Max-imizing Your Revit Model for Better Design Visualizations

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: Might as well get started at least, a nice little warm-up. You guys, I'm Alonzo, this is Rob.

ROB TERRY: Good to See everybody, thanks for coming.

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: I really appreciate you guys here this is our first class here at AU, so hopefully if you don't learn anything from us at least will entertain you for about an hour.

ROB TERRY: We'll try. At least he will.

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: And keep you awake.

ROB TERRY: Yeah, hopefully. Yes, it's kind of interesting from this side from this side of the table. But again, glad to be here in our class maximizing your Revit model for better design visualizations. I'm a max guy and Alonzo's is a Revit guy, so you know, we always have these conversations about why use Max, because Revit can do a lot of the things that Max can do in terms of rendering an output and VR and all these kinds of things. But one of the things are going to try to do is give you guys a little example of some of the things that we do and how we incorporate 3ds Max into our workflow and how it works for us, so.

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: Quick show of hands, everybody's background who's the Revit side, yes. We always win.

ROB TERRY: You won me over.

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: And the Max side? All right, a few double hands, that's good.

ROB TERRY: Cool.

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: This is the smart people who are going to call us out on things, huh?

ROB TERRY: Yep. You definitely won me over on that one though.

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: I know, I know. You guys, what's the over under on questions?

ROB TERRY: Four.

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: Four? I'll take over.

ROB TERRY: OK.

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: I'll take you over?

ROB TERRY: What's your runner on finishing on time?

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: What's that? I'm definitely taking [INAUDIBLE].

ROB TERRY: Everybody got the handout. Realize it was kind of an ambitious set of things, so hopefully we'll do our best to try to get through everything. But again, if you have any questions, let us know. So it's about the time, so let's go ahead.

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: Let's get going. So first of all, thank you guys. Like it we said, we're very excited to be here. It's our first shot at this, so please be gentle. You guys, just so you get a little bit of knowledge. You guys are coming from about five or six different countries, all over the United States.

I think we saw a guy from MIT in here. So you might be able to help us out with some equations. And then we have a few people from Stan Tech and the NWH, our extended family. Where are you guys at? Anybody? Anybody? Must be at the craps table. So we'll be all right.

So the-- we're all really here to get inspired, right? So if you received the handout ahead of time, you know what our class outline's going to be. You know how to get this video afterwards. You have something to present to the office, if you like it.

Whenever we come to these conventions, what we really like to do is try to get inspired to just do a couple of things when we get back to the office. So make sure you have fun along the way, right? If this was all about work, then we wouldn't really be here. We wouldn't be enjoying what we're doing. So a couple of things, and Rob hasn't seen all these slides just yet.

But a couple of ways we like to have fun is, how do you instill in your teams this kind of feeling?

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ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: Typical day in the Terry household.

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ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: There's an easy way to throw the clothes in the hamper, right? And then there's the fun way of throwing your clothes in the hamper.

ROB TERRY: And it seems kind of silly to show this, but the reality is, we push software pretty hard. And we come up with roadblocks, and we find these walls, redefine ways to climb over those walls. And there are times when we've figured something out, and we really get that excited and high fives across the board.

So you know, when we run up to those situations, we can't forget to take that hard shot.

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: Can't be scared to fail. Can't be scared to get small little leaps. And you know what? When we get them, we deserve to celebrate. Always remind your teams.

ROB TERRY: Have fun along the way.

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: Right? And there's a lot of challenges we deal with. We don't really have to go too much into those. But it's always whenever you hit that tough moment, take a couple of steps back and look at the positive aspect of things, right? What did we do right? What did we learn from this example? What can we do better next time?

This is a good one just a post at the office.

ROB TERRY: How many of your plans actually ever go the way of the one on top? Yeah. No, it rarely ever does. And you know, I think we've found ways that we anticipate those. And if we're able to adapt to those changes beforehand, we're going to be in a better position to succeed as we go down the road.

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: So who is Zack right? We've got a really smart team, young team. Very talented guys. But I've got one guy, Zack, who always tends to-- we got a couple laughs over there. You know Zach?

