grout gap to something small so the grout isn't consuming the entire texture. I made the diffuse of the tiles map a small noise map just cause I wanted to add a slight bit of variation, you can just use a flat color.

Next, in blue, is just a basic noise map with a noise map alpha to add some variance to the texture. Just some random 'wear and tear.' Lowering the opacity or making the size of noises will change the effect. They are pretty simple so I'm not going to go into too much detail there. Just set it to some sort of burn or dodge or overlay type of blend mode.

Last, in yellow, is the new layer. As I have used in an earlier tip, the ambient occlusion map takes the ambient occlusion you see, and changes the color/texture or whatever is in light and dark slot based on the distance of other objects to the source geometry. We can use that to simulate stains that are made because of water and other stuff dripping down and collecting around walls and vents and other stuff. Simply increasing the spread (which changes how much the black bleeds into the white), and the distance (which changes how far away an object has to be to influence the AO map) can increase the distance out it gets from the walls and objects. This makes a nice black and white map around everything in contact or near contact with our roof Now we can just set it into a blend mode like color burn and it will burn stains into our ground.

The alpha for this, in purple, I made just because I wanted some variance in my map. It's just a simple noise map, nothing special.

Once we've done all that we get a really nice, extremely easy, versatile, and fast way of adding a lot of customization to our roof textures. And it looks good too I hope this was helpful and can help people make some nice textures. Remember, this isn't limited to roofs, that was just my example. It applies most things you want it to.

[paulvmontfort 616]

thanks for that tip. I actually never do anything in photoshop, All my materials are completely done in max and standard textures. This is a great addition and i will certainly try it on the Four Seasons and upcoming 2IFC

[kellydale2003 2,276]

Composite is my favorite! hahah. It's not only for a roof, but I used it on the brick for Rouge Place... Along with it I used a bump map to give it a bit of an uuumph!

Great tutorial though! It's better than finding out about it a couple years later (like I did :b)

[AndisArt 2,066]

This makes a nice black and white map around everything in contact or near contact with our roof Now we can just set it into a blend mode like color burn and it will burn stains into our ground.

OMG that is AMAAAZING!!! I'm so excited for this No more photoshopping each single texture... whopeeeee!

[darn42 1,268]

New tip!

 

This is something that I have found invaluable in certain situations and I felt like sharing to you all today.

 

Replacing Geometry with instances

 

Say that you have created something that uses a lot of similar geometry/objects, instances, or otherwise, and you realize you either want to replace with something new, or you realized you have screwed something up on, and, for example, they became uninstanced or unsaveable, but placing those objects still took a long time and you want to save that work. Instead of doing so manually, we can use 3ds max's powerful curve editor to replace them easily and quickly.

 

This is something that I realized I should write a tutorial on recently when it saved me a good chunk of time when making a bridge.

 

 

So here is my scene that I screwed up. Notice the piece in the truss that has the two red lines coming from it. That is correct, it is an instance of the selected geometry I made to show what the error was. All of the circled pieces were neither mirrored across the i-beams, nor were they shelled. Now I could copy and paste that into every single one of them, replace them, or I could just copy my correct geometry.

 

The icon circled in green is the curve editor. I don't use it much, but it is great for animation and some other very specific modeling stuff. It opens up a large dialogue box that I shrunk so you could see my screen. The menu on the left of that box is all that really matters though since we won't be using any curves. When you open up the curve editor, select the object you want to instance, and it will show up all of its transformations and materials and such that are animatable. The thing we are interested in, though, is the "modified object" part. This is what tells the editor what the object actually is, and luckily enough, it is copy/pasteable! So highlight that and then right click -> copy

 

Once you have that done. Select all of the incorrect objects that you want to paste it into. (If anyone is frustrated by selecting lots of objects post and I'll write a tutorial on speeding up selecting items. I'm not sure if that's something that is needed) Once you have all of them selected. You can now select all of the objects in the curve editor (using ctrl+click) and once you are done, right click and paste.

 

 

I am not sure if there is a fast way to select objects in curve editor--like a select similar thing, so I just manually select everything in there. It helps to increase the size and scroll. Once you paste the copy, a dialogue box will pop up with a few options, just select what you want, and all of those objects will be replaced. Pretty awesome right?

