Using 3ds Max 2018 and the Arnold Renderer with Revit Models

MATT DILLON: So I'm going to ask you all to do a favor. I'm using this microphone, and I probably don't need it in here. But I have to have it because they're recording the session. If you notice I'm starting to talk too loud, would somebody just tell me-- talking too loud? My wife tells me I have a teacher's voice, so I'll try to keep it down. But sometimes, I forget.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

MATT DILLON: Well, I work for a reseller, and I do consulting and teaching through them. So I teach either on-site at customers' offices, or I teach from my home office up in the loft. So we do a lot of remote training, so we GoToTraining and GoToMeeting if people don't want to have us come to them. So sometimes, it's less expensive that way, easier to schedule. There's downsides to it as well.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

MATT DILLON: Some people like the on-site. I prefer teaching face-to-face because you get the non-verbals, the facial expressions. You get a little bit more synergy going. But it is convenient to do it do it online.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

MATT DILLON: Yeah, ever since I started working out of my house, the commute and the dress code got a lot easier to deal with.

AUDIENCE: Where are you based out of?

MATT DILLON: Well, our home office is in Atlanta, but I'm in San Antonio. So you were in the session yesterday?

AUDIENCE: Yes.

MATT DILLON: How do you think that went? I was a little thrown off at the beginning because when I said, is there anybody here that never used Revit before? I was expecting hands to go up-- no hands. I said OK, how many people have used Revit more than five years? And all the hands went up. That's not who I did this class for. What am I going to show them?

AUDIENCE: Well I've been using it for [INAUDIBLE]. kaqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqqq it was nice to [INAUDIBLE] and have some of the basics refreshed.

MATT DILLON: Right, or when they get some validation? Yeah, that always helps.

AUDIENCE: And as a high school teacher, [INAUDIBLE]. I actually recorded a couple of the things that we've been doing, because that's what my students are doing at home.

MATT DILLON: OK, so you teach Revit in high school?

AUDIENCE: Yes.

MATT DILLON: Oh, cool.

Not too many high schools are teaching Revit.

AUDIENCE: In Oakland County, Michigan, we have 20 high schools that are majority [INAUDIBLE].

MATT DILLON: Wow, really?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

MATT DILLON: Cool.

AUDIENCE: In Florida, [? they teach them ?] on this.

MATT DILLON: Really?

AUDIENCE: My daughter [INAUDIBLE]

MATT DILLON: You know, I went to my son's high school-- of course it's been a few years. Maybe things have changed. He's 26 now. But 10 years ago, I went in there. They didn't have Revit. They had AutoCAD in the drafting lab. But the instructor really didn't--

AUDIENCE: I think it depends who's teaching it, right? What's [INAUDIBLE] In my home and business, [INAUDIBLE] my advisory team-- not many of them are [INAUDIBLE] But the university is, so they help keep you in it. [INAUDIBLE]

MATT DILLON: You know, a few years ago, we brought in several of the chairmen of, like, the architectural departments in some of the universities and colleges, just around where we are. And we got them together with some of the more forward-thinking principles of architectural firms so they could kind of just discuss OK, what do you need from someone graduating from college? And all of the principals said, you need to be teaching them Revit. We need people that know how to use the tool. If they can't use the tool, we can't use them. And most of the junior colleges and everything, they were listening. They were very attentive. The four-year and the five-year schools-- well, we just teach them theory. So that's kind of disappointing. Hopefully that's changed, too.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

MATT DILLON: That's good.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

MATT DILLON: Yeah, because when I went through architectural school, we didn't-- it was all on the board. But they taught drafting, right? So you would think-- how are we doing? Almost time.

AUDIENCE: Most of the students, [INAUDIBLE].

MATT DILLON: Good. I have 1:29. So we're going to start here in just a second.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

MATT DILLON: Hi.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

MATT DILLON: Sorry?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

MATT DILLON: No, go ahead. Just don't unplug me.

Is that everybody? I think we're close. And it just turned 1:30, so it doesn't matter. We're going to start. OK.