ROB TERRY: Yep. Everybody has a Zachary. Zack is a coworker. He sits right next to us. And a really smart kid. But I tell you, I've been hearing him say so many times in the past couple years, I need to learn Max. I need to learn Max.

He's in Revit all the time, and he complains about all sorts of things. So I think there's a little bit of Zack in everybody. And one of the things that Zack tends to do is he'll take some shortcuts, because as we all do, we have deadlines. And we have our boss yelling. And all these kind of things that we need to take care of. So sometimes we have to take shortcuts, but we need to make sure that we take the right shortcuts.

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: And there's nothing wrong with shortcuts. It's just a matter of thinking all the way through your plan when you take them. Is it really a short cut, or are we going to find ourselves in trouble later?

ROB TERRY: Yeah.

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: Just another quick, inspiring quote. So when we talk about this, we've really adjusted what we do to define a idea, right? Innovate, design, educate, achieve. Whenever we start a project, we know that we're always going to hit a brick wall. We're always going to have to find a better, faster, quicker way. That's why we're here this week alone.

But rarely do we actually say to our teammates, I need you to innovate a better way of doing this. I need to educate your team, your consultants, your client, right? And rarely do we say, hey, great job doing this. Let's achieve this. How do we know we're doing a great job? We get another contract from a client. We get a, hey, great job, team, on pushing that one for the video.

All very important. We often-- we concentrate too much on design and not enough on the other aspects.

ROB TERRY: And the education part of IDEA is a huge part, so again, why we're here.

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: So we're going to walk through our design-enhance present program, and it really aligns with Revit Max to render.

ROB TERRY: Kind of why we use Max. How it benefits us. So the innovation of integration. I'm kind of an analogies guy. A lot of my knowledge, when it comes down to a hardware, I usually talk about cars and engines and that kind of stuff. But when it comes to workflows, I find myself talking about recipes and food. So being a pioneer of our own workflow, it kind of comes down to, what's that recipe that's going to work for you?

You know sometimes it's a software, it's a skill set, it's just a technique. So these little ingredients-- however you find them or rediscover them-- you know, it's whatever works for your particular recipe, to get that final product to work for you the best.

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: And with technology advancing as fast as it is, I mean, we just had the software keynote today, everybody on our team pioneers their own way, right? And the more you can get them to think that they're the next Magellan-- got that one in there-- the better off we're going to be as a team. We're going to take small steps to get us to bigger leaps.

And that's a little bit about the mentality.

ROB TERRY: Yeah, it's a philosophy. You know, so if we get all of our teams-- you know, we work with multidisciplinary firms-- so to get the architecture team, the interior design team, the landscape and hardscape team, all together into Revit. We know how hard it was to transfer over to Revit from AutoCAD as it is. Trying to get all of those disciplines come together is pretty tough too. But when that happens, great things happen.

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: And the examples that we're pulling from today, they're coming from small 2,000-square-foot retail projects all the way up to 500,000-square-foot redevelopments. So it really does hit a wide range. It's about getting that mentality. Sorry, I skipped one there. And the last thing we'll say on that is, no more faking it, right?

ROB TERRY: No, clients are becoming-- they're pretty well aware of the capabilities of what we can do. So if we're going through, we want to be able to show them, during a design review, an accurate representation of the model as it's happening. So we don't want to fake it anymore. They don't want to see a rendering that's not going to look anything what they are buying. And that happens too often.

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: And the industry has completely sold them on what we can do and how we can do it. Now we just have to produce, so--

ROB TERRY: Yes, this is just a quick image of a hospital that we worked on. This is a lobby, so we had the architecture team and the design team pick the materials. We can show this to a client year or so before it's built. And the next is an actual photo of this hotel lobby, sorry, it's a hospital lobby. That was just finished earlier this year. And so it's a pretty close representation of it. So we're not faking it to the client. We're actually building what we've sold them. So I think that's important part.

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: And the value of these is a year ahead of time. In this case, it was a maternity ward. And so they need to sell the spaces before they build the hospital. And to do that, they need to know what this is going to look like. So a very nice project to share for that one.

