Building Visualization

MATT DILLON: They closed the door, so I'm going to go ahead and start. I'm probably 30 seconds early. So don't tell anybody, OK? Again, for those of you who walked in, I'm doing a little bit of an experiment. So I usually show the software live. And because of a lot of what I'm going to be doing is going to require a lot of rendering, you don't want to sit there waiting through a rendering process to see the result. So instead I've got a bunch of embedded videos that I'll be talking through, and I've clipped out the rendering part. Some of them might have taken 20 minutes to render. So hopefully they'll go OK. I've gone through it several times, and it's not messed up on me yet.

For those who don't know me, my name is Matt Dillon. I am with Applied Software. Formerly I was with Inceptia, which before that was DC CAD. So if you know me from then, we actually merged with Applied Software back in September of last year. So it's been a little over a year. I'm a certified instructor for Autodesk. I've got a few years of experience with this stuff. I'm not a hardcore Max user. So I'm assuming that most of you guys are coming from kind of the same place I am, which is, your main focus is maybe Revit. But you'd like to be able to do some rendering in Max, but you don't live in Max. You don't have time to hire, or the money to hire a staff of people to do things in Max that live in it, breathe it, sleep it, that kind of thing. Is that pretty close? That's who this class is geared for.

I have done a lot of renderings through the years. I actually started-- does anybody remember an old program called Autoshade? See all the gray haired people remember that. I think the first rendering I did was with Autoshade, and it was around 1987. Somewhere around there. We've come a little bit since then, OK? But I've seen a lot of iterations of stuff. I've gone down a lot of rabbit holes, and I'm hoping to prevent you from going down some of those rabbit holes that I went down, trying to figure out how to make this stuff work.

So with that, this is not an advanced class. Hopefully that's already been made clear. So if you're a hardcore Max user looking for some really cool advanced tips, you're probably not going to get anything like that in this class. But again, if you're just somebody that wants to be able to take what you do normally, day to day in Revit, bring it into Max, and get some decent renderings, do an animation, that's what this class is for. Has anybody in here never used Max before? OK. So OK, that's fine. I do assume though, that you have a basic understanding of the interface. And if you don't, don't get up walk. You should get something out of this. But I'm not going to really cover a whole lot of stuff about basic interface things.

So what would I'm going to talk about in this class is first, just talk about the various options and strategies for bringing a Revit model into Max. There's a lot of ways you can do it. I'll show you some little tricks on how to better manage the geometry when you bring it in. We're going to talk about the new art render, versus the mental ray render. So the mental ray render has been around for several years. The art render is brand new. So it's just been added to Max in 2017. It's now the default render in Revit 2017. We'll talk about that, when you might use one, versus the other. Did anybody go to the class this morning on the art render? I was relieved when I sat through that class that he didn't contradict anything that I've already figured out, because sometimes you don't know what you don't know, right? So it was good news for me.

We're going to spend a lot of time talking about photometric lighting, especially. This is a really big deal with Max. Revit as well, but it's even a bigger deal with Max. Little bit about materials. And then the last part of the class I'm going to show you how to create a keyframe animation the simple way. And then, how to use a component of Max that a lot of people don't know about called Video Post, to put several sequences together, to make a longer sequence. Rendering shorter sequences, and then put them together in a variety of ways. Sort of like the way they do on television, and the movies, where they cut from one scene to the next. That kind of thing.

But first off, how many people have rendered in Revit. You can get pretty good renderings in Revit, right? So why even bother with Max? Well, it depends. I mean sometimes what you can get in Revit is perfectly satisfactory. So I'm not telling you to stop rendering in Revit. It just depends on the effect you're trying to get. So in this example, I've got a daylight scene. I'm indoors, and I've got a large expanse of light, and I want to pull a lot of light into the scene. You can't do that real effectively with Revit. You can do it a little bit, to an extent. But you can do it a lot better with Max. You have a lot more control over that in Max.

