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Discover how to use 3ds Max in conjunction with Arnold to render out final images.
Type:
Tutorial
Length:
6 min.
Tutorial resources
These downloadable resources will be used to complete this tutorial:
Transcript
00:04
Now, let's take a quick look at how we can use Arnold to render images inside of thus
00:08
Max. And you can see we just have sort of a music room
00:11
uh set up here to use to render
00:14
and we don't have any lights in the scene right now.
00:16
Let's first go into our render setup
00:18
and make sure we have Arnold selected as our render
00:21
and you can see that gives us an Arnold specific
00:23
tab that has some Arnold specific parameters on it.
00:26
We still have our common tab with the size and the frame numbers.
00:30
So go ahead and set that to Arnold.
00:32
And then the first thing I'm gonna do is add an environment light.
00:35
And if we come into rendering and come down to your environment,
00:39
I wanna make sure that there's no environment currently in our background.
00:42
What we're gonna do is use an Arnold light to do this
00:46
and Arnold lights work a little bit differently in terms of
00:48
choosing what kind of light you want to actually use.
00:51
Let's go to create,
00:52
we're gonna go to lights
00:54
and instead of photo metric or standard,
00:55
we're gonna choose Arnold and you can see there's only one type of light.
00:59
So click on Arnold light,
01:01
add it to the scene
01:02
and you can see it now here in our Explorer, as well as here in our viewport.
01:06
And I'm gonna change the type
01:08
from point to sky dome.
01:10
And if you look at all of these, you can see you have a lot of different options.
01:12
This is where you'll actually change the type of light that you want to use.
01:15
You can create a spotlight, you can create a distant light,
01:18
which is kind of like sunlight, which we'll do in a second, a
01:20
point light we're gonna do is create a sky dome light.
01:24
OK. So the sky dome selected, I wanna choose the format.
01:27
I want to change that to lat long because that's the
01:30
type of H D R image that we're gonna be using.
01:32
Let's come down to color slash intensity. I'm gonna change this color to texture
01:36
and this is where we're gonna put on our maps.
01:38
So here we're gonna come back and I'm just gonna type in
01:41
H G R I and we'll choose H D R environment and let's choose this Portland landing pad.
01:47
You can use any of these really.
01:49
So get our environment added
01:51
depending on how you add this, your intensity may be a little bit high
01:55
and your exposure
01:56
may be high.
01:57
So these may be one and eight something like that.
02:00
You can see that there is an interplay between intensity and exposure.
02:04
Now, instead of rendering this apart in a separate window,
02:08
one of the cool things we can do is turn on active shade.
02:11
So in our viewport, let's go ahead and turn on active shade using Arnold,
02:15
you can see that's giving us a rendered preview of what this will look like.
02:18
Actually in our view port,
02:20
you can see it's really, really blown out.
02:21
So what I wanna do is decrease either the intensity or the exposure.
02:25
Let's go and take the exposure down by half.
02:29
You can see it progressively get better and better.
02:32
OK. I'm gonna take the intensity down by half as well.
02:36
So I don't want any overall kind of large scale illumination.
02:40
I want it to be pretty low,
02:43
pretty low level of illumination here.
02:45
So I think that looks pretty good. I might want to lower it uh a little bit more even.
02:50
But the thing I want to do is actually add some direct
02:52
sunlight coming in through the window at kind of an angle.
02:55
So to do that, I'm going to create another Arnold light.
02:60
So come up here, we've got Arnold light selected, we're in create,
03:04
let's go ahead and create another Arnold light.
03:07
This time, I'm going to change the type to distant
03:11
and I'm gonna hit alt W to jump out of our perspective view.
03:15
Let me turn off active shade for a moment
03:18
and then I want to grab that light,
03:20
move it up
03:22
and kind of over this way.
03:25
And we can see from the top view,
03:27
it's pointed straight down.
03:29
So what I wanna do is kind of point it in through the window
03:32
and then sort of add an angle.
03:34
Now this distant light is really just a light vector or direction.