We'll go key learning objectives. Again, you saw those in the handout.

ROB TERRY: Just why we use Max. How you can-- there again, I think one of Zack's biggest problems of jumping into Max is he was intimidated. It takes time to learn new programs, so he would take shortcuts. But some of these things we're going to show you, just simple examples of how you can make things a little bit more interesting, a little bit more fun. And just examine and explore and experiment with new things within Max and just kind of give you an idea that it's really not as hard as you might think.

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: So design. When we're out with Revit, majority of the room has that same background. You know, one team, one dream. We've talked about it. This is an example again. Seventeen design partners, three-year project, 500,000 square feet. Same theories that we're using, we use in small retail projects.

It's all about a thought process. Can we all work together? Be leaders in our own environment, and everybody pioneer their own areas of expertise.

ROB TERRY: It's not just the pretty picture. You know, it's collaborating with that client along the way. And we're having an accurate representation of his model throughout the whole process.

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: This right here is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen right. We did great. The contractor loved the model. The drawings look great. We made money on the project. But you know what, it just doesn't have that same wow factor. But do you ever think I would even come close to modeling this in Revit? I hope not.

ROB TERRY: Zack would try.

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: Exactly.

ROB TERRY: Zack might try. No, but the reality again--

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: You should have seen his T-shirt.

ROB TERRY: So the right tool for the job. I mean, use Revit to create the architecture. I let the architects architect. And I will help build the context within their design. And a lot of times you don't need this for construction documents, but we need this to sell the client that, you know, hey, there's going to be a lot of retail in your store. So people will buy it.

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: And it makes it easier to get buy off, right? I think we've all probably struggled with buy off on the drawings. But when I show a client that, there's a lot of room for adjustment. When I show him that, it's a dream come true, and they believe everything we say.

So best practices in design. If by now you guys aren't federating your models in Revit, you're really not taking advantage of your own workflows. Whether it's a large project or small projects, we like to do a link by FBX and set the groups by material but per our own process.

So for example, in this scenario we had ancient [INAUDIBLE] style that actually would bog down our Revit models. And once we had locked the buildings in place, there's really no reason that we're looking at them. So we're able to export them, get them out of our way. And it's one less thing we can worry about.

So then while we continue to design, Rob has the opportunity to start working on the [INAUDIBLE] and looking at materials.

ROB TERRY: Yeah, we bring it in to 3D Studio and into Max, and we can hide things that we don't need. So if that's part of this whole giant model, then we can't turn it off. So it's a strategic thought process of which models to separate out, and it makes things a lot easier.

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: We talked about multidisciplinary. One of the big pushes that we make is our area development team is in Revit with us. We believe in creating spaces people enjoy. And to do that, we're going to have to collaborate from the outdoors to the structure to the indoor space.

So a lot of-- a few of the examples that we'll pull out is how we have to adjust Revit for our design team and how have Max enhance the process.

Ah, generic materials. Everybody have fun with generic materials? Right?

ROB TERRY: I don't. I don't. So we export by-- or I will import a Revit model by materials, and it's just a easy way to organize the model. And when one material changes-- because the materials are going to change-- it's easier to modify just the material one time, instead of having to do it several times over several different objects that are the same material.

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: So a couple of ways that we try to track those before we do an export is very simple. Multicategory filters. Apply your favorite color-- hot pink.

ROB TERRY: Generic materials kill our side of things.

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: So they kill us on Tuesday, but they save us on Fridays.

ROB TERRY: It's our version of the swear jar. So if you export a model with the generic materials, you have to put a dollar in here. And it's going to escalate up to a finger pretty soon if Zack doesn't get off the--

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: Couple of quick examples. We jumped ahead on that FBX export. Everything we have sometimes are just placeholders in Revit, right? Think about the lanterns. Think about the furniture that hasn't been picked out. If we don't have a precise model with that's low in detail, we'll have placeholders. We can export. And you will see how we locate those in Max in a bit.

ROB TERRY: Now on the Max side of things, just a good reminder that organization is key. So there's a little button up there. You press that for your new scene, and it's going to organize all these folder, structure for you.