Here's a dusk scene. Again, you can get a decent image in Revit. You've got a little bit more control over Max. But quite frankly, these are fairly similar. I could argue either way on this one. Here's a big one, though, nighttime scenes. And you really don't see it much in this image, but I'm going to show you something a little bit later on, where you really see the difference.

But I want to point out a couple of things. In the Revit image. Notice that everything's black out here. Even though there's lights here, everything's black out here. And if you look at the Max scene you're actually seeing some of this exterior lighting filtering out into this area beyond, which is a little bit more realistic. And the reason for that is Max gives you a lot of control over global illumination, indirect lighting, which Revit doesn't give you as much control over. OK so there' an example of where you might want to do it in Max, versus Revit. Also if you want to do animations. Has anybody here done an animation in Revit? Don't do it in Revit. Use Max. If you're going to do an animation, just use Max.

So we're going to go through this workflow real fast, and we're going to focus on each aspect of this as we go through the class. So I'll get into all these things in more detail. But here's the basic workflow. First thing is, just link, or import your Revit geometry. 90% of your geometry is going to be done in Revit. You may do some modeling in Max to embellish the scene a little bit, but most of it is going to be in Revit. So that's the first thing you want to do, is get your Revit geometry in. And then you need to choose your rendering engine. Everything you do from this point forward, to a large extent, depends on which rendering engine you're going to use. You're going to use art, or mental ray, or something else. We'll talk about some of the others. But you want to do that first off.

I don't like to use Revit cameras in Max. You can import Revit cameras into Max when you link, or import the file, but I choose not to. And I'll explain why when we get to exposure. I'll explain why now. In Max, I like to use physical cameras. And you don't have that in Revit. We'll talk more about that when we start talking about lighting and exposure.

You're probably going to need to work a little bit with materials. Again, I'm assuming that your materials have already been assigned in Revit. but you're going to find some cases where you might want to tweak them a little bit in Max. Or in some cases, you may even need to swap them out for something else. Especially if you're using, again, the art render. We'll talk about that when we get to that particular rendering engine.

Lighting is a big deal. You can bring in your lights from Revit. There's nothing wrong with that. They're perfectly valid. They're photometric lights. But you may want to add more lights, or tweak the lighting that's coming in from Revit, to give it more effect. So there's tons of controls in Max for lighting. And this is usually where people get tripped up. Especially if you're using the mental ray engine, there's all kinds of settings here for global illumination. And this is where you can go down a lot of rabbit holes. I'm going to try to keep you from doing that. If you choose to use mental ray, I'll show you kind of the settings that I like to use that seem to work best for me.

You need to work with exposure. And if you've rendered in Revit you know how exposure affects the scene. It's the same concept in Max. So it's not that hard to pick up on. Again, I recommend the physical camera. It gives you a little bit more flexibility with different exposure options. Different cameras can have different exposures, and you can play with different things.

And then you're going to do a lot of iterative rendering. So you're going to be fine tuning your lighting, fine tuning your materials. You're going to want to be doing some test renderings. You don't want to spend a lot of time on these. So there's little tricks you can do to adjust the render quality to kind of get a preview, without doing your final rendering, and get through them fairly quickly, until you're ready to do that final rendering. We'll cover some of the little tips and tricks for that.

And then finally, do your final render. And in case I forget to mention this when we get to this step, when you save your render, don't do this. Let's see if I've got it on this slide. Nah, of course not. We'll probably get to it later, but there's an option in your render settings. There's an output option where you can render directly to a file. And a lot of people will go through all their test renders. And then they'll render their final render to make sure it looks like what they want, and then they'll go and render it again to output to a JPEG or something. Don't do that. You can save right from the render frame window right there. So when you render that final image, yeah, that's the one I want, just hit the little Save button right there. And you don't have to render it again.

