How to create a furry carpet in 3ds max with VrayFurIn this short tutorial I will show you a way of creating a carpet in 3ds max using vray fur. Before I begin, I need to say that you need to use vray fur ONLY when you absolutely need it (when the camera is really close to that specific object that the vray fur is applied to, or if you need to render at a very high resolution); if not using vray displacement is the way to go. If you decide that you need that you need a very high level of detail in your rendering, than be prepared for higher rendering times.

First, create a plane at the desired dimensions. This will be your carpet.With the plane selected, go to “Create > Vray > Vray Fur”By default, the vray fur will be linked to your plane. Assign them a desired material (keeping both the plane and the vray fur gizmo selected) and leave all the rest of the parameters unchanged for the moment.If you hit a test rendering at this point you should end up with something like the following:

Under the parameters rollout of the vray gizmo, start adjusting the parameters. The “length” is (obviously) for specifying the lengths of the threads in your carpet. In this case I have set it to 4.5 cm, the thickness to about 0.1 cm and left the others as default.Looking at the test rendering above, it is obvious that you need more threads. You can do this by scrolling down to “Distribution” and increase the parameter right next to “Per Area”.NOTE: By default this is set to per area, which means that the distribution of the threads will affect the entire area of the object selected, while the “per face” will distribute threads on each face of the object.

After setting the per area distribution to 1.2 I ended up with the following result:

It’s starting to look ok, but at this point it is too uniform and definitely needs some variation.This can be easily arranged by tweaking the parameters under the variation rollout of the vray fur. All the parameters have very intuitive names so you can understand easily what they do (direction var, length var, thickness var, gravity var)

After having set the direction var to 0.8, length to 0.5, thickness var to 0.7, and gravity var to 0.7, I ended up with the following rendering.

CLICK THE IMAGE ABOVE TO VIEW A HIGHER RESOLUTION RENDERINGFollowing the same method you can create grass, animal fur or other similar stuff, but again keep in mind that this will take a lot of rendering time.

HDRi Sky Lighting Tutorial

Thought I should do a quick tutorial on how I use these HDRi Skydomes I’m selling. Note that this is just

one of many possible workflows, and there are probably lots of tricks I’m missing and even things I do

completely wrong. I should also say that I work mostly with still images, not animations.

1. Here is a typical architectural scene. It is a model I made of Waro Kishi’s Fukaya house in Japan that

never really went anywhere.

2. I use a gamma 2.2 workflow together with reinhard color mapping, so not strictly LWF but shares some

of the advantages. I don’t want this to turn into a LWF tutorial or discussion, but this post on cgpov.com

pretty much sums up how I feel a gamma corrected workflow helps us as visualisation artists.

The reinhard color mapping helps to control burnt out (overexposed) areas. Screenshot of my color

mapping set up: The burn value of the reinhard color mapping typically ranges from .75 for an exterior to

0.05 for an interior. You need to experiment with the value until you gain control over the burnt out areas.

Here is an example with a camera pointing at the HDR sky:

For the final render, I use the Vray Frame Buffer, and add a slight s-curve to the output to compensate for

the lack of contrast that the gamma corrected workflow introduces:

3. Add a vray dome light and load the exr/hdr using the max bitmap loader. Set the mapping type to

environment/spherical. If you are using .hdr files, you can use the vrayHDRi loader instead. It makes no

difference whether you use the bitmap loader or the vrayHDRi loader, the vrayHDRi adds a bit more

control in that you can control the render multiplier independently from the viewport multplier. Set the

output of the .exr to 1 and the vraylight multiplier to 1. If your hdr/exr has no alpha channel it seems you

can save quite a bit of memory while rendering (approx 200mb in my case) if you load the exr/hdr as

realpixel float rgb rather than the rgba option.

[Click for original size]

4. To rotate the HDR you need to enter a U offset value from 0-1, so to rotate 180 degrees with would

enter 0.5, 270 degrees 0.75 etc.

5. Add a vrayphysicalcamera, and set the aperture and shutter speed to something that would work for a

typical outdoor scene, like F4, 1/200th & ISO 100. Remember that you are in effect using a completely

manual camera, there is no ‘P’ or automatic mode so you need to experiment with different exposures

until you get a good result.

[Click for original size]

6. Hit render and see what you get. If it looks too dark/bright I tend to adjust the bitmap’s output rather

than the vraylight multiplier, so that I can have a couple of ready setup HDRi’s ready to drag and drop

onto the dome light. In the examples below I use an output value of 1.5.

How to Create Really Cool Light Effects

on Jan 10 in Effects, Lighting and rendering by Paul

In this tutorial, I will show you how create really cool and exceptional light effects using Photoshop and a bit of 3ds Max. Let’s get started!

Light Effects

Here is a final image preview.

Step 1 – Light Paths

First of all open up your 3ds Max (or any other 3D application) and create a few paths like on the image below. Their placement is random. I’ve created around 20 of them. These will be our light strokes.

Step 2

Select each one and make each renderable. In order to make them visible in renders go to their propetries (to the right in your sidebar) and select “Enable in Render” as well as “Enable in Viewport”. You may also change “steps” under “Interpolation” to something like 16. This will make each light stroke smoother.

Step 3

Hit ‘M’ on your keyboard to get to the ‘Material Editor’ and select the first material. Use the setting below for this material and apply it to your light strokes. You may also modify it a bit if it doesn’t look alright.

Step 4

Scale your light strokes in one direction (like on the image below). Move your camera around and find it a good placement (see my example).

Step 5

Once you’ve done everything render your scene. I used VRay here with Global Illumination turned on. Other rendering engines should work fine here, too. Here is what I got (originally I used 1680×1050px resolution).

