Unleash the Power of Arnold and 3ds Max for Product Design Visualization

BRUNO LANDRY: Yeah. I think we'll go. So can you hear me correctly. So we'll start right away because we have a jam packed agenda. So me and Jose are here to talk about the power of Arnold and 3ds Max for product design visualization. I'm Bruno Landry. I'm a product owner on the 3ds Max product team. Jose is a 3ds Max technical specialist.

So let's go right away. So I don't know who attended our class last year. Any of you attended our class?

JOSE ELIZARDO: On VR?

BRUNO LANDRY: Yeah. So first of all--

JOSE ELIZARDO: You can raise your hand, David.

BRUNO LANDRY: So first of all, thank you because we were voted as top rated AU speakers. So that's because of you. So thank you and please fill out the survey at the end of the class. So last year we talked about 3ds Max workflow for VR, but this year we kind of decided to move away from VR a little bit, and we will talk about 3ds Max and Arnold.

So, first of all, about me. So my background-- I come from an industrial design background. I started using 3ds about 15 years ago. So I did a lot of images and animation like this. So product design, art viz, transportation, interior design. So I started with 3ds Max 4, and now I'm part of the Max development team for three years now.

JOSE ELIZARDO: So everyone, my name is Jose Elizardo. I've been at Autodesk for about 12 years now, going on 12 years. I've spent a third of my life at Autodesk.

BRUNO LANDRY: Ooh.

JOSE ELIZARDO: Yeah. So I used to be a QA on the team that Bruno is currently working on. And though some of the releases I was involved in, about five to six releases I was involved with. And today I'm a technical specialist. I basically demo Max across North America, Canada, and US. I do events like these. AU, Instagraph, and whatnot, and visit customers like you guys.

All right. So we're going to spend the next hour-- hour and-- hour and three, hour and five minutes talking to you about Arnold. So without getting into the technical mumbo jumbo what Arnold is, it's essentially a fully featured production, proven five star AAA production renderer. So it's a classic GPU, soon to be CPU, soon to be GPU, currently on beta Monte Carlo path tracer.

The great thing about Arnold is that it's got minimalistic settings. You give it the scenes, it does all the heavy lifting for you. There's some things you need to be concerned with which we're going to cover in today's class, but for the most part you don't get bogged down with all pre-caching and baking of indirect illumination and things of that nature. And the same is applicable to both still images and animations. There's actually no difference when you're creating still images or animations. You don't have to worry about flickering and that kind of stuff. You do have to worry about noise, which we'll cover a little bit later.

It does a really great job at handling extremely large and complex data sets, whether we're talking about polygons or faces, or texture, texture sizes, amounts of textures. It does a really, really great job. It's actually where the name comes from, Arnold is not an accident. It comes from the strength of Arnold Schwarzenegger, which you're going to see a lot of references to Arnold throughout the presentations. Just a little bit.

Also, it's got a really nice integration into active shade. So interactive, iterative rendering through active shade. It's predominantly used, of course, in film and TV, but we're starting to see a foothold in industries like civil ADC manufacturing, which is what we're going to talk a lot about today. And that's probably due to the fact that it can handle such complex data sets, which are the kinds of stuff you guys deal with.

Some of the strengths without listing everything that it can do, I can spend an hour talking about that, but it does a really nice job at image based lighting scenarios, IBL. Traditionally-lit scenes, which we're going to cover a lot today. Studio lighting, and it does a really nice job also with, of course, photo realistic rendering and NPR style. So not in photo realistic rendering type of effects.

And just a quick slide on some of the movies that have been done with Arnold. Pretty much everything you've seen in cinema over the last 10 or some odd years, in some extent or another Arnold has been used in. And all these films you see here have some Arnold in them, like I said, to one extent or another.

BRUNO LANDRY: All right. So this is awesome. We now have a AAA production, proven render in Max Arnold. So the expectation is I'm going to switch my renderer to Arnold. I'm going to hit our renderer and everything will shine, it's going to be wonderful. But, in reality, it's not always that easy. So we've learned that in the last few weeks. I mean, we've tried to learn Arnold and, I mean, I think six weeks ago I never almost touch it. So I come from V-RAY and Mental Ray, and I've tried Brazil and Storm and all of that.