So let's dive in a little deeper here, and talk about importing and linking. So which would you do, import or link? It's pretty straightforward. Obviously, if you're importing, there's no link-- there that's why it's not called a link-- back to the original file. So if you've updated the model, you have to re-import. You can't just update the link. If it's a large file that could take a while. With links, of course, you can update the file. And what's cool, I'm going to show you some little tricks to manage that file. So if you've made changes to the Revit model, you don't necessarily have to re-link the whole model, or upload, or update the whole model. Just parts of it.

This may seem like a big deal here, that if you import the geometry, the objects become editable meshes. So you can actually edit them. You have full control over editing those, but as soon as you start editing that mesh, you've pretty much destroyed the geometry. Has anybody ever done that, right? I'm going to play with this a little bit. Boom. It's no longer a window, or a wall, it's a blob. So even though the Revit objects are largely un-editable, they're still editable to some extent, even when you link them in. Primarily, if you need to, say, swap out materials or something. You can still do that.

I personally prefer the file linking. I don't do much importing at all. I prefer file linking, myself. And if we talk more about file linking, some strategies for that, we'll get to that in a minute. I want to talk about this as well. There's two places you can go to link the file in. You can go to the application menu here, and you'll see several options for linking or importing the file. But you can also go over here to the utilities panel in Revit. You'll notice there's no file link button here. If I click on More, then I'll get a whole list of additional utilities, and you'll see file length there. But if you're doing this a lot, and you will, wouldn't it be nice just to have the button right there, right? So we can do that. You can actually customize this interface fairly easily. So I'm going to go ahead and run this video. I'm going to show you how to do that.

So you'll notice this button here. I got the shakes today. Too much coffee. So that button there actually allows you to configure those buttons. So right now there's eight buttons. You can see in the list there, there's file link manager. I'm just going to add a button. Just add one more button, or I could take something off of one of those buttons, and replace it, but I'm going to add a button. And just drag that file link manager tool over to it, click OK, and it's there. And it'll stay there until you take it off. OK. So that's real quick, easy way of making file link manager a little bit more accessible.

So if you're going to link, there's two ways you can do it essentially. You can link in an FBX file. Does everybody know what an FBX file is? OK. So that's kind of like the 3D translation file for Autodesk. FDX is a good way to transfer three dimensional data from say, Revit to Navisworks, to Max. I can go from Showcase to Max, using FBX. Max to Showcase using FBX. Sort of like DXF for 3D geometry that includes materials.

But we can also link Revit files directly. You don't have to go FBX. So if we look at the differences, if you go FBX, you have to open up the Revit model, and export the FBX from Revit. So you go to the application menu, export FBX. You've got to be in a 3D view to do that. And when you export that FBX, all of the texture maps that define your materials in the Revit model, get saved in an FBM folder, in the same location that you export the Revit file to, the FBX file to. So you've got both of those you have to manage. You've got the FBX file, and all those texture maps that go with it. Otherwise in the Max Scene you won't see the textures.

If you link it, you can link the file directly into 3DS Max. You don't have to open it up in Revit. You can just go grab the file. And as long as there's a 3D view in that Revit model, you can choose the 3D view to link, and it'll bring it in. You don't even have to Revit on the machine. And more importantly, there is no FBM folder. Well we'll see this more later on, when I get some materials. But the texture maps stay right where they're at. They're referenced in their original location. So you don't have to manage that. So I prefer linking, and I prefer linking directly from the RVT file. And there is one case where I will link an FBX file. We'll get into that a little bit later.

So again, here's an illustration of that. Linking in an FBX, if I look at a texture map, this is just a piece of the material editor in Max. And this is a texture map that's partly defining the material that I'm dealing with. And you can see where it's referencing. And it's in my folder that I stored the FBX file at. And if that moves, then I've lost all references to those maps, and I've got to rebuild those materials, and re-point them to all those maps. The maps are there, I just have to rebuild it, and point to those locations. And that can be a pain.