So good afternoon, everybody. For those of you that don't know me, my name's Matt Dillon, and I'm with Applied Software. We are a reseller, all over the country. Our home office is in Atlanta. However, I work out of my house in God's little piece of heaven on earth, San Antonio, Texas-- except in August. It's not heaven on earth in August. Don't come in August.

I've been doing this for a while. My background is architecture. And I started with a very, very early version of AutoCAD. Does anybody remember a program called AutoShade? One person. You just dated yourself. So I used to do a lot of renderings with AutoShade, and there was a program called AutoFlix that did animations-- 16-color, very low resolution. So I kind of started with that, and have migrated along with all the various applications-- 3D Studio, Vis, Max, up to present day.

How many of you currently use 3ds Max? I would expect most of you. OK. How many of you currently use the Arnold renderer? A few. OK. How many of you have tried it, and just-- like, forget it?

AUDIENCE: Going back to 2017.

MATT DILLON: Yeah, OK. So that's the purpose of this class. Now I am not an Arnold expert. I won't even pretend to be. Because like you guys, I was on 2017 up until 2018 came out. And there went the Mental Ray render-- we'll talk about that. And there's Arnold. And what do you do with this thing? So I had to learn it.

But my focus is on building visualization. And that's what I'm going to focus on here. So there's a ton of things you can do with Arnold that aren't really building-visualization-oriented that I'm not going to get into in this class because frankly I'm not the right person to teach that. How many of you were in the class that I taught last year, on Mental Ray? Anybody? Good, because none of that applies now anyway, right?

So here's what we're going to cover today. We're going to talk about the Advance Ray Trace-- or ART renderer-- versus Arnold. That's still an option. It doesn't mean you shouldn't use it. So we're going to talk about-- compare and contrast those. And then, assuming you're going to try to at least try to use Arnold, we're going to talk about what you need to do to get your Revit model renderable with Arnold. There's some things that need to happen to that model. And if you've tried rendering with the Arnold renderer, just by switching to that render, you found that out pretty quick.

We're going to talk about physical materials. So that's actually a material that was introduced-- I guess in 2017, when they added the ART renderer to 3ds Max.

We're going to talk about the Arnold Lights, and the specific ones we're going to use for doing and an interior rendering using exterior lighting, because that's kind of the most complicated type of lighting scenario you're going to have. So we're going to focus on that for the most part. I will do some stuff on the back end with just interior lighting. But we're going to focus primarily on those types of scenes-- exterior light with an interior scene, and how you deal with that.

We're also going to talk about HDR images, so using those as an environment for your scene. And that will lead us into the new capability in Arnold of doing a virtual reality stereo panorama using the Arnold virtual reality camera. So you don't have to go to the cloud to do it anymore. You can do it right inside of 3ds Max. And so that's kind of where I'll end up.

So let's talk about ART versus Arnold-- little history lesson. So like I said, I go back a ways. But I'm not going to go back all the way to the beginning.

But if we just look at Revit versus 3ds Max and the rendering engines that we've had through the years-- when Autodesk first purchased the Revit technology, we had Accurender in Revit. Anybody remember that one? That's what came with Revit originally. And at that time, if I remember right, 3ds Max was pretty much-- we were pretty much just using the Scanline render for the most part. Now there are other renderers than what I'm going to show here. There's some third-party renders, like V-Ray, et cetera, which are very good. And then of course the Mental Ray Iray renderer is also very good. So I'm not really talking about those. But these are some of the major ones that people were using.

Now at some point-- and I'm trying to remember exactly when it happened-- Autodesk introduced the Mental Ray renderer. And they had that both in Max and in Revit. As a matter of fact, they had it in AutoCAD as well. Is it still in AutoCAD? Does anybody know? They took it out?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

MATT DILLON: Don't know. It doesn't matter. I don't use the AutoCAD.