So at some point, we wanted to show you a few-- at some point we hit a few walls, so we wanted to give you a few tips and tricks. And at some point you think that you got it. OK I'm good, and getting those nice rendering, but it's no-- you're not there yet. There's still a few tips and tricks and walls that's you're going to hit. So we'll help you guys for your on-boarding with Arnold.

So before we start rendering with Arnold, so I'll go over quickly over our agenda for today. So I'll talk a little bit about the import process for getting your CAD data in Max. I'll talk a little bit about the UV. LookDev, mostly for lighting and shading. We'll see how we can use VFX technique in product design viz. Jose will talk about how set up your scene for the final frame rendering. And at the end, I will talk about the Max development process and the Max team. So before we start, so who here used Max? We have a few Max user in the room. Great. We'll use Arnold.

All right. So you'll start using it more next week hopefully. So everything that you'll see is made with Max, the latest release of 2019 update two, and the latest MaxtoA plugin as well. So let's start. So the Import process. It's kind of the essential part. It's not always easy, but sometime-- I mean, before rendering any pixel on screen you need to get your CAD model into 3ds Max.

So there is about 30 different file format supported in the 3ds Max. It's a bit overwhelming, it's confusing for Arnold, as you can see. So we have native support for a CAD format like CATIA, Pro/ENGINEER, Inventor, SOLIDWORKS as well. So I'll just go over a few of them and highlight a few fun fact or highlight a few stuff. So let's start with SOLIDWORKS. So we support both solid parts, solid assembly, and even nested assembly natively. And you don't need a SOLIDWORKS license to import those CAD model in Max, which is a good thing.

So we have native support. So the import setting are quite minimal, you can choose what will be the up axis, choose to mesh your geometry or not, and you have a slider to define the density of the mesh. So this is what you get from an SOLIDWORKS import. The structure of the file is quite good, and as you can see we support nested assemblies. So, for example, this part was another assembly inside the main one. The structure of the file, as I've mentioned, is quite good. We get the name of the object and most of the material are imported correctly. So these are standard material, but you could use that as a base to swap those for another Arnold shader, for example.

So the next file format I want to highlight is the Inventor. Same things as SOLIDWORKS. We support both assembly and individual parts. It's also a native support. This one is a bit more complex. You have more option, you can select the density of the mesh, define all your file will be split into layers, and stuff like that. And you can also decide to import animation, which all are at constraint in the Inventor.

So you can see the architecture of the file is very neat. Everything is split into layers. If I go in and check the meshing of the object, the mesh is quite nice. So there's no seam, no holes, no flip normals. And the materials are also imported correctly, so everything that was kind of defined in the Inventor will be imported. Although these are Autodesk material, we might want to switch those to something else to render properly in Arnold. And the most important thing, so we support constraint. So these are translated as animation in 3ds Max. So that's very helpful.

And finally the STEP file format. No, this is-- Sorry. Yes, so the STEP file format. This is maybe the most common because most of the 3D CAD package can output a STEP file. And I've used this one a lot in the past. So just a bit differently for this one, I won't mesh my geometry. So I will keep them as what we call body object. And it's the same setting as the other importer. And what I'll get-- so this is a shoe.

And you'll see that the surfaces are actually not mesh, these are body objects. So these are still surfaces. And you'll see it's a bit subtle, but there is some seams and wholes between those two surfaces. So I can go in my body objects setting and change the display to fine. And this should fix the problem I had between those two surfaces. And the other great thing is I have access to this sub-surface in the body object. So, let's say, I want to add-- separate those or add another material, for example, on that area. So I have access to those sub-surface.

And, finally, the easy way to set up Arnold in a few seconds. So I will assign a classic physical material to my shoe. And I will just go in my render settings, change my production renderer to Arnold, and in my super important in the settings I want to activate the legacy 3ds Max map. So this will make sure that all the very Max-specific map and shaders will render properly in Arnold.

And, finally, I just need to hit Render, and this is what I'll get. So we'll show how to make this shoe a bit more realistic and beautiful. Although, if you zoom in, still these are still surfaces. It look quite good in the rendering. You see the quality of the mesh is pretty good. So I have a confession to make, and I don't like UVs. I mean, I use them in the past. I did a bunch of unwrap, but I hate that. So doing box projects in my opinion plainer, it's kind of my maximum. So I'll show you all we can avoid that.

So these are rendering and technical animation I did in the past. I was working in the bicycle industry for about five years. And these are all SOLIDWORKS model, and I need to apply carbon fiber material on top of most of them. And using UV was a bit painful, so I'll show you all I can redo this project way more easily with Arnold and Max today.