And if I go RVT notice right here, it's looking at the material in the original place that it came from. This is just one of the default AutoCAD materials, and the materials stored in the default AutoCAD material library. But let's say I created my own custom material, with my own custom map file, and stored it in a folder called, My Maps. Somewhere up on the server, wherever, doesn't matter. Wherever it found it when it originally linked the file in, that's where it's going to reference it at in Max. I don't have to make sure it follows my file around. And again, that's linking a Revit file.

So if you ever noticed in Revit, when you go to the application menu, and you've got the Sweet's Workflows. You ever seen that? Don't use it. It's kind of a placebo. It makes it look like it's making it easier for you. First off, it's always going to export an FBX file. And if you look at the different settings for all of these different ways of exporting an FBX file, the differences between them are practically nonexistent. And it's not a big deal. But more importantly, when you export it, that FBX file, and the associated FBM folder, get exported to your temp folder. How many of y'all clean your temp folder out on a regular basis? I do. Guess what? You just lost your FBX, and the material definitions.

And even if you've already got Max sitting there, waiting for the file, ready to take it. Doesn't matter. The Sweet Workflow is going to launch another session anyway, right? So it's going to take longer.

AUDIENCE: So you can't define [INAUDIBLE]?

PRESENTER: Not to my knowledge. The question is, can you define it to go make that temp folder go somewhere else, make the FBM file go somewhere other than temp? I don't think so. Yeah. I mean once I realized what was really happening I said I'm not going to do that. I can do it manually, and do it better that way. OK. So, whether you're linking FBX, or RVT files, there's a couple of strategies you might want to take advantage of, and sometimes these Revit models get kind of large. And every time you make a change in the Revit model, you don't want to have to upload the entire model. So a few things to be aware of.

First off, when you link the file in, you've got these presets, how do you want to derive the Max geometry. And the one I usually use is this one here, buy Revit material. So instead of a wall being an object in Max, no. Everything that is jip board, has a jip board material assigned to it, that's one object in Max called jip board. And then everything that might have a limestone veneer assigned to it, that's an object called limestone. So it gives me fewer objects to manage. Makes it really easier to swap out. Like if I want to say, you know what? Instead of limestone, I want to make it brick. Well, I can easily make everything that was limestone, brick. Just by swapping out the material on that one object.

Let's say I have a few walls where I want a little bit more granular control up. I might want to say, that wall there, I want to make an accent wall. So I want to be able to get to the jp board on that wall, and make it separate from the jip board on these walls, and assign a material separately to that. That's when I would link that geometry in, using the do not combine entities, to where, yeah it's a wall. That wall is an object. That wall is an object. So you can mix, and match, depending on what you want to do with the objects, how much control do you want over them, as to how you bring them in.

Regardless of which one of these presets you use, I would suggest you split your Revit model up. And the way you do it is in Revit set up 3D views, with just the geometry that you want visible for that piece of the model, in that view. So when you export an FBX, or you link a Revit file, again, you're doing it based on a 3-D view in the Revit model. And the only objects that will come over, are those objects that are visible in that view. So I've got all these Max views set up with different parts of the model visible in them, and that allows me to link those in separately. So that if I made a change only on the first floor, then I can just reload that part of the model. Instead of having to reload the whole thing. I can ignore these other views. Does that make sense? So a little bit of pre-work in the Revit model, will go a long way when you go to bring it into Max.

And then once you bring it into Max, to get a little bit more control over selecting those objects, or maybe just turning them off and on, to get them out of the way. Put them on layers. How many of y'all use layers in Max? For a long time I kind of ignored layers in Max, because once I went from AutoCAD to Revit, it was like, thank god, no more layers, right? But I've kind of come back around. And one of the things I like to do now is when I link these various pieces in, each view gets assigned to a corresponding layer in Max. So again, it gives me a little bit more control over selecting them, as well as turning them off and on.