And you know, just a reminder, for unit set up, just make sure that the units you're importing equal what you what you want and what you're exporting. Otherwise you'll have some issues. And again, we link to an FBX file. We don't link to an actual Revit model. You can do that, but we've found that linking to an FBX file is much better. There's a lot more files that we actually end up linking. But it's much easier to re-link one section of a model that we've federated properly instead of the whole entire model when just one minor thing has changed.

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: So when you link to a Revit model, it's actually bringing parametric information. And every time you reload, it gives it a chance to crash. It gives it a chance to bring too much. By going to an FBX, we're simplifying these models. We're reducing the sizes. And we're keeping ourselves flexible.

ROB TERRY: Yep, again we combine my Revit material. There's a couple of different options, but Revit material works best for us. And because the architects, you know we start this process early. So day one, we're getting a model, a Revit model. It's very basic. But at that point we can start working on the context of our design, and again, let the architects do their thing. And we're already starting with all the lighting and all the entourage and all those kind of things.

So when the model changes, and it's going to, and it should. So when it does--

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: All I'm trying to do is buy you some time with the wrong information, and then take my time to adjust it as I need to.

ROB TERRY: Yeah, and when he saves over it, it will alert me that there has been a change, so I can just reload that portion of the model and keep going. So we've got the Max Revit. How we're preparing. Now we're going to start enhancing that model. This is why we're in Max now.

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: So we're going to cover a few different categories, and take a couple deep dives into what this is. Real quick. Another example of not over-inflating the Revit model. This is a great project. Very simple structure. Very heavy theming. Zack could have spent a lifetime and still not gotten to where we got to on this.

ROB TERRY: This is another right tools for the job thing. You know, we need to-- buy offs are-- you know you can see the Revit geometry in the background. But we're just adding on top of-- we're augmenting the Revit model with additional theme and elements and materials and textures. Just because they serve two different purposes. But the actual design of the model stays the same.

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: So we do a good amount of theme work, but this works for a lot of different sectors. One good example is themed archways, right? In Revit, we need a location. We need size. We're really going to have a theme contractor plaster over this thing, and really get the job done. But in order to get the visualization right, we need to have something for Rob to work on.

ROB TERRY: yeah, so this is kind of just like a template for me to build over. Because our client wants to see the actual cracks and the aged and the deterioration of these stones for this particular themed element. So I'll just build up on that.

And one of the best parts about Max and how you model in Max is the use of the modifier stack. So you match people-- you know that. I mean, it's beautiful. So we can start with a very simple generic object, and we can just add modifiers. We can add changes to it that build it up and give it whatever texture--

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: Whatever crazy thing we can come up with.

ROB TERRY: So we're just adding a modifier. So each one has its own function. And you can rearrange them and turn them on and off. And you can just design really parametrically really quickly using a bunch of these tools. And there's thousands of them. And it's great.

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: So one way of doing that is off of basic cube, off of cylinder. I set a location and let them go at it.

ROB TERRY: Yeah, but one of my favorite-- I love starting with a spline. Spline modeling, I love it. You know, curbs for landscape. But it's the same idea. You can add modifiers to it and create really amazing shapes by using a modifier. So using one shape to drive another. Kind of a simple example of a star and a path. You create this, and just combine them together, and you get an interesting shape. And this shape doesn't really mean anything, but it could be anything.

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: And if you think about the amount of time you might invest in Revit in order to come up with the same shape, it doesn't make sense to do it when you can have the same specialty in Max.

ROB TERRY: So here's an example, a real-world example of a chandelier that we had to build. This was a couple of years ago. Interior designer said we need this chandelier. Very detailed.

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: Really made the space. A gorgeous lobby. But I think they spent 20 grand on the chandelier, and it's going to sit right there.

ROB TERRY: Yeah, glass, you know. You can see it. You know, the floral shapes and all that kind of stuff. So she gives me a picture of it from this catalog, and she asked me to model it. So I did. And the next morning she came in, and I showed her this rendering here on the left.

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: Oh, so you got the file from the manufacturer?