So this is the bike. It was provided by Argon 18. I still have good friends over there. So, right now, my material is driven by a single texture, and I'm using this as a roughness value and also the reflectivity. But-- so in the past, I would probably use another texture to drive the base color. But if I want to use that same texture, I will get something that doesn't really look good like this. So I want to use, in this case, an OSL map called Multiply.

So I can drive my shader with a single texture, and this Multiply map will kind of multiply the color black by my texture, so I will get a nice look on the bicycle for my material. But if we zoom in, I don't know if you can see that there is no UV, and the pattern is just all messed up. It goes in every ways and I see big scene. So that doesn't make it, so it's not good enough.

So in the past, I would have probably put the box UV map like a very small value. And if you look closely again, I mean it goes in all direction. There is some big seams. It doesn't look good. You see that the pattern is kind of stretch in one ways, so it's kind of ugly and it's not realistic enough. So what you could use now in-- there is a three planar map in Arnold, and basically, this one will kind of project the same texture from three different projects on plane. And when you go in the three planar map, you can define tiling, the offset, the rotation of these plane and also the blending. So you can avoid those ugly scene.

So I will apply the material to see how it looks. So if we zoom in, we see that the pattern is following smoothly all the surfaces. It's not perfect, but it's kind of blending quite nicely. And if I go in this area of the bicycle, you'll see that there is some blend, but it's good enough in most situation. And I don't need to unwrap the full bike just to apply a carbon texture, so it's way better. And by changing the initial texture, I can get my unicorn bike. And I will do another bike this time with a kind of camouflage. Maybe you want to go hunting on a bike, I don't know. Might be helpful. So I can change, again, the scaling and the blending just to avoid seeing those kind of ugly scene between each projects and plane.

So now that we have this carbon material, I want to apply stickers on it. Because the bicycle industry, believe me, they like their stickers. So I will create the material called the layer shader available in Arnold. So I will use my initial carbon material as the base of the materials. And since I want to have a smooth, not too glossy carbon material, and a super glossy stickers on top of it, I will use another material which will be the second layer of my materials. So that's the physical material, and I will apply it as the second layer, and I will add the texture.

So I could use the bitmap node, but there is another one provided with Arnold called the image node. And this one give you a little bit more control, so I really like this one. So I will just go fetch my texture. And this one is P and G with transparency, so it's very helpful, so we can clip the opacity of the sticker. So I don't have to use a mask, for example, black and white JPEG just to match that. So I will turn up the tiling, but I still need to use a UV map to place the sticker correctly. So I will use a planar. Simple enough. Make sure that it's fit the aspect ratio of the bitmap. And I will place that stickers on the down tube.

And you have no idea how many stickers I've placed on digital bike. It's a bit crazy. So it look nice. And I know it's kind of flip right now, so I could go in my UV map and change the axis and just flip it. And I could it can do the same in the map node. So now, I'm not seeing the-- flip it. OK. So I'm not seeing my carbon material, so I need to ask the layer shader to kind of clip so I can see correctly my carbon under the stickers. So, now, I can even disconnect the base color and drive it using my physical material.

So let's say I want a red super glossy sticker on top of this smooth, carbon material. All right. We zoom in. Look good. So using this process, I was able to create a bunch of variation of the same bike super easily. So the kind of classic. It's funny because I have that actual bike at home. Not this one. So that's the you need to go hunting bike, that's the unicorn bike. And I just need to swap textures and change the color of the material. That's super easy. And that's kind of the hipster cool bike. I like this one.

So sometime, in extreme circumstance, you'll need to use UV and I'll show you how. So that's a project I did a while ago as a freelancer. I needed to populate the port of Montreal with a bunch of container. And that was working a bit not efficiently. I had four different texture per container. I had to randomize them manually. It was a bit ridiculous. And at some point, the client asked me all we need to swap those three for another brand because we changed provider. So I needed-- it was kind of a mess. So let's say I need to do that project again, I will do a bit more smartly.

So I cut the part with the UV because I realized that I have two hours of content in a 60 minute class. So I'll just kind of jump to the end, and I'll show you that I've created a bunch of different diffuse map based on a single UV sheet like this, which will be way more easier to manage. And once I'm back in Max-- so this is my shader and I want to-- my goal is to randomized to diffuse map. And for that I will kind of impart all the diffuse map that I've created in Photoshop. And to randomize that, I will use a node called I believe it's one of 10. It's called one of 10 exactly. So this will help me to randomized that set of diffuse map on my containers.