So at that point, Revit used Mental Ray, and Mental Ray was a much better renderer for doing building visualization, especially, than the old Scanline renderer. The Scanline renderer didn't do any kind of radiocity or any of that stuff. It was fast, but that's because there was a lot of things it wasn't doing. So Mental Ray was kind of the standard for several years because it allowed us to do radiocity in the form of final gather, that type of thing. So a lot of indirect illumination capabilities. But it also made it kind of complex. But once you've figured out where to go, it worked pretty well. That's what I kind of focused my class on last year, was where do you go in Mental Ray to do the same kind of rendering that we're going to do today.

Well, with Revit 2016, they introduced the ART render. But you also still had the Mental Ray renderer available. And then in 2017, they took the Mental Ray renderer out of Revit, and it was just the ART renderer. And they introduced the ART renderer to Max, but we still had the Mental Ray renderer. So you could kind of go any way you wanted.

Well, with 2018, got the Arnold renderer now, in Max, mental ray is gone. Accurender went away a long time ago. So now your choices are basically, if you're bringing a Revit model into 3ds Max, you can use either the ART renderer or the Arnold renderer. You can also still use the Mental Ray renderer. Did you all know that is still available? You can go and download it. You just go to the Nvidia website, and you can download the Nvidia Mental Ray renderer for free.

The bad news is, if you want to download it so you can do render farms, back burner, you're gonna have to pay for that. That part of it is not free. But if you want to stick with Mental Ray, it is still available. You just have to go download it. I downloaded it, tried it out. It works the same way it did last year.

So which one do you use? Well, this is not a really good example. But if you look at these two scenes here, this is actually the ART renderer. It's a Revit model brought into ART, and it's, again, a scene very similar to what we're going to do today, where I've got exterior light, but it's an interior scene. And the problem with the ART renderer is it doesn't have a whole lot of controls for controlling how indirect lighting is handles. I mean, it does some, but you can't really tweak it very much. It's got a lot of controls for reducing noise in the rendering, but not much for indirect lighting control it's a very simple renderer. That's a nice thing. It makes rendering really simple. But it also means you don't have a whole lot of control here, other than maybe adjusting exposure.

So here the exposure is adjusted so that the outside is not washed out. Well then the inside is dark. Here, the exposure has been adjusted to make the light on the inside a little bit nicer. But then the outside starts to get washed out. It's a classic dilemma. We've all seen it, right? And that's what a lot of my class was about last year, was how do you not have that happen with Mental Ray. With ART, it's not really an option that I know of.

With Arnold, we can. Now the materials here are a little goofed up. We'll talk about materials a little bit later. So you can kind of ignore those. But in this scene, I'm using the Arnold renderer. And you'll notice I'm getting a decent amount of light in here. I probably could have set it up to get more. But I still haven't got myself washed out here.

You like my background there? Isn't that pretty? Yuck.

But really, just focus on the light. That's really the only thing I'm trying to show here. And this is where Arnold is going to give you better capabilities than the advanced ray trace renderer.

So I don't know what's going on with these slides. It was doing this earlier-- somehow this blue banner. Anyway, we're going to talk about, if you're going to use Arnold, what do you have to do to your render model? Why do you have to convert it? Who here has brought a Revit model into Max, gone to the Arnold renderer, and tried to render it? Anybody? What happened?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

MATT DILLON: How did it look?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

MATT DILLON: Not too good? Yeah. Pretty bad, right? We'll see it here in a minute. I'm going to do it.

The problem is-- and this is the biggest part of it right here-- is materials. Revit materials are still Mental Ray materials. Even though the Mental Ray engine is gone, they're still the same Mental Ray materials we had two or three, four years ago. Those work OK with the ART renderer. They're not the best, but they work OK with the ART renderer. But they're not going to work with Arnold. Arnold prefers either physical or standard surface materials. So the nice thing is the ART renderer accept both physical-- or the ART and Arnold renderer will both accept the physical materials.

So if you stick with physical materials, you're in pretty good shape. But if you just let the materials come across from Revit the way they are, you got Mental Ray materials, which are not going to look good at all.