03:37
So I'm just positioning it for seeing clarity in organization.
03:41
What really matters is how it's rotated.
03:44
So we can in our perspective, you see this a little bit better,
03:48
the angle that we're looking at.
03:50
So I'll kind of move it over this way and
03:52
it's kind of an interesting angle to get some
03:55
cool shadows in here.
03:57
Let's go ahead and go to modify
03:59
and there, you can see some similar parameters.
04:01
Let's go back into our shot cam
04:04
and I'll just maximize that.
04:07
Let's go ahead and turn on active shade again.
04:09
Let's see what kind of difference the new light has made.
04:13
So I can already tell that I want to really increase the intensity of that light.
04:17
So let's choose that light
04:19
and let's bring up our exposure. So we'll bring this back to
04:23
higher exposure
04:25
and now we're getting really some strong light in there
04:29
can rotate it a little bit.
04:32
I do like the, the brightness of it.
04:34
Let's take this down a little bit though.
04:36
So once we get kind of a feel of how it's going to look using active shade,
04:41
we can go ahead and turn that off
04:43
and now we can do a render.
04:45
So let's go ahead and just do a production render and see how it looks.
04:49
So then we can see if we need to adjust anything,
04:51
so it looks pretty good, but you can definitely see some graininess in there.
04:55
And so some of the things that we can do
04:58
to kind of change that is if we go over to our Arnold render, you can see
05:02
there is a sampling in ray depth
05:04
and we've got this camera samples,
05:07
those are sort of a multiplier of the samples that
05:09
we have for diffuse specular transmission and so forth.
05:14
So you can try increasing samples in the specific
05:17
areas
05:19
and you can also increase samples in your camera.
05:22
I just added some sampling to the diffuse.
05:25
Let's make actually make that five
05:27
and we'll go ahead and hit render again.
05:29
So to my eye that looks a little bit better.
05:31
Having the samples a little bit higher, gives us a little bit
05:34
uh more of a cleaner look in some of these brick areas uh where we had some of the noise,
05:39
you could also play around with some of the sampling settings to get
05:42
the result that you want.
Video transcript
00:04
Now, let's take a quick look at how we can use Arnold to render images inside of thus
00:08
Max. And you can see we just have sort of a music room
00:11
uh set up here to use to render
00:14
and we don't have any lights in the scene right now.
00:16
Let's first go into our render setup
00:18
and make sure we have Arnold selected as our render
00:21
and you can see that gives us an Arnold specific
00:23
tab that has some Arnold specific parameters on it.
00:26
We still have our common tab with the size and the frame numbers.
00:30
So go ahead and set that to Arnold.
00:32
And then the first thing I'm gonna do is add an environment light.
00:35
And if we come into rendering and come down to your environment,
00:39
I wanna make sure that there's no environment currently in our background.
00:42
What we're gonna do is use an Arnold light to do this
00:46
and Arnold lights work a little bit differently in terms of
00:48
choosing what kind of light you want to actually use.
00:51
Let's go to create,
00:52
we're gonna go to lights
00:54
and instead of photo metric or standard,
00:55
we're gonna choose Arnold and you can see there's only one type of light.
00:59
So click on Arnold light,
01:01
add it to the scene
01:02
and you can see it now here in our Explorer, as well as here in our viewport.
01:06
And I'm gonna change the type
01:08
from point to sky dome.
01:10
And if you look at all of these, you can see you have a lot of different options.
01:12
This is where you'll actually change the type of light that you want to use.
01:15
You can create a spotlight, you can create a distant light,
01:18
which is kind of like sunlight, which we'll do in a second, a
01:20
point light we're gonna do is create a sky dome light.
01:24
OK. So the sky dome selected, I wanna choose the format.
01:27
I want to change that to lat long because that's the
01:30
type of H D R image that we're gonna be using.
01:32
Let's come down to color slash intensity. I'm gonna change this color to texture
01:36
and this is where we're gonna put on our maps.