ROB TERRY: Yeah, yeah. So she said, no, that's what I actually need you to model. And I said, that is the rendering. That's the model of it. So of course I showed her the wireframe version of it, just to prove that it was the model. And then I opened up my big mouth and said, Yeah, you know what's kind of fun is all these parameters you can add to these splines to build this. They're all animatable. So I could actually animate this thing growing.

So there's another thing. We say, don't be like Zack, don't be like Rob, and ruin your weekend.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

ROB TERRY: I had to prove that I could. So that was my weekend.

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: It's been worse. I think we've shown this one about 1,000 times.

ROB TERRY: Yeah, that's kind of fun. But you know, just again, that's just taking a simple example and just taking it a step further and all the things that you can actually do with just some simple shapes and simple objects.

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: So you know, you know what the worst part of this presentation? We've done it a couple of times on smaller scales. And all of my images, as soon as he overlays his, nobody wants to go back to mine.

ROB TERRY: And this is one of his or--

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: Yeah, no, take a guess? Who did which one? So the hotel room project. You know, 400 times this room. We need the sample room. We felt great about it. It's a new space plan.

ROB TERRY: It looks great in plan too.

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: Til the client says to you, that pillow doesn't look very comfortable. And it's like what--

ROB TERRY: Yeah.

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: You know, great.

ROB TERRY: And it really doesn't.

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: And it really ruins your entire day after that. But so, same overlay. Same rooms. Basic geometry.

ROB TERRY: Yeah, again using the Revit backbone and just overlaying more comfortable materials and more comfortable geometry. Just adding whatever we need to do to tell that story, we can do that a little bit more easily in Max than obviously in Revit.

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: And we want to walk through these-- a couple of examples. We're going to look at the pillows, we're going to look at the drapes. Drapes? Clothes?

ROB TERRY: It works for drapes.

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: Same thing.

ROB TERRY: Yeah, it's awesome. It's called the cloth modifier. You know, just imagine just being able to make something look like a cloth. So this is awesome. It's one of my favorite modifiers. It's also a good introduction to the simulation tools found within Max. So in this particular instance, we're just selecting a table-- or I create a plane. And make sure it has a ton of segments. The more segments you have, the better off it's going to look when it actually drops.

So we're going to select that plane. Select our tabletop, which is going to be the collision object. Apply a cloth modifier to it, and let gravity take over.

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: Has anybody ever attempted this try to do this in Revit?

ROB TERRY: I just hit--

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: A little bit of Zack in all of us, right?

ROB TERRY: But anybody here have to design a restaurant? Yeah, I mean tablecloths. I mean this isn't just tablecloths. I mean this is for bedspreads. It's for putting a blanket over a couch or who knows? Like drapes.

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: Very simple example. Rotate it. Looks like a completely different one, completely changes rendering in a matter of minutes.

ROB TERRY: Yeah, so another cool use of the cloth modifer is you know the pillow. You know that issue before when the client didn't think it looked very comfortable. So same idea. Instead of a plane, we're actually using a box, so this box does have some depth to it. Again it needs to have lots of segments. The only difference is in the settings, you go back one real quick?

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: Sure.

ROB TERRY: The only difference between this one is there's a-- you forgot how to go back.

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: We were doing so well. What do you want me to do?

ROB TERRY: So there's this little pressure area, parameter right here. And what that does is, as gravity is handling, pulling down this object, and those are our collision objects, it actually kind of starts to push the geometry outwards, as if it had an expanding gas in it. So go ahead, so I did a little--

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: The more he talks, he turns into a physicist, by the way. Don't worry. It was funny. One day we were getting close, we're getting finished on a deadline, and it's all completely out of our court. And we look over the wall-- we sit right across from each other-- Rob, are you almost done with this one?

I mean, it's a little bit of off, so I head over to the other side and he's fluffing towels. I'm like, what are you doing fluffing towels?

ROB TERRY: No, I was draping towels over towel bar for a bathroom. It matters. So again. Just a simple-- all I'm doing, I'm hitting this. Select those two. Tell which one I want to be the collision object. How much gravity I want. See that pillow just kind of expands automatically like that. And depending upon the angle that you have it, it's going to bounce off of our collision objects or couch or whatever it may be. And it's going to fall however gravity dictates it.