So you need to convert those. If you're bringing your cameras in with the Revit model, I think they come in as free cameras. I'm not sure-- maybe target. It doesn't matter-- either target or free. It's one or the other. Arnold really works better with a physical camera. It's not that you can't use a free camera or a target camera. It really works better with a physical camera. And the nice thing about a physical camera is it truly simulates a real camera, including allowing you to adjust the exposure with the camera, not as a global setting for the entire scene.

So I've always kind of like that anyway. So if you're bringing your cameras in from Revit, you're probably going to want to convert those as well.

Lights as well-- Revit lights are photometric for the most part, and Arnold does support those photometric lights. You don't absolutely have to convert them, but my experience has shown me that the Arnold lights actually give you better results. So if you go ahead and convert those to Arnold lights, even though the Revit photometric lights technically are supported, yes, they will work, I think the quality of the lighting's a little bit better with the Arnold lights. And Arnold does have a photometric light, which will read an IES file, the whole thing.

Again, exposure control-- Revit models come across with Mental Ray exposure control typically. That's not going to work with Arnold. You need to change your exposure control in your scene to physical camera exposure control to go with your physical cameras.

And then the sun settings-- you bring in a Revit model. If you're bringing in the sun settings with the Revit model, it converts it to a daylight system, which is Mental Ray-- not going to work with Arnold. And it needs to be converted to a sun positioner, which will work with either ART or Arnold. OK, now I'm going to talk a little bit more about this sun positioner because I typically don't use the sun positioner with Arnold either. I'll show it to you, but then I'll explain why I don't use it, and then show you how I do it.

The good news is, yes, all that stuff does have to be converted. But there's a tool now in Revit called the scene converter, which is a really handy tool with presets to allow you to, whether it came from Revit or not, convert a 3ds Max scene from the settings that are optimum for one renderer versus another, relatively quickly. You need to set it up. Once it's set up, it works pretty well.

So I'm going to go ahead and show you that, but let me kind of do a couple of preliminary things first.

So this is a simple little Revit model that I brought in using the file link manager. Let me show you a couple of things to kind of give you the lay of the land. So if I go to file link manager, there's just one file in here. And I use the standard Combined by Revit Material preset. That's the one I use most of the time. I don't think anybody here took my class last year. But one of the things I did in that class was I showed you a lot of little different tricks for doing different things for different outcomes when you link a file. And if you're interested, you can go download my handout from last year. It's available on AU Online. This one's just real simple. I brought in this one view, one model with this Combined by Revit Material.

Now I have modified that preset a little bit. I don't import any helpers. I don't import any lights-- usually. Sometimes I'll turn that on, and go ahead and import the lights. But I tend to do that separately from the regular model. I also don't import the daylight systems, and I don't import the camera. So really all I'm bringing in is the Revit geometry, and it's organized by material for the most part. Again, sometimes there's exceptions. But in this model, it's pretty simple.

So I did add a few things, some props that I modeled in Max, and just kind of merged in from another scene. So this ceiling fan there, that's actually 3ds Max geometry. This little rug here, that's just a Max plane, and I mapped an image of a Turkish rug that I stole off the internet to it. Likewise, this painting on the wall back there, I stole that. I steal a lot of things off the internet. So I stole that one, too. Just some props so the scene wouldn't look quite so stark with just walls, and the furniture, et cetera in there.

Again, no lights yet. So I've also got a camera that I placed. This is a physical camera that I placed in Max. Max 2018 does some weird things. You pick the camera-- in earlier versions, if you picked the camera, you were just getting the camera. In Max, you see what it is? That's why I use the heck out of the scene explorer, because I can just pick the camera itself and actually look at its properties over here.

So the thing on this camera-- again, it is a physical camera. And you'll notice down here, I've got the exposure set. Now if you're a photographer, you'll love this, because you can actually go in there and set things according to film speed, shutter speed, f-stop, all that. I'm clueless when it comes to that. So I use the old style. I just use the target exposure value. I'm lazy. I don't like to have to think. So I use the presets for the color values. So right now it's just set to daylight. But again, you're free to get in there and tweak to your heart's content using the controls.