So I will plug them all in the one of 10 OSL map. And now I just need to-- we'll replace the color like this. So I just need to randomized them by their unique ID. So each node in Max is a unique ID, so each materials. So I'm using it's called Node Handle, I think, Node Handle OSL map. And I just will plug this one in my one of 10. So if I'm look at my rendering, right now it's all black because I did not set the number of map that I have plugged. So as soon as I changed that to seven, because I have seven different diffuse map.

So each time I will copy one of these container, automatically, it will get a new texture. So I can easily just populate a full-- I mean port or boat or whatever. And each time I get a new object, automatically it will go fetch from one of these seven maps. So this is super helpful. And I made that in a few minutes. So that's kind of the final shot.

And so let's see how we can do now a bit of LookDev. So we'll do studio lighting with Arnold. It's the basic when you do product rendering, you need to have a nice studio shop. So let's go and see how we can make that in Arnold. So that's kind of a classic. I love that chair. The Eames Lounge Chair. So that's the background I have for my studio. I like that shape. The light will bounce, and I can control my reflection. So I will create the classic. We'll create a physical camera. Just make sure that it look nice in my view part, like this.

So to get a nice framing. And I will trade my first Arnold lights. So under Lights, you have Arnold lights. So I have my first one. I will place it correctly. And this time, I want to render directly in my view ports. I will activate the active shade directly in my view port. So right now, it's all black. So I will check the exposure value for my physical camera.

So it was set at eight, which is the default. I will change that. And if I look at my light, so it's still black. It's because the intensity was way too low. So if I crank up the intensity and the exposure of value, now I start to see something. That's better.

But how do I get those really sharp shadows? And typically in those kind of studio shots you don't want that. So that's because my light is actually a quad light, which is kind of a real light. So I want to add a bigger value so it will create very-- smoother shadows. So I will crank up that value for x and y.

So now you can see that I have a big rectangle. So this will produce way smoother shadows like this. Although it's create a lot of noise, as you can see the shadows are a bit weird. So usually when you test your lighting, you can work with your shaded model. It's kind of better to work with a gray model just to analyze properly where the noise is coming from and how to fix that.

So under the settings of my lights under Rendering, I can crank up a little bit the samples. I've put four, I believe. So you see that it's getting more smooth like this. So I would change the color to kind of a yellow-ish color like this.

All right. It's kind of a classic. So I will copy the slide. And, yes, I will rename it. So rename your light, it's very important. So I'm creating another one. I'll put the color more like blue-ish for this one, and I will create another one on the top. This will be my top light. I'll put this one white and maybe a little bit bigger.

Now it's starting to look good. And we have a tool in Max called a light lister, which is very helpful to when you deal with multiple lights. Although, I just have three, it's still very useful to change these various setting of my light so I can change the intensity, the exposure, and their color as well.

So I see that it's kind of-- there's still noise, and it's coming from my top light. So I can crank up the sample, only for this light, to reduce a bit of the noise.

All right. What's next? So I think I will switch that model back to my shaded one. I think. Oh, yeah. All right. So I can see how my shaded model now behave in that setup. It look good. It's a bit dark, I think, for the legs of the chair. So I will copy my front light, rig another one. This one will be the top light. I will create the front light.

But now it create some very of blasted reflection, and I don't really want that. So I can tone down the light intensity and exposure. Although you can go in the contribution of your lights and just turn down these specular value, or contribution, for this light. So it will kind of effect the diffuse overall lighting, but it won't affect the reflection. So I don't want to see blasted [? eye ?] lights on those legs. So it look quite good. I think so at least.

So using my light lister, I will turn off all of them and I will show you how we can light that scene differently. So now we're back to all black. So going in my environment settings, as you can see as soon as I change my background colors, it affect my lighting because in Arnold you always have a Skydome lighting your scene. So as soon as I change my color, it will affect my lighting like that. And same thing if I, for example, I will change my background. This one is super dark.

And because of the light bounce in the reflection light, I mean, the color of your background will affect the lighting as well. So you need to take that in consideration. So back to fully black, but this time I want to use a EXR or an HDR file. Here I'm using the 3ds Max asset library. It's very useful because you can actually see the preview of your HDR. 3ds Max library is free on the app store, so you should get this. It's very useful.