Of course, it's fake gravity. But you can go in and manipulate it however you want after that. you

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: And we have these videos up on YouTube.

ROB TERRY: Yep, yep.

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: If you want to look at them closer, you can take a look at the tool bars.

ROB TERRY: Yep.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

ROB TERRY: I wouldn't ever want to manually render that or model that in Max either, so-- fluff wealth modifier.

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: We've talked about a little bit of how we enhance some stuff. We're now looking at just object placement. Object paint really gets a broad brush stroke. When you think about [INAUDIBLE] or bushes or trees. I need thousands, and I need them large quantities and variation. Awesome tool for that.

ROB TERRY: Yeah, that's found on the ribbon.

Staging items. It's either a-- it's that telescope in the window. It's the open book on the coffee table.

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: We've got this one designer who can't sell space without green apples.

ROB TERRY: Got to have a basket of green apples. And they have to be green apples, for some reason. And you know, maybe it's her little Easter egg of everywhere. But so we talk about the mass placement of trees and what not. But how do we get those apples in the bowl? You know, we could manually place them and rotate them within there.

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: Spend a couple of hours looking for them.

ROB TERRY: And you can usually tell when it's fake. So again, here's just another, using physics, let gravity do the work for you. Just drop them in there. And that's real time. You don't have to have a, of course a nice graphics card helps. But you don't need crazy equipment to do this. And it's really pretty easy just to select those apples. Select the collision object. And just let it happen. And it just looks a little bit more natural. Of course, you can manipulate them afterwards if you want to.

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: On this, you know looking at-- a bowl is a great example. How are you going place this bowl in here?

ROB TERRY: Where does the bowl come from?

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: Where does the bowl come from? Zack spent about an hour trying to find it on Autodesk seek, right? Which is a great tool by the way. Everybody has their 3-D library somewhere online, but at the time, Rob can do this in about two minutes? Three minutes?

ROB TERRY: Yeah, Zack, stop. You know and you get to pick and choose. Some models are going to be really highly detailed, and you have to make that decision. Am I going to have to spend a lot of money on this model that turbo squid has? Or for instance, to use in your project. Or is it something simple that we can model?

So I tell Zack I can model that bowl four different ways in five minutes. You know, just pick and choose what matters on where you're going to get your models from. But there's obviously a lot of resources.

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: At the other extreme of this, we had a statue in the middle of a cultural project, and it had just kind of been a placeholder over time, placeholder over time. But it made its way to the final animation.

One thing Rob and I don't know is that statues and different poses have different meanings. Well, now we know that. And we needed a very specific soldier in a very specific pose. We did spend time looking. [? Autoseek ?] didn't have it. 1-2-3D Catch didn't have a complete model that we could go around.

Then we realized we could go one mile down the street. Buy a toy, and take pictures around it, and we had the exact same thing. The toy was about $10. About 20 minutes of taking because we messed up the first time. And there you go, and you have a model that you need for work.

ROB TERRY: So statue, as you know, we talked about. The statue was originally there for scale. Speaking of scale, Entourage-- people, clients always want to see people in their scenes. And it makes sense because it does help for scale. It helps for the space. It helps tell the story. You know, the type of people that are there. Why they might be there.

So the populate tool is a really quick and easy way to add people to your scene. Here's just a quick little video of just how simple it is. A couple of clicks. So this is walking people. Parameters. You can tell it how many people you want. The density. Gender. The direction they're moving.

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: And it's great to start with a baseline, right? If you're looking ahead of time and thinking of the composition in your rendering, it's great to start with people instead of no people.

ROB TERRY: And idle people. And then again, all you have to do is hit that simulate button, and it'll kind of take care of it. And again, this might be sped up about maybe 50%. But it took probably 15 seconds just to get people walking around in your scene. And it certainly helps. But the reality is, I mean that works, these are kind of genetic material.