OK, so that's what's going on in the scene now. I'm going to go ahead and render it. But first I need to put in a light source. We're going to just put in a sun positioner. So I'm just going to put a-- let's see, how do you do that again? You got to put the little compass thing in there, and then you drag that guy out. Now normally when I use the sun positioner, I use that Control Using the Actual Date, Time, and Location. But for this example, I'm going to go to Manual. I'm going to put it where I'm going to wind up putting another type of light later. So I'm just going to swing this thing around that, and do something probably that would never happen in the real world-- bring this way down here. And that's what I like about Max. It doesn't have to be real to be believable.

OK, so let's go ahead and render that. Let me check my exposure first. And right now, my renderer is still set to ART. That's the default. So I'm still using the ART renderer right now. So I'll go ahead and render this-- or we can do the preview. Might need to adjust the exposure on the camera just a bit. So I don't know how well you can see that. It's kind of small. But back in here, it's kind of dark. I am getting indirect illumination. ART does that. But again, I don't have the controls. I would like to have over that. So about the only thing I can do to increase this light in the back of this room here is to come in here and drop the exposure value of the camera. But that's again, affecting the entire image, not just that part of it. So if I could do a quick render here-- I'd probably even let it go the whole way. So I am getting more light back here, but now this area here is starting to get washed out, and my background is going to start to get washed out. And that's the problem. I can't find an exposure setting that's going to work for both. So that's the issue with ART.

The other thing, too, is if you really want to be critical about the materials, they're a little off. Because these materials just came right over from Revit. They're Mental Ray materials. Yeah, they'll render, but they're not quite the way they should look.

So let's try Arnold. Arnold's supposed to be such a cool renderer. You keep reading about it, right? So I'm just going to go up here, and I'm going to change my renderer to Arnold. This should make it all better, right? I don't see anything yet. Anybody ever have this happen with Mental Ray, too? It's really to fix in Mental Ray. That was just you had the wrong exposure setting. That's not going to work Arnold. It's black, right? And yes, I'm in this viewport. I made sure that that viewport was active. So something happened.

Why can't I see anything? Well maybe there's something wrong with this light. Well I'm just going to tell you, there's nothing wrong with that light.

I'm going to put a couple of fill lights in here. Let's just do a test. What happens if I use a different kind of light? Again, I'm going to use a standard photometric free light. I'll stick one right there, and I'll name that Fill 01. And what I want to do, I think I'll raise that up a little bit. And actually, for now, I'm just going to get rid of that guy, and change my exposure control just a little bit, get rid of the background for now. We'll come back to that later.

But just to get those out of the way for the moment. So let me move him up, make a little change to the color of the light, make it more of a incandescent type light. And I'll Clone that. And let's see what happens now. Wait a minute. One more thing. I almost forgot. I just went from exterior lighting to interior lighting. I need to change my exposure. So let me just drop that down to something a little bit more appropriate. Let's see what that--

So there's nothing wrong with my lighting-- well I don't think there is-- but if you look at the window, it doesn't look transparent, does it? All I had was the sun. So something's going on with the materials. And if you look at the materials, they don't look anything like they looked before. So that's the big thing here, is the materials. It's all those Mental Ray materials. Arnold does not like it, not one bit.

So let's convert the scene. So I want to go up here to the Rendering pulldown menu, and click Scene Converter.

And you can spend a lot of time in here setting things up. You've got some options here. Sorry, I just dropped my microphone thingy. You've got some options here. We'll take a look at that in a minute. Over here in the editor is where you can tell the converter how you want things to convert. So you'll notice here I'm telling it, well, I want to convert anything from Mental Ray to a physical material, because I know those will work with Arnold. So if it runs across any of these, convert them to a physical material-- maps, cameras, lights. I'm converting any photometric lights to Arnold lights.