So to get my HDR to lit my scene, I just drag and drop. And I want to use it not as a background, but just as an environment map. And now although I've put HDR, it's all black. That's because each time you do a change in the render settings, it's not kicking in in your active shade, so you need to relaunch it. That's good to know, because I learned that the hard way.

So it's a bit blasted, so I will change the exposure of my camera. All right. And I can drag my HDR from the environment to my Slate Material Editor, and I can just move the offset. And this will rotate my HDR, so creates a totally different lighting. And it's still-- I mean, it's making some noise again. For this one, if you want to tone down the noise, you need to go in your render settings and under, it's IBL sample, you can crank up this value. And, again, this is a render setting. It's not specific to a material. So we need to stop your active shade and relaunch it again to see it kicking in in your scene.

So it's better, but there is still some noise. So I'll show you a trick to easily remove some noise. So here I've switched to another HDR file. And when you go in your render settings, we have a denoiser called optics. And I will do it-- just go into Denoiser tab and hit the apply on [INAUDIBLE]. So this denoiser, which is only available with Nvidia card, it will kick in automatically at the end of my rendering. So you might not want to use that in production, but when you're doing you look there like this and just testing stuff in the active shade, you'll see that at the end of the rendering, there is kind of a lot of noise on those legs. And it will kind of-- well on the projector it's not that obvious, but you see it kick in, and it remove a lot of noise in that scene.

Yes. So we'll see how we can shade with Arnold. Yeah, you see the-- Yeah. We're there. So I'll do a overview of the shader in the 3ds Max with Arnold. So we'll use the same scene, same lighting set up. Right now it's all gray, so I will shade those object one by one quickly. So for the wood I will use physical material. And we have a preset call satin varnish wood, or something like that, which looks kind of good. But I don't want to use those map, I want to use mine. So we'll just trash that, assign the material to the wood [? up ?] [? checks, ?] and I will just pipe in the-- add my diffuse map as a base color. And this is a black and white map that I will use for a bump.

And if we zoom in a little bit. I don't want to bump to be too strong, we just adds more realism and see it a little bit. So I can change the roughness. The roughness is kind of the glossiness or the blurriness of the reflection. And I want to crank up a little bit the bump value just to see it, but not too strong. Think I have a [INAUDIBLE] something. Yeah. So I don't know if you see it on the projector, but it's kind of subtle.

So for this, all the metal part, I've used, again, physical material with a bunch of preset. There is one for matte aluminum, rubber, plastic, all kind of stuff. So I've just used that. And I think I did not change anything. So it already look good. And for the leather, this time I will use the Arnold standard surface shader. It's kind of the uber Arnold shader. You can do almost anything with this one.

So I will use it to create my leather. So I will use my color as a diffuse map, and I will assign it to all my object. And by default, it's super glossy. You can control the reflection under Specular. So general is the amount of reflection, and the roughness is the blurriness of the reflection.

But instead of adding values [? here, ?] I want to add this black and white map. And this will drive my roughness and reflection for the letter to get the smooth, cozy letter like this. And I want to pipe in, again, bump map. Although for the Arnold shader, you cannot put the black and white normal-- black and white bump map. There is no bump map slot, in fact, in the Arnold shader. So you need to use you need to pipe in something in the normal map. So for this we'll use a-- it's a bit small, but it's called the bump to the node. So this will transform black and white traditional bump map and fake a normal map.

So we'll just put this one in the normal material slot. And you'll see that it look nice, although the tiling is a bit too big, so we'll change that. And it look good. So next to the chair I'll put a little bit of a side table. So for this one, I don't want to shade this one with textures and JPEG, so I will use a node in Max called the advanced wood. So I will create a physical material, and I will go get the advanced wood map. So this will drive all the value for the materials.

So it's not JPEG, it's not picture, it's all procedural. So you can change the scale. And everything will occur in this map, all the settings are there. So we have a bunch of preset, so you can change the bump, the color, the roughness, there is a lot of settings. And everything is procedural.

So, let's say, I move very closely like this. So the details-- you won't see artifact of JPEGs because it's all procedurally driven by the map. So you can change the bump in the roughness in some of the colors. You can even put, I think, the pores and the rays for the wood. So if you zoom in very closely, you'll see the details. It's pretty amazing.