 

Hopefully this helps you all, I just had to post it because I realized how useful it was.

[Gn_leugim 853]

great tips and very useful. but I would rename the title to "Max tips and Tricks" as most thngs shown here don't work on the "original" BAT aka gmax and may mislead new users just a  thought.

[darn42 1,268]

Sorry about my absence as of late, life is busy, but I just came across something that I had to post.

http://www.epab.bme.hu/grafika/Reference/Pps/mr_for_architectural_visualization.pdf

Its a 35 page white page on mental ray lighting rendering and material production. It helps to demystify a lot of the more confusing and technical aspects of the renderer. I recommend everybody looks it through, it's worth the time.

[darn42 1,268]

Just thought I'd put this here, I just found out about this and it's pretty helpful.

 

 

This is in the mental connection rollout of most materials. For any object that has an opacity of 1 or a transparency of 0, check this box. It is off by default because using it when those aren't true it messes stuff up. Anyways, it lowers render time, sometimes significantly. 

 

Enjoy.

[darn42 1,268]

This isn't really a tutorial, but I was thinking about this a bit, and I kinda wanted to write something about it.

 

 

EDIT: Some pictures aren't working because I couldn't figure out how to show pictures from STEX previews. I will update with the pictures when I can. 

Edit:Edit: Fixed almost all of them.

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Composition in a BAT

 

So this is a pretty broad topic, that until now, I haven't really thought about in regards to BATing, but a lot of the rules shouldn't be ignored.

 

-Color Theory

-Silhouettes

-Levels of Detail

-Areas of Visual Activity, and rest

-Direction, both visual and artistic

 

Most of these are, for a large part, taken care of when doing a recreation. The architect has already thought about the colors, and levels of detail, and the silhouettes, and pretty much everything listed. That's their job. To convert a 3d space into something that is pleasing to the eye on a large scale. Our job is to translate that into a very limited, orthographic view. Because of that, the number one rule is even more important.

 

Everything in a piece of art contributes to the overall impression of the piece. 

 

It's like expressions. If someone is smiling, but their eyes aren't in it, you can tell something is up, but not quite exactly what. But if you cover up just their mouth, or just their eyes, what you take away from that expression changes completely. 

 

I'd like to use Seraf's building he's working on right now as an example of how much a small change in something small changes the entirety of the building.

 

(if you don't want me to use this as an example, I won't, but I figured you wouldn't really mind)

 

In this update, he changed the material on 4 of the plants on the second floor. If you cover up the half that has the old material, you get an overall impression that is completely different than if you were to cover up the other half. The colors and the lighting of the bushes changed slightly, which changes how they interact with everything around them. It's so apparent here because of the large contrast in colors between the facade and the plant. Eyes are drawn to contrast, and so when there is anything out of the usual, care has to be taken in how it is presented.

 

This kinda brings us to what color theory is, which I'm not going to go deep into because there are literally books on it and they are free on the internet. But really, I'll condense some information.

 

Color theory is basically how colors interact with each other. I'm sure you've all seen the color wheel, and the primary, secondary, and tertiary colors. Certain colors look good together, and some don't. Colors across each other on the wheel tend to provide very high visual contrast, whereas colors next to each other in the wheel tend to blend together. 

 

Another important concept is that of dominance. One color has to be dominant, or it will look off-balance. By dominant, I mean taking the majority of space on the building.

 

This image shows it pretty well.

 

 

 Dominant color 
 Sub-dominant colors 
 Accent 

 Dominant color 
 Sub-dominant colors 
 Accent 

 

 

These simple geometric diagrams are actually very pleasing to the eye because of how their colors are arranged. If we look at some images of some BATs that I have found particularly nice looking, we can see some patterns.

 

Aphrodite's Garden by JasonCW

 

 

UNAM Libraray by Harishna (where did he go?)

 

 

 

Philadelphia City Hall by Debussyman

 

I can't seem to find this one anywhere besides on STEX.

 

All of these share some common traits. 

 

-They have a limited Palate of colors

 Jason's has, in order of dominance, Red-Orange, White, Black, Grey, and Green

 

Hamish: Orangish-brown and many variations of it, (the mural has green, white, yellow, blue, black, red), white, silver, and yellow

 

Debussyman: White, Black, Light and Dark Blue.