But if you notice, this is actually-- it says it's a converter for ART. I'm not sure what this is doing. This is not one I put together. Because it looks like it's going to work for Arnold. It's even changing the render to Arnold. Something there doesn't look right, though. So I'm going to go ahead and open up another one. This is one I put together-- Revit to Arnold. And I know this one will work. I might have screwed up, and maybe saved the other one to the wrong name at some point.

But basically, this one converts everything to Arnold-compatible stuff. I basically just went through this editor, and just chose each one of these things in turn, and said, yeah, when you run across this, convert it to a physical material. OK, pretty simple. The good news is, you don't have to do this if you don't want. If you've gone to the additional materials on the website-- so did you download my handout, there is also additional materials. It's a single PDF, because for some reason they wouldn't let us upload anything but PDF files. It's like, well, what if I had some other kind of file I wanted to upload as additional materials? It's got to be PDF. So on the PDF, there's two links. One of the links will take you to a file I've got in a Dropbox folder, and it's this preset. So if you want, just go up there, download it, stick it in the Presets folder. And if you don't like what it does, you can tweak it. I mean, there's some options here that you may want to play with, but it'll get you started at least.

I'm going to go ahead and convert the scene. Doesn't take very long-- a few seconds, which always seems like a lot longer when you're watching it. OK, so it's done. Now let's re-render.

Yeah, the lighting's a little off because I forgot to set my exposure control for incandescent as well. So it's a little yellower than it should be. But that's exposure control.

But if you notice, my materials are back. I've got the floor, the window's probably transparent. The wood is a little different. It'll look better when I get my exposure and lighting set up better. But the materials are now working. They're still not perfect.

If you notice the couch there, see how shiny that couch is? Sometimes, even after conversion, the resulting physical material is way too reflective, and I don't know why. It's actually gotten better. Because I'll show you an image here in a minute. But it used to be that the gyp board materials also came in very reflective. And somewhere along the way, I think an update of Max or something maybe fixed some of that. It's still not perfect, though. Back in the '60s, my Aunt Grace had a couch like this. You did not want to sit on it in the summertime.

So there's still some work that needs to be done but that's that gives me probably 80% maybe 90% of the way there. So let's talk about physical materials and Arnold lights, I think, is what I said there-- and HDR images.

So first off, we're going to be doing a lot of kind of iterative rendering here. So when you're doing all these test renders, you don't want to sit there and wait for this to render-- this big old image-- while you're just trying to test a little tweak that you just made. So one of the things you'll want to do is change your render settings to settings that won't take too long to render.

So for example, here in the common area of the Render Setup dialog box, in this example, I'm going to the HDTV aspect ratio. But I've got it set to a pretty small size, 320 by 180. That'll take a lot less time to render. Sometimes I'll also set the area to render to just a region of the screen, or an object, or something like that. The other thing is-- and we'll take a look at these Arnold settings a little bit later-- the Arnold renderer does have settings for indirect lighting as well as some other things that we'll look at. I just leave these at the default. As a matter of fact, this is not the default. The default, that's set to 1. But I normally have these set to the default because the bigger these numbers get, the higher quality of rendering you get, and the longer it takes. So when I'm testing, I leave these low. So that's the first thing.

And then, again, we need to work with exposure. So if you're not real familiar with exposure, you just want to make sure your exposure settings are set for physical camera exposure. And on the camera, typically if you're doing exterior lighting, whether you're on the inside of a building or the outside, if you're using a lot of exterior light, you're going to want to set your exposure setting-- you at least start some around 10 to 13. Normally, like 12.5/12 works pretty well. And then you can adjust it from there after you do a preview of it.

On artificial light, usually I go anywhere from 4 to 6. Sometimes it winds up lower, sometimes it winds up higher. But I'll start off here. And again, I'll do a preview. If I don't like it, I'll just adjust the exposure, and you get immediate feedback in this window when you're doing that. So you can see pretty quickly what's going to happen.