Step 6

Once all that is done save your render as Targa or Tiff image (*.tga or *.tiff – I used .tga) in order to have your alpha channel baked into the file. Use Adobe Photoshop to open it. Desaturate your render and use its alpha channel to remove black bacground. To begin with fill the background layer with pure black color.

Step 7

Use ‘Type Tool (T)’ to create a ‘light effects‘ text. Go to its ‘layer styles’ and decrease its ‘Fill opacity’ to 0%.

Step 8

Duplicate this layer and go to ‘Filter -> Blur -> Motion Blur’. Use 0 degrees for angle and around 40 pixels for distance.

Step 9

I’ve pasted a star field image in the background and used a ‘Hue/Saturation…’ layer with hue set to 87, saturation to 58 and lightness to 0. Alternatively you can use your ‘Brush Tool (B)’ to paint some lighter areas in the center.

Step 10

The image is ready but you can improve it even more by adding there some light strokes created with brushes like these available on ColorBurned – 46 Stunning High Resolution Photoshop Light Effect Brushes.

Conclusion

I hope you like it. Click on the preview image to get the full size image.

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Tutorial by Shadi Younis

This tutorial shows you the basics of how to set up daylight lighting in V-Ray using VRaySun and a 3ds Max daylight system for precise control of time of day and location.

In this tutorial we will start by lighting our scene with a VRaySun inside a 3ds Max daylight system in order to have accurate time and location control.

1Switch to top view and go to the create menu > systems > daylight system. Now click and drag a daylight in the center of your scene. (see image below)

2Now we need to change the settings of the Max daylight system so that it uses a VRaySun to light our scene. Select the daylight system and in the modify panel select VRaySun from the Sunlight dropdown menu. Accept the request to automatically add a VRaySky environment map. We will be using the automatically created VRaySky environment map to light the scene, so we also need to disable the Skylight. Select <no skylight> from the Skylight dropdown menu. (see image below)

3We can now use the daylight system to accurately position our VRaySun and we do so by clicking on the setup button in the modify panel and then adjust our time and location to our needs. In this example I have set it to 15:45 and this gives me a low angel for the sun, thus creating a nice afternoon mood. (see image below). TIP: Having the sun at close to a 90 degree angle will resemble 12:00 mid-day resulting in a brighter scene.

Before we go to rendering we need to adjust our VRaySun and create a VRayPhysicalCamera in order to have physically correct exposure.

4Go to the VRaySun rollout of the daylight system in the modify panel, and select CIE Clear from the sky model dropdown menu. This setting gives you a few presets of physically correct sky models that will contribute to the overall lighting of our scene. (see image below)

5Now in the top viewport create a VRayPhysicalCamera and point it at the object. (see image below)

6Select the VRayPhysicalCamera and go to the modify panel and adjust the distortion to 0.25. This will curve the camera lens slightly just like the lens in real world cameras. Then set the vignetting to 1.3 which will mimic an effect produced by the lens that darkens the corners of your image. This will help draw the eye to the center of the image. White balance is important because it will affect the overall color tone of the image, a light blue will balance the image and a dark blue will give us a more yellowish tone whereas a light orange will give us a cold blue tone. Feel free to play with this, and at the end of this tutorial there are a few images showing the effect of color balance. The last thing to set in the VRayPhysicalCamera is the film speed. The higher the value the brighter the image just like in real world films. This value represents the films sensitivity to light, and in this case we set it to 120 (see image below).

7If you render your scene at this point it will look like the image below.

8Lets quickly set the 3ds Max gamma setting to a Linear Workflow (If you haven't already) so we can get the correct colors. Go to the customize menu > preferences, and then select the Gamma and LUT tab. Check enable Gamma/LUT correction, and adjust your gamma value to 2.2 and set input gamma to 2.2 and output gamma to 1.0 (see image below). Editor's note: We will soon feature a Linear Workflow tutorial on the site, exploring this in depth with regards to Why and How.

9Now let's jump to the render settings. Hit F10 to open the render dialog box, go to the VRay tab and enable built-in frame buffer. This will allow us to further control our exposure and colors after the rendering is done and will be a huge time saver. To ensure image sampling happens at the correct gamma level for our render we need to adjust the gamma to 2.2 and enable Don't affect colors(adaptation only). Unless we do this the image sampler will be using gamma 1.0 to determine if sampes are within acceptable noise thresholds, and we end up with a more noisy image when viewed at gamma 2.2 (see image below).

10Move to the Indirect Illumination tab and enable GI. For primary bounces we will use Irradiance map, and for secondary bounces we will use Light cache. This combination gives us a fast plus clean render. well… fast-ish (see image below).

11Now that we have chosen our GI method combination we need to adjust them, so go to the Irradiance map section and choose medium. Or if your computer is slow you can set it to low or very low and do a bit of compromising. Enable show calc phase, this will let you see the irradiance map while it's being calculated (see image below).

12In the Light cache section set the subdivs to 1500 and (or if your computer is slow set it to around 800, but not lower if you need a good quality image). Also enable show calc phase to see the light cache while it's being calculated (see image below).

13We are done now, and you can render the scene. In the VRay Frame Buffer you have to click on the sRGB button to see the final result of our gamma correction. Also and notice that you can enable the curve editor by clicking its icon at the bottom of the VRay Frame Buffer window and then adjust the color to your liking. Remember to save your images in a linear format, like Open EXR, as this will ensure that the image displays correctly further down your pipeline (see image below). If you want to save to a format line PNG, TIFF or JPG you should change the output gamma in the save dialog to 2.2 to burn in the gamma.

14here is the final image:

Some variations in color balance:

I hope that you have enjoyed this tutorial and happy rendering .