So I've got a little video to show that. Now, you'll notice in the video, the layer manager isn't even available right here. So I'll show you how to access that, if you don't know. So first thing we're going to go up to the utilities panel, click on the file link manager button. Go ahead. Click on it. There you go. OK. And go grab the file. And it's going to take a few seconds here. And what it's actually doing is this reading that Revit model, to look at what 3D views are available. And once it's got a list of 3D views, then it will display them for me. And I can choose the actual view that I want to bring in. I'm going to bring in the first floor first. And before I actually link it, I'm going to go check this preset. And you'll notice that on my preset, I'm not bringing in anything other than geometry. So no lights, no daylight systems, no cameras. On this preset, I'm not doing any of that. That doesn't mean I don't bring in lights, but not with this geometry.

So this is where I kind of fast forward a little bit. You'll see it here. Boom. It's automagically in there, right? It takes it a few seconds to do that. It might take it up to a minute or two, actually to link that in, and read the model. So I just kind of fast forward it. Now we're going to put it on a layer right. So it came in on this layer that is basically named the same as the file. So all that geometry is on that one layer. But you're going to rename that layer to, in this case, first floor interior's. So now I've got all that geometry on a layer.

Go back. Go select the exact same file again. Let it read the list. And this time, once that list comes up I'll choose, in this case, the first floor furniture. And we'll link that in. I don't need to look at the preset. I know what it's doing. I always check the preset the first time, and then after that I know what it's doing. And again, it's got the same name again, the file name again. But again I just rename that layer now to furniture, and just wash, rinse, repeat, keep going. Don't worry you're not going not going to sit here, and watch me load the whole thing. So I'm going to cut ahead here in a second.

So I want to point out one more thing here. Come on, move ahead. Move ahead. There you go. All right. So everything's been loaded. I want to point out, there's one here that says lights. And in that one, I modified the preset to bring the lights in. And you'll notice, I don't know if you can read that, but that one I actually did as an FBX. So what I did for the lights is, I went to a view where only the lights were visible in Revit, export the FBX file. And the reason I did that is when you bring in lights, as part of an FBX file, by default, they're turned off. I don't like them on automatically. I'll turn them on when I'm ready to turn them on. If you bring it in is part of the Revit file, they're automatically on. And I usually wind up going and turning them off especially. If I'm going to do a daylight scene or something.

So it's just a little thing I do. OK so that's linking. Any questions on that? Does that make sense? OK.

So let's talk about the renderers. Art versus NVIDIA and there are some others as well. So the art renderer is brand new for Max. One of the nice things about it is, it's really simple. And I was, again, I sat in a class this morning. And the guy had a really good way of explaining it. It's based on real world, physical properties. It's already configured to simulate reality. So there's not a whole lot of controls here. You're not trying to fake things. It's meant to be realistic, out of the box. You do have some controls over image quality, noise filtering, and things. We'll talk about that in a little bit. There's the noise filtering. One thing to remember in Max, in general, the further over to the right the sliders go, the better the image quality, the longer it takes to render. So the trick is finding that balance between image quality, and time.

Then the NVIDIA MentalRay renderer is a lot more complex, especially when we start talking about global illumination. So Final Gather is part of that. There's a lot of settings there. And again, a lot of rabbit holes you can go down. I'll hopefully show you some things to keep you from doing that. The Ray renderer is really good for faking it, right? You need to, maybe, embellish reality. And the MentalRay render allows you to do that. So you're going to have some scenes where you're going to need to embellish reality a little bit, because reality doesn't look the way you want it to look. That's when you might need to use the MentalRay renderer.

So if you look at a list, and this is a little bit deceiving, art is easier. There's no question. Art it's faster. It's definitely faster than the MentalRay render. And it is now the default renderer in Max 2017. You can switch to the others, but it is the default. And it is also the only render in Revit 2017. OK? But in red there, it doesn't support attenuation. How many of y'all know what attenuation is? OK. Though for those of you that don't know, it's not that important anymore. And I'll explain why in a minute when we get to lighting. So you know, that's really not a big deal. Limited lighting controls. Again, the global illumination. You don't have all those settings. So less flexibility, but much less complexity, right?