So this is the materials that used to-- this is what used to happen, the same scene prior to one or two of the last updates. Everything was shiny. I mean, the couch was shiny. Look at the chairs-- same thing. And then if you look at the wood, here. Look at this. This is a gyp board ceiling. Gyp board don't do that, right? So it's not as bad now. So they must have fixed something. But there's still going to be some things you don't want to convert. So after conversion, it might look something like this. And in this example, what I'm going to do here, I actually made some additional changes to the materials to change their colors, et cetera. And I made a totally new material for the couch because I just didn't like the one that was there.

So let's see. Ah, yes, more stuff, before I get into it.

How many of you all are familiar with the Slate Material Editor? Does anybody still use the old legacy editor? You know, when this thing first came out, I was like, whoa, that's too much. And I stayed with the legacy editor. And then one day I said, I really need to learn the thing. I go back to the legacy editor now, it's like, how did I ever work with that thing?

So if you're not familiar with it-- I think most of you were, but there were a few that indicated maybe you weren't. Just real quick, I would like to get into it. Your scene materials are here, so you can basically just load in whatever material you need to edit from the scene. And the main thing you're probably going to be interested in is this area right here, your reflectivity and the roughness values of the materials. That's typically what you're going to wind up having to change.

There are some really good tutorials out there on physical materials, because that's what you're going to have after running that conversion. And I've put some links in the handout to those. They're YouTube tutorials. They're relatively short. And I think most of them actually have data sets that you can download so that you can follow along. And they really get into the weeds with physical materials pretty quickly. And they talk about this index of refraction, et cetera. And also the emissive materials and subsurface scattering. You can do all kinds of crazy things with them. But for this purpose, I'm going to focus primarily on these settings here.

If you need to create a new physical material, you'll notice when you've got the Arnold renderer set, you've got a little bit more limitations as far as what kind of materials are available to you. You won't see the Mental Ray arc and design materials, or any of those. Those will be gone. You'll want to stick to either the physical materials or one of these true Arnold materials, which in all honesty I have not messed with too much. This is where you can really get into some crazy stuff like you can do here. This one here, standard hair material, that's what it's for. It's for hair. You can have hair that does things.

But I've taken a look at this one here. And that's kind of on my next list, just to kind of try to master that one. But right now I'm sticking with physical materials because they're easy. You can even use a preset. So you know, I want-- something's glass, and choose the kind of glass you want. It'll kind of give you a head start toward getting there.

How many of y'all have used these maps with the Mental Ray renderer before, like the tile map and everything? Well that went away with Arnold. When you go to the Arnold renderer, you don't have those maps available. And I kind of miss some of them.

And I stumbled across this. On the System tab of the Renderer Settings dialog box, is this little checkbox here. And it says, look, you can get your 3ds Max legacy maps back if you want. Warning-- it might be a little bit unstable when you're exporting an ASS file. I looked up ASS file. I don't think I'm going to be exporting any, so I'm not too worried about it.

So the other thing that's missing in 3D Max 2018 is the asset browser. Remember that one? It's gone. It wasn't the most stable thing in the world anyway, but I kind of missed it. Instead, you have this 3ds Max asset library. And it kind of does the same thing. It's a little bit more configurable. Because you can add your own folders to it here as collections of texture maps, et cetera. So you can set this up and configure it more the way you want it to work.

The bad news is it's kind of slow. So if you're going to use it, launch it when you launch 3ds Max. It is a separate program altogether. And that way, it'll kind of be sitting in the background. Because it takes it a while to generate these images. And while it's doing that, their performance can be kind of ragged. You're definitely going to want two monitors if you're going to use that as well.

So let's kind of go through some things with materials. So I want to take care of this couch. That's really bugging me. So I'm going to bring up the material editor. And for those of you, again, that aren't familiar with the Slate Material Editor, real quick, kind of lay-of-the-land tour-- you can have custom material libraries there. It's real simple to create them. You can just right-click and-- somewhere, anyway. It's right here.

Anyway, you can create your own custom material libraries. And don't do like I do. I create new materials all the time, and then just blow them away. If you go to the trouble to create a new material, put it in your material library. All you have to do is drag the wire connector from the output node to the material library, and it's in there, and you can save it, and you've got it.