01:38
So here we're gonna come back and I'm just gonna type in
01:41
H G R I and we'll choose H D R environment and let's choose this Portland landing pad.
01:47
You can use any of these really.
01:49
So get our environment added
01:51
depending on how you add this, your intensity may be a little bit high
01:55
and your exposure
01:56
may be high.
01:57
So these may be one and eight something like that.
02:00
You can see that there is an interplay between intensity and exposure.
02:04
Now, instead of rendering this apart in a separate window,
02:08
one of the cool things we can do is turn on active shade.
02:11
So in our viewport, let's go ahead and turn on active shade using Arnold,
02:15
you can see that's giving us a rendered preview of what this will look like.
02:18
Actually in our view port,
02:20
you can see it's really, really blown out.
02:21
So what I wanna do is decrease either the intensity or the exposure.
02:25
Let's go and take the exposure down by half.
02:29
You can see it progressively get better and better.
02:32
OK. I'm gonna take the intensity down by half as well.
02:36
So I don't want any overall kind of large scale illumination.
02:40
I want it to be pretty low,
02:43
pretty low level of illumination here.
02:45
So I think that looks pretty good. I might want to lower it uh a little bit more even.
02:50
But the thing I want to do is actually add some direct
02:52
sunlight coming in through the window at kind of an angle.
02:55
So to do that, I'm going to create another Arnold light.
02:60
So come up here, we've got Arnold light selected, we're in create,
03:04
let's go ahead and create another Arnold light.
03:07
This time, I'm going to change the type to distant
03:11
and I'm gonna hit alt W to jump out of our perspective view.
03:15
Let me turn off active shade for a moment
03:18
and then I want to grab that light,
03:20
move it up
03:22
and kind of over this way.
03:25
And we can see from the top view,
03:27
it's pointed straight down.
03:29
So what I wanna do is kind of point it in through the window
03:32
and then sort of add an angle.
03:34
Now this distant light is really just a light vector or direction.
03:37
So I'm just positioning it for seeing clarity in organization.
03:41
What really matters is how it's rotated.
03:44
So we can in our perspective, you see this a little bit better,
03:48
the angle that we're looking at.
03:50
So I'll kind of move it over this way and
03:52
it's kind of an interesting angle to get some
03:55
cool shadows in here.
03:57
Let's go ahead and go to modify
03:59
and there, you can see some similar parameters.
04:01
Let's go back into our shot cam
04:04
and I'll just maximize that.
04:07
Let's go ahead and turn on active shade again.
04:09
Let's see what kind of difference the new light has made.
04:13
So I can already tell that I want to really increase the intensity of that light.
04:17
So let's choose that light
04:19
and let's bring up our exposure. So we'll bring this back to
04:23
higher exposure
04:25
and now we're getting really some strong light in there
04:29
can rotate it a little bit.
04:32
I do like the, the brightness of it.
04:34
Let's take this down a little bit though.
04:36
So once we get kind of a feel of how it's going to look using active shade,
04:41
we can go ahead and turn that off
04:43
and now we can do a render.
04:45
So let's go ahead and just do a production render and see how it looks.
04:49
So then we can see if we need to adjust anything,
04:51
so it looks pretty good, but you can definitely see some graininess in there.
04:55
And so some of the things that we can do
04:58
to kind of change that is if we go over to our Arnold render, you can see
05:02
there is a sampling in ray depth
05:04
and we've got this camera samples,
05:07
those are sort of a multiplier of the samples that
05:09
we have for diffuse specular transmission and so forth.
05:14
So you can try increasing samples in the specific
05:17
areas
05:19
and you can also increase samples in your camera.
05:22
I just added some sampling to the diffuse.
05:25
Let's make actually make that five
05:27
and we'll go ahead and hit render again.
05:29
So to my eye that looks a little bit better.
05:31
Having the samples a little bit higher, gives us a little bit
05:34
uh more of a cleaner look in some of these brick areas uh where we had some of the noise,
05:39
you could also play around with some of the sampling settings to get
05:42
the result that you want.
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