And, I mean, it's all super easy to manage. So you just need to tweak settings until you get what you want. But even the presets are quite good. So there is preset for painted wood. So I want to put something dark to fit with the chair, although I will still see that it's wood but there is a coat on top of it. So I put something on that table, and frankly, I like scotch and whiskey, so I put a whiskey bottle.

So there is a preset in the physical material for glass. Although it look OK, but I don't know, I kind of prefer to do my glass and transparent material with the Arnold shader. And to control the key value, to change the transparency, is the transmission value. So it's supplied. I will go in my transmission and crank this one to one. And already it look fairly good. And you can remove the contribution of the base color, you can tweak the speaker value to get like a frosty glass if you want like this. And you can tone down a bit the transmission, add back some base color. So if you want to create colored glass like this weird [? thingy, ?] I don't know.

So you can create a lot of various transparent materials. I will use the same, just copy it and call this one scotch. And I will fix the pinky effect in a second. All right. So far for my scotch material, basically, you just need to give the transmission value a color. So depending on the age of your scotch and what kind of region you like in Scotland. And you might want to copy that color in the specular value as well. So we would add colors to the reflection as well.

All right. So one last material to create some fabrics. So I will use another Arnold shader. And this time I will add kind of like the other one to a base color for the color of the fabric, and then we'll use the bump 2D to add some-- so here I'm going to fix the roughness and the reflection. And then we'll add some bump map as well, like this.

And, finally, the key value for a good looking fabric. There is a value called sheen. And this will create kind of a fuzzy effect. It's a fall off. You can add even control the roughness for this one, control the colors. So you can get a fairly realistic fabric in no time. So it's fairly good. So at the end, I add this image. So I just crank up a bit the settings, and Jose will go over that a little bit later. And I was able to achieve that in a few minutes, seriously. But the render took a few more minutes, but still.

So one last shader I want to talk about, and this was released, in fact, I think 10 days ago. So it's called the round corners. So most of the time when you have crazy CAD model like this, you might have some nice rounding in some areas, but you will add some razor sharp edge. Which most of them--I mean, in real life, there's nothing sharp as this. So to add some more realism, usually you want to add the chamfering on top of that.

So you need to select the edge. It's a CAD model, the loop function won't work. So you need to select them manually. It's long, it's painful, and when you start doing your chamfering, it's breaking everything. All the edge are messed up. You see it's create extra points, and if I start rendering, it look like-- no, it's bad.

So I would just remove that. And, instead, I'm going to use the new map called round corners. And again, that was really even the latest Arnold thing 10 days ago. And I just need to pipe in this map in my normal of each of those Arnold shaders. And these are all the material in that scene. So most of them are metallic materials, they could be plastic or anything.

And I just want to check my value for the radius because now it's a bit too strong, and it creates some very weird effects. So depending on the scale of the object, scale of your scene, you might want to change the value. I think I'm going to use like 0.01 or 0.02. And you see that I get those nice smooth edges. And this add a lot of realism and it costs nothing, so you should totally use that. It's very helpful. All right.

So, yeah, shading a car. I mean, it's not avoidable when you're doing product design most of the time. I know that I had to shade a bunch of vehicles. And I'm not really into cars, and I know it think it's me. So I've talked to Jose and I wanted to do like that Japanese motorcycle from the movie Akira. And he was like, dude, what the hell is that? So I was like, oh come on. So yeah. So maybe it won't resonate with people. I know that I'm a bit weird.

So I decided to use a NASCAR model.f it's a cheap one I found for free on TurboSquid. But, still, I will add my Japanese animation twist to it. So I will use for that-- I want to apply stickers all over the car. And as I've mentioned, I don't like UV, so I will use the-- there's an OSL node called randomize bitmap. And you just need to pipe in the UV transform node, that's another OSL node, and that's the only thing that you need to do. And everything around UV like the scale, the size, the rotation, the offset, will be controlling that node. And after that, you can have fun and play with the randomized bitmap.

So I will change the styling a bit, just to have more space for my stickers. And all those weird square will be place holder for stickers. All right. So I will just add a color. I'm using an OSL map just for the color. It could be the input of the OSL randomized bitmap as well, but sometimes it's useful to have a separate node for a color. So, right now, there's only one texture used. It's kind of the default one. If I turn off all the randomized value, I get a tile like this one. So all those place could be stickers.