 

 

-No Color goes uninterrupted for a long period of time

 

Jason has geometric color changes, Hamish has lots of different objects colored differently, or detailed textures. Debussyman has, on the bottom, lots of details, and at the top lots of color variation.

 

 

-This is the most relevant point to people doing recreations. Every color included goes well with the dominant color. If they were paint swatches and you overlapped them, the saturation, hue, and tint all complement the dominant color. The high contrast colors are kept to a minimum, and the low contrast colors are more present. Even in hamishes, where there is practically every color at once in that mural, they are all unsaturated, and almost grayed out so that they don't overpower the orange. It's still very colorful, but it looks very nice as well. 

 

 

-And the most important, I think, is that every color references the dominant color. In every single one, for almost the entire building there are no additional colors that are not bordering the dominant. Look, there will be some of the dominant color next to every single change, except in one spot for every one of them. The ground floor for jason, and hamish, and the spire in debussyman. Then, there is whatever accent color, next to a sub-dominant color.

 

- - - - - - - - - - -

 

Do what you want with this color information. The third point is very important. Everything should look good with the dominant color, no exceptions. Don't let anything overpower it. If it is a color that is far from the dominant color on the spectrum, desaturate it and change the hue a bit to make it closer to the main color.

 

- - - - - - - - - - -

 

I've written a lot already, so I'm just going to this one next section, and I'll combine Levels of detail, and areas of visual activity and rest. 

 

These are what you are going to encounter while modeling mostly, and while texturing a little bit. For levels of detail, there are three sections to know. Large details, the shape of the facade; medium details, stuff like windows and other architectural elements; and the small details, which are things like wires on the roof, or security cameras, and especially textures. Each of these has a very specific piece of importance. 

 

The large details show us something we can recognize. It looks like a building because of the large details. The medium details are where we start showing what the building does, what it's purpose is, and most importantly, what it's aesthetic is. For these, the size isn't what determines them, but the importance.  These are the majority of the details, and most time should probably be spent on these. If you do only large and medium details, the building will probably look 90-95% done. For my jeweler's building, all of the stonework and gargoyles are medium details. 

 

Finally the small details--which are my favorite because of a neurotic band director who ended up making us really really good because of his fixation on the details--are there to convince people it's real. This is an illusion, and any good illusion can successfully trick people into thinking what you want them to think. Be neurotic. Put some life into the building. My purpose in this section is to tell you how important the small details are, and how to make them. It's hard to put into words... Tell a story with them. Texturing is the best example of this.

 

Do you have an AC unit or exhaust anywhere. How long has that been there. Was there another one before that in another location? All of these affect you textures, because over time that exhaust stains where it opens up just a little, and it just keeps adding on. You can do similar things with modeling. Paying attention to references is the most important part there, though. Leave no detail unacknowledged. It doesn't have to be accurate. If it's tiny enough, a slightly modified box can do the trick for most details like that. But do not ignore anything. That's what adds the life to your building. But really, as has been said before, the texturing is the most important small detail you can have.

 

 

Now for areas of visual activity and rest. This one is going to be short, but, basically, make sure that there are areas that someone can subconsciously look at for a while to try and decipher everything that is going on in that location. Busy window reflections, cornices, gargoyles, intricate textures, some sort of interesting pattern. It doesn't have to be a noisy kind of detail, it just needs to be small, and in between these areas of detail, there should be spaces with little to no detail. Contrast is nice. Don't overdo it though, it's the same idea as with colors, the blank space should complement the details. 

 

I'm going to use Reddonquixotes most recent submission for this, because I love it.

 

 

Look at the facade. At every point going up the building you can find something busy, the reflections, the mullions and at the top, the spires and roof junk. But at the same time, your eye can rest on something not so busy. The tiles, or the dark crevices of the windows or the interior of the steps. There's details everywhere, but they don't detract from the overall shape of the structure because there's some calm, easy shapes right next to them.

 

- - - - - - - - - - -

 

I'm not actually sure what I just did right now... Just kinda felt like writing a post like this, and got too far to change my mind about it. It's really more to organize my ideas on the subject for myself than anything else, but tell me if you'd like me to do something like this again if I feel so inspired. 

 

And a TL;DR Make sure everything looks good together.