You can go in and change their preset animation and their clothes to some degree. But we work in a lot of projects where--

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

ROB TERRY: Very specific people, you know. Or what they're wearing that indicate, you know. A hospital. We need nurses. We need doctors. We work on a military barracks, and they're very specific about the color of the camouflage that these soldiers that are going to be there could wear. So Autodesk has what's called the Autodesk character generator. It's free to use. You just need an Autodesk ID to sign in there. And you can customize your own people, from body type and shape to hair color, eye color, facial expressions. What they're wearing. All sorts of stuff.

Then you can download them to your scene, and that's really pretty helpful. So you can see we've made a couple of here. You might recognize--

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: You can always improve haircuts whenever you need to.

ROB TERRY: Yep.

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: There's never enough bald guys in the videos.

ROB TERRY: So one of the beauties.

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: Veronica has her green apples.

ROB TERRY: So we're testing the download.

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: Don't walk that way.

ROB TERRY: Well this was about a week after he got his license for architecture. So he cracked a beer. And I think Joe--

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: This might have been taken last night. I don't even know.

ROB TERRY: But so those characters come downloaded with the script. We can easily just string a bunch of two- or three-second animations in there. He's pretty happy. He doesn't know it yet, but there is humility somehow in there. So pretty-- again, it's having fun in what we do. We know we're going to need to have these people in our projects. So we have find a way to test it out. And this was just kind of a fun way to--

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: That first dance was custom. He was able to put a script together. Those last three he was able to pull offline and join them together.

ROB TERRY: There's tons of them out there. [? Autodesk ?] knowledge center. You just do a search for the animations for [? biped, ?] and you get a ton of this kind of stuff. That's a good kind of transition into animation. So animation this is such a huge part of Max, and we can't even begin to touch on all of it. So we're going to kind of just like a small example of what you can do with Max.

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: And a lot of these, by the way, we're pulling right from manufacturer sites. We give Rob a solid starting point. This was the actual fan we used in the project. But it needed a little bit more.

ROB TERRY: Yeah, so basic steps for here. We know that we have to keep it simple with animation. Animation can be anything, from a camera path to-- you know, again, even if it's a still image the illusion or the appearance of motion with motion blur. That can really help in an image too. So I can't stress enough how much we use it.

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: So we're going to take a deep dive on this one. This is all one part, just one motion on one fan, right? All of the blades and the head are moving together.

ROB TERRY: So just keep your-- you know, we want to keep it simple. So the area where we can add keyframes to it, just step-- where the ceiling fan is, that's step one. And then a little bit further down the road, where it is, this is where we had keyframes here, on this timeline here. It's about 30 seconds later or 30 frames later, about a second later, we're just with the autokey on here, we're just rotating the ceiling fan to where we want it to be one second later. And it will automatically create that animation.

So we want to get a little bit further into those key frames, have a little more control. We open up the track view, which you can still see those keyframes. And you can see that angle there. That's indicating a ceiling fan that rotates around once and then stops. And that might be cool if your animation is one second long, but usually it isn't.

So you can keyframes. Range You can do a whole bunch of different things to get it to continue to rotate. One of the cool things is an out-of-range type controller. So it's just selecting that, adding out-of-range, and there's a bunch of different ones you can use. In this case the one that works best is relative repeat, so you just have that ceiling fan spinning around at that particular speed for as long as your animation is. It doesn't matter.

But even more, even better than that, is what's called expression controllers. So instead of using keyframes at all, we're actually just using a mathematical equation that's driving our force here.

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: So keyframe works great when you're doing one fan, one motion. Maybe two. But if we think about six moving parts or a dozen or two dozen in animation, keyframes gets pretty rough to keep track of, especially when you want to stay flexible and make changes.

ROB TERRY: Yeah, and simplifying it certainly helps. And I know this doesn't sound like simplifying when the expression is s times speed times 360--

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: There goes the physicist.

ROB TERRY: divided by pi times 180. Wherever that is. But you know, it definitely helps a lot of things. And speaking of control, you know when I'm sitting on the couch, I love to have that remote control for my ceiling fan or TV. And if I have to get up somewhere else to pick it up, it kind of annoys me. So again taking this one step further, we kind of made up a little virtual remote control for our ceiling fan using that same expression controller. But instead of giving it a constant speed, we assign it to another controller, which we can vary the speed of it just by a couple of clicks.

