Thierry’s Technical Tutorials

Posts Tagged ‘Tutorials’

There are a few things that you must be aware of when rendering animations, that relate to the Mental Ray global illumination system.

You will probably be using final gather (FG) and global illumination (GI) when rendering your animation(s).

You can use ‘cache files’ that store FG and GI information between frames; this will save you significant amounts of render time, as well as reduce rendering artefacts.

Global Illumination

At the start of a render, depending upon the scene, Mental Ray may spend quite a lot of time producing the photon map. This does not change between frames, so it makes sense to only compute it for the first frame, and reuse it for all subsequent frames. Use a photon map file to do this.

‘Render’ dialog -> ‘Indirect Illumination’ tab -> ‘Caustics and Global Illumination (GI)’ rollout -> ‘Photon Map’ section:

1. Check the ‘Read/Write File’ check box.
2. Use the ‘…’ button to choose a file to write. (Use the ‘X’ button to clear a file from a previous session)

Final Gather

The final gather pass can also store information for use in subsequent frames. Final gather is not able to reuse all the information from previous frames, but it can reuse some. This means that using the final gather map file will save some time.
In addition to this, when using the final gather on either the draft, low, or medium quality presets, a flickering lighting-noise will be visible in the animation.
This looks extremely ugly. Using the final gather map file will almost eliminate these artefacts, so it is a necessary step.

‘Render’ dialog -> ‘Indirect Illumination’ tab -> ‘Final Gather’ rollout -> ‘Final Gather Map’ section:

1. Check the ‘Read/Write File’ check box.
2. Use the ‘…’ button to choose a file to write. (Use the ‘X’ button to clear a file from a previous session)

Anti-aliasing

Aliasing produces jaggy edges. Not only do these look a little bad in still frames, in animations these can look terrible.

‘Render’ dialog -> ‘Renderer’ tab -> ‘Sampling Quality’ rollout -> ‘Samples per Pixel’ section:

Minimum: By default, 3ds max uses a value of 1/4. This can result in small/thin object details being left out of the render entirely!! This causes flickering in animations so it can look very bad. Increase this to 1.
Maximum: The default value of 4 is okay, but the result will be better if you use 16. This will increase render time though; so what you use is up to you.

Mental Ray crashes

Using the final gather map will sometimes cause Mental Ray to crash, usually due to running out of memory.
If you render an animation from within Max, this will cause the render to stop. You will get an