This one's kind of important. If you're going to do a night scene you might like to use the lens effects, which I'll be showing you. Doesn't support lens effects. So if I need lens effects, 'm going to have to go with metal ray. It doesn't support sky portals. That's a big deal if you're doing certain types of interior scenes. This is not a huge deal. You may have to do a little tweaking with some of the Revit materials, but not a lot. So MentalRay is kind of the opposite of that. It's slower, et cetera, et cetera. But don't let the amount of red over here, versus the amount of red, lull you into thinking you should just use metal ray, right? It depends on the situation. And a lot of these are not that big of a deal.

So I'm going to show you an example of what they both look like. Here's the art renderer. Real simple little rendering here. We're going to just do an exterior scene. And you'll see how they actually look different when they render. But you can see it's very simple controls here. So 50%. This is actually a fairly decent rendering quality setting here. You might bump that up to high, but this will actually give you a decent rendering. Watch what happens though. You see how it kind of pixelates? So the art renderer, what's cool about this one is you can set it for a certain quality, but you can actually watch the image as it gets better, and better, and better, and you might get to a certain point, maybe halfway along, where you go, you know what? That's a good enough. Stop, and save it, right? So there's the finished art render.

Now let me show you the MentalRay render, and what that looks like. So there's the MentalRay render. Same scene. Look at all these settings here. I'm just going with default settings here. We'll talk more about these in a little bit. And I've got quite a bit-- hopefully everybody downloaded the handout. If you didn't, make sure you download it. I've got tons of information on different options for the settings here, and when you might want to use them one way or another way. This is called a bucket render. So you'll see as it's rendering, it's first just making a pass to do the final gather, the indirect lighting calculations. And then it's going to start doing the render. And you have to wait for it to finish. Sorry, that was my screen doing that, not the render. But you have to wait for it to finish, because it starts rendering in these buckets. And you see these squares appearing. They usually go from left to right. You can't just say, good enough. Stop. Doesn't matter. If it's good enough, great. We've still got to wait for it to finish. And it does take longer. But the final quality is comparable, for an exterior rendering.

So which one do you use? These are my recommendations. And if you want to take a picture of this, I'll hold this up. I'll leave this up here for a little bit. I've done a lot of experimenting since 3ds Max 2017 came out. Kind of played with it. A lot of different ways, and here's kind of what I've come up with. If you're going to do a simple exterior scene with daylight, so sunlight, you can use either one. They both give you good quality rendering. Nighttime scene, exterior, use MentalRay. We'll dive into this a little more later.

Interior, daylight only. In other words, inside scene. If you have a large expanse of glass, and you're trying to bring in daylight, and light up the interior of the room, use the MentalRay render, because you're going to need to tweak reality a little bit. Interior daylight plus artificial. So any time there is daylight on the inside of the building, and you're trying to really leverage that daylight on the inside of the building, you're really talking MentalRay. OK. Now if it's just a little bit of daylight, like some small windows up there, but mostly artificial light, I'd go the other way. But if it's a lot of daylight you're trying to bring in, use MentalRay. Artificial only, you can use art or MentalRay. In general, either of these here that say art or MentalRay, I'm going to make it real simple on you. Go with the art render. OK, if it says art or MentalRay, just go with art. It's simpler. It's faster. It just makes more sense.

Now we'll look at some specific examples. By the way, this PowerPoint is also available on the AU website. You can download the whole thing. OK so there are other renderers, not just MentalRay or art. There is the Scanline renderer. This has been around forever. I mean when 3D Studio first came, out back in the 90s some time, getting old, memory fades, that was the original renderer with 3D Studio. It's going away. Don't use it. It does not support photometric lighting. And it doesn't support the materials that come with Revit. Don't use the Scanline Renderer. Pretend it's not there.