So here is that kind of that in motion. And again, all these videos that are kind of, I'm describing, how to set this up are online.

VIDEO NARRATION: We have remote fan speed set to zero. We hit play. Now, by click of a button, fan speed. Backwards. Forwards. Very fast.

ROB TERRY: And you see, there's no keyframes.

VIDEO NARRATION: Very cool.

ROB TERRY: It is very cool too.

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: Yeah, he gets excited when he's by himself too.

ROB TERRY: Expression controllers.

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: So that's one look. Should we talk about this squid?

ROB TERRY: Yep, yep, yep.

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: So clients always have the final say, no matter what we think is good. And with class we've been working a long time with, we know what their tendencies tend to be. With animations we need to be sure that we can get the right image for the product

ROB TERRY: Yeah, so we're just basically taking a simple concept like animating a ceiling fan and then adding it to a little bit more complex structure here.

VIDEO NARRATION: So as I click on play, nothing happens because everything is kind of set to a default of zero. But as I click on things, you'll see things start to change. Obviously our swing is probably going to rise up--

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

VIDEO NARRATION: Might tilt a little bit there. You never know. And of course, the faster we go, that centrifugal force is going to become greater and greater and greater. So this is a kind of a fake centrifugal force using an IK solution, but certainly a lot more realistic than that one--

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

VIDEO NARRATION: As you can see, I'm changing things on the fly. The speed, the height, we can even go backwards if we want to. So anything that I think my client, and they will change almost everything, so if you can anticipate those changes beforehand and save yourself--

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: Look at that.

ROB TERRY: We don't to worry about our team going back and kayframing all these things. We're just using those expression controllers to drive all of that dynamics. And you know, we'll call the ride manufacturer, and they'll tell us that ride needs to go this-- or this ride goes this fast. And it has these particular dynamics. So we'll animate those.

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: But if it doesn't tell the story, Brian wants to speed it up.

ROB TERRY: We'll say, hey that looks like it's going too fast. Or Grandma looks like she will die on that ride, so we've got to slow it down. It doesn't matter. Doesn't matter if the ride is spinning as much as it can, but we always have to make it right for the client. I can change. He says make it go slower or faster, I can, again, just a click of a button. You know, just a little bit of pre-planning to account for those?

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: You think a squid-- if you think a squid is going to throw Brian off his game, imagine what would happen when he looks at the materials, right?

ROB TERRY: But actually, that was a jellyfish. But--

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: That's a squid.

ROB TERRY: No, it was jellyfish. But you're not a marine biologist, so we'll let it slide. So another great reason why we use Max is materials, bad materials.

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: So if you've gone from Revit right to a rendering engine, you'll notice that the materials don't translate just the way you had thought of initially. This is one of the better examples of why we use Max as a conduit to go through.

ROB TERRY: Nothing ruins a good, well-modeled object than a bad material. And this comes in a lot where you have bricks in it. And it might not be that extreme. It just might be shifted up a little bit, and those joints just don't match up very well.

So of course, in Max, a simple object like this, we can just add a UVW matte modifier to it. You know box mapping, planner mapping, usually handles a situation for a simple object like this. But in reality, they're usually not just a box. So we use another tool--

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: And it's not just another reactive tool. It's actually a proactive, right? So a lot of times in the past we used to use Photoshop to apply graphics or a rendering to it.

ROB TERRY: Do it in post.

ALONSO RODRIGUEZ: A little post-action. Zack loves to do things in Photoshop at the end. But when our clients come in and say I need you to adjust the shot by 4 degrees, we just ruined an entire rendering that we've done before. By using the UVW modifier earlier in the process, we're actually painting these graphics on the walls and they're living in the animation.

ROB TERRY: We're basically unwrapping 3D objects into a 2D space to give us an easier way to map. And you can see here, you know, the dirt on the ground. And oh, this is one of my biggest pet peeves, and I guarantee you it's our main landscape designers as well. But you know, you spend all this time on materials and design this whole hardscape section. And look how that curve comes in. It just looks terrible.