Again, since I had the Arnold renderer current, all we're seeing here are those types of materials that are compatible with the Arnold renderer. So physical material, of course these are really just collections of other materials, like a multi/sub-object material. Those are always going to be compatible.

But then we have the true Arnold materials down here. And you'll notice the maps are just those maps that are compatible with Arnold, as well as the Arnold-specific maps. And you don't see the Mental Ray maps. But if you want them, you can just go to your Render Settings, go to System, and then check on legacy map support. But stay away from the ASS. And there's your material for your maps. So you've got the tile map and the other stuff. I might turn that off because I really don't need them. And then of course the materials that are your current scene here-- the Physical Sun and Sky Environment is supported with Arnold. That does work. That's part of the whole sun positioner thing. So that will work for your background if you need it.

So what I'm going to do is I'm going to bring in this material here. And I could go to my scene materials to grab it. But if I want to make sure I'm getting the right material, I'm going to use this eyedropper here, and pick on that couch, and that'll put the material in here. I don't where that material name came from, but I didn't make it.

So here's the problem. It is a physical material, because I ran the converter on it, but it's way too reflective. So I'm just going to dial reflections. I mean, this is a fabric. I really don't want it to be reflective at all. I'm going to be kind of heavy-handed here. I want to dial these all the way down, these all the way up-- roughness. Now I could probably a little bit more surgical here and get a little bit better material. But in the interest of time, I'm just going to do that.

And let's see what that looks like. I'm going to change my render settings just a little bit here, and tell render I'm just interested in rendering this region right here. And let's see if that makes any difference. No more reflections. So again, if you just play with those three settings, you should be able to get something more appropriate for what you're trying to do.

So a few more things I'd like to change-- the gyp board probably is not as reflective as it used to be. It might still be a little bit, though. Besides, I want to change the colors a little bit. Those materials, again, came right over from Revit. And even though they were converted, the converter still keeps these bitmaps. And I honestly don't know why they're using a bitmap to make this white. That's all they're doing. It's a white bitmap. Well, why not just leave the base color map white, and you don't have to drag that bitmap around. And I'll leave the bump map on there. Let's just make sure that that's white. And actually, to make sure that it's going to look the way I want, I'm going to use one of those presets. Because there is a preset here for matte paint. And that'll actually get rid of that bitmap. That's fine. I'm going to you use the preset. It's got a little bit of reflectivity to it. We want a little bit of light to reflect off of it. I don't want it to be purple though. I don't know why they make the default purple.

So there's my ceiling material. Now I'll take care of the walls. Same thing, I'm going to use a preset. Be careful, by the way. I just double-clicked on this thing. And I'm not editing that material. I get burned by this all the time. I'm still editing the other material. Until you see those dashed lines around that node, you're not editing that. Double-click carefully. If you double-click too fast, it ignores you. That's fine. But the way I double-clicked a minute ago, it was a little bit faster, and it ignored me. I get burned by that almost every single time I edit materials.

So I'm going to go ahead and make this a matte material as well, just make it a different color. So let's just kind of make it kind of a bluish, sort of like that.

And this isn't really a problem. The only real reason I'm not seeing the wood here-- it'll render. We just saw that. But if I want to feel better, just for peace of mind, I'm going to grab that eyedropper, grab that wood material, and simply, over here, check on this box here to show it in the viewport. Again, that's not affecting the rendering at all. It just makes me feel better.

I really still don't like this material or these materials. So I'm going to create a brand new physical material. So I'm going to grab the physical material over here from the material map browser. I'm not going to use a template or anything. I'm just going to go out and grab some texture maps. So here's the Asset Library. I've actually got it running. I launched it before class. But the first time you launch it, you probably won't have it right away. I mean, once you have it installed, it's actually a desktop icon. And you can either launch it from Max or from your desktop. But if you've just installed Max and you haven't installed the Asset Library yet first, just go to there, launch 3ds Max Asset Library, and it'll actually take you to a web page where you can download it, and then install it. And then from there, whenever you launch that, it will activate or launch it.