NVIDIA iRay is another option. It's a good renderer and it supports the same materials that the MentalRay supports, and it supports photometric lighting. The reason I don't use it is I have a notebook here that is really not beefy enough for iRay. iRay has some fairly stringent hardware requirements. So if you've got a really powerful GPU, you know, multi-core machine, then you might want to consider the iRay renderer, play with it, see what you think. It's a good renderer. But if you don't, don't go there. It requires too many resources. V-Ray, a lot of people like to use V-Ray. I'm not that familiar with it. And the reason I'm not that familiar with it is I'm a cheapskate, and V-Ray costs money. It's extra. It's a third party renderer. So I do know a lot of people that love it. I don't use it. Don't know anything about it.

And then you have cloud rendering. So you can render from the cloud, from either Revit or Max. It's quick and easy. There's some cool things you can do, along these lines here. Fewer options. Again, easy usually means fewer option. It pretty much always works out that way. Depending on the quality, and what you're trying to do with the rendering, it may cost you some Cloud Credits. But the Cloud Credits aren't much. I mean, what is it, $1 a credit or something like that? It's not that big of a deal.

Let me show you an example of a panorama, if you haven't ever done one of these. So this is a cloud rendering here, right? Just a static image. But this is a panorama that I actually downloaded. Really simple to do. So you've been hearing a lot of stuff got VR out here, right? Well this is your first kind of step toward VR. You can also do a stereo panorama in the cloud. So you upload your file to a stereo panorama, download it, put on the goggles, and you're doing VR. And it's not hard. It's real simple. This is brain dead simple. So I encourage you to try it. I think that particular rendering cost me maybe six credits. So give it a shot. It's worth it.

OK. My favorite topic. Photometric lighting, and materials. Almost my favorite topic. So when you're working with photometric lighting and materials, you're going to be doing a lot of tweaking, and adjusting, and you want to see how it's going to affect your final rendering. And this is where you need to come up with some ways of doing multiple iterative renderings quickly, right? You don't want to have to be waiting 20, 30 minutes, or an hour each rendering just to see what some minor adjustment might do so. So some things you can do is in the render setup dialog box-- whoops, get back there. Render render set up dialog box, in the art render, you can just set your quality way down low, like this. I'm turning off noise filtering here. Noise filtering basically just kind of smooths out some of the granularity there. Kind of blurs the image as well. But you know, it's something you can play with. But again, it takes a little bit more time. So I'm going to turn that off. And in the comment settings here, I'm rendering to a lot smaller size. So I might render normally to a like 1920 by 1080, but for this test, I'm going to render to 320 by 180. It takes it less time. Now, the results here is a pretty grainy image.

But if all I'm trying to do is get a sense of the overall lighting, this is all I really need. And it doesn't take any time at all. If I need more detail, less graininess, well then I can do something like this. I bump my quality up, which is going to increase rendering time, but then I say, instead of rendering the entire view, I just want to render a blow up area, to the same image size, and that will speed it up again. So here's an example of how that's going to work.

So we'll do the art renderer first. We'll go to render set up. So here, again, I'm setting my render size to a small size. And then I'm going to drop my render quality all the way down to minimum, and I'm turning off noise filtering. Also fastpath tracing. That's usually fine for almost every rendering you do with the art render, the fastpath tracing. The other option, the advanced ray tracing, is really if you've got a lot of reflective materials. That might be a little bit more helpful. But frankly, I haven't noticed much difference, and it takes longer. So there you go. It's, again, grainy, but you get a good sense of what the lighting's going to do.

OK, now if I want to get a little bit more detail on that table, I'll up the quality here to draft. And I'll change it to a blow, up instead of a view. When you go to a blow up, you've got this box here that you can drag around, position it where you want, and then you can play with those little corners to kind of get the size the way you want. You've got a similar thing in Revit. Want to go ahead and render that. It'll take a little bit longer, but not much. And again, you get a little better quality image, so you can see more detail on it. So again, pretty simple with art. There's not a whole lot of settings to manage.