So I will change this for the solid angle logo. And I will add another one I will use one of these-- this one was on the motorcycle in the Japanese animation. So I just need to check the value. So this one-- I don't want to switch my texture, so I will put the largest value here in the pixel scale so they won't get switched And I will respect the aspect ratio of the images. So I can start playing with all the random value. There is a lot, so you can just start playing with that. So you can control their position, their rotation, the probability of having stickers that displays scaling, x and y rotation, the alpha, there's a lot of things. So I will start adding-- I think you can go up to 10 different stickers.

And you can play with the random value. And at the end, you have the seeds, so this will just throw another random solution. So you can just have fun and put stickers on top of everything. And at the end, this is the result I like. So, technically, you could use that with the [? three ?] [? planar ?] that I've shown at the beginning, and kind of came up with your own personal camouflage pattern.

And since is my goal was to do the Japan animation look, I will use the toon shader provided in Arnold to achieve that look. So this is my car. And, for this one, I want to put this movie poster in the background of my view port so I can easily place my camera, so it will fit nicely with the poster. Like this, so I can see my motorcycle is there, so I can replace it. And here I have another backplate that I will put in my environment of Arnold. So I use a backplate, and this one I've completely erased the motorcycle. And this one will show up when I will render.

So as you can see, it's now sitting properly. And for this I will remove my car shader and I will use a map called the toon shader in Arnold. And I will use this one. So this one is called map to materials. So we take any map that you have in Max, and it will convert it super easily to our materials. Because, technically, I cannot apply that toon shaders directly to my car, so I will just use this node to transform this to a material. So I will apply it to the car.

So there is a lot of settings in the toon shaders. I won't go crazy and show all of them, but the one thing that you need to know, and I found this one the hard way, you need to go in your render setting and change the filtering to contour. So this way, the edges and the toon effect will appear on the car. So you can change a bunch of value like the threshold, the color, the width of those edges.

Now, at some point, when I'm kind of happy with the result, I will get something that looks like my Akira and NASCAR. And it also contributing to the alpha, so it might be useful in some case to get only the toon effect on the separate layers. And using the same technique, it's kind of nostalgic moment, so the Thunderbird space shuttle like this one.

All right. So I don't know if you guys know substance. And so I call that SUI, shading under the influence. OK. It's not for everyone. So substance painter and designer, these are used to create a bunch of super highly realistic and procedural material. And, seriously, I mean, if you google Arnold Schwarzenegger and substance, this is the first GIF. So just google it. And so I will use substance material to shade that shoe.

And this is still, as I've mentioned at the beginning, this one is not mesh yet. This is still a body object. So it's only surfaces. And I will go on the substance website under download. You can find the free plug-in for substance and Max. Once you install it, you will have the substance menu and you will get access. So substance source for this one, you need to have a subscription. There is thousands and thousands of materials. And there is also substance share. And this one is totally free. So you can download those, there was about like 1,000 different materials.

So I've tried designer, I tried painter, maybe at some point I'm going to get good at this, but for now I think I can be a good consumer of just those material. I won't maybe create some, it's a bit overwhelming for me. But I can consume those easily. And, I mean, all of those are totally free, so. So I will start by shading one of the parts of the shoes. I will use the sole of the shoe.

All right. So I will go in my map and find the substance one. You see that there is two. The old one is the legacy one, you might not want to use it. We are keeping this one for backward compatibility. And the new one, substance two, that's the one you should use. So if you double click on this, and I will load one of the substance file that I've downloaded. These are SBSR I think-- AR. All right. So it's a bit tiny, so I will zoom in to see.

So this is a pattern of dots. So it fit nicely with the sole of the shoe. So-- I'm going to do next. Yeah, I cannot apply it directly to the geometry, so you'll just go in the substance menu when you have your map selected, and there's a substance to Arnold. And it just create, automatically, an Arnold shaders and all the connection. So you don't even have to care about any setting, any values, everything will be driven procedurally from this map.

So I've assigned it to the sole of the shoe. And now I'll go back, and this is where you kind of tweak the materials. So you might want to change the default value, which is 512 by 512. I will put 2k, and this can under the hood it's kind of producing maps. So if you have a lower value when you zoom in, you'll see some weird artifacts. So by just cranking up that value, if you need to do really close up of your object, you will see some nice material like this.