So the next one is MentalRay. Same process. So on MentalRay, again, on the common settings, I'm going to render a view. I'm going to render to a small size. But then when we get to global Illumination, right here, I want to take final gather, which is the calculation for indirect lighting, set it all the way down to draft, so it's the lowest quality possible, because that can really take some time, and then go ahead and let it render. And also I pulled up the render frame window. This button here pulls up the render frame window, so that I can drop the image quality all the way down. There's probably another place to do that, but that's just how I do it with MentalRay. And again, you notice, it does take longer than the art render, even with those settings dropped all the way down, because it's calculating final gather. I need that because I'm trying to bring an exterior light, and that's what final gather helps you do. So I get a decent quality rendering. That's fairly quick. Fairly easy. But again, the key is, lower the quality, until you're ready to bump it up for that final rendering.

Another tool that's really valuable in Max for comparing renderings, among other things, we're going to see us again when we get to animation, is the RAM player, what this allows you to do is to compare renderings. So you know, I do a rendering, I think I'll change the setting here. I can then do another rendering, and compare that to the RAM player, to see what some of the subtle changes might have been. Because sometimes it's not real obvious. Gee, it looks like it didn't do much of anything. And then you load it in the RAM player. You go, oh yeah it did. This is a lot better, right? So it's really helpful. I'll show you how that works. It's pretty straightforward.

So first I'm going to do a render. And again, I'm in the mental ray rendering. Again, we're dealing with an exterior scene, light coming in. This is just with the default final gather settings. Default global illumination settings. So I've done that rendering. And I'm now going to capture in the RAM player. So it's at the bottom of this rendering pull down menu. So right here, I've got two channels, and I'm going to load it into channel A, the last rendering, and just store it. So I'm just going to minimize that window. Don't close it. You'll lose the rendering. And then I'm going to make an adjustment. I'm going to go to my final gather settings, and I'm going to bump up the number of light bounces. So how many times is light bouncing off the objects in the scene? That's way too many, by the way. Six is ridiculous. It really increases render time, and it doesn't give you that much. But let's pretend I don't know that. OK.

So I'm going to load that now in channel B, and I can see the difference. Now, I don't know how well you can see it on the projector. But you can see there is a difference. Now, if I'm gullible, I might think, that's pretty good. I'm going to go with that. But let's see if I can improve the render quality now. A little tip, don't go above two bounces on final gather. You reach a point of diminishing returns. And here I see, OK, I bumped up the image quality, and it really increased my render time, and it didn't do anything to the scene. So I know I can bump that down before I do my final render, and not waste too much time on it. So use that RAM player. It's a really handy tool for comparing images when you're tweaking lights, tweaking materials. It's invaluable.

So let's talk about lighting settings. Talk about exterior light first. And again, the art render, and the mental ray render, in this respect, are fairly similar. But they do use different tools. So if you're using the art renderer, you want to use the art sun positioner. And it's on the lighting tab of the create command panel. If you're using the mental ray renderer you're going to use the MR. It's not Mr., OK? It's mental ray MR daylight's system. And that's actually found on the systems panel, and not the create panel. But once you get to them, they both work pretty much the same way. They both include, both a light source, and an artificial sky environment, which also casts light as well.

So I'll show you both of them. Here's the art sun positioner. So again, I brought in my Revit scene. I've got my lights in there. But they're all turned off. I did not bring in the daylight system from Revit. I didn't bring in any cameras. I created my camera right here in Max. But there's the sun positioner on the light tab. So you'll notice, you place it, and then you have to size up this composite. The size of that doesn't matter. That's just a glyph that allows you to then rotate it, to indicate which direction north is. And then you position the actual sun system, or the sunlight. And then over here, you configure, usually based on date, time, and location, where that sunlight actually is. So I'm going to click on the location tab here. This is a desert scene. So we're going to put it in, where my good friend Stephen Shell lives, Tucson, Arizona. And we'll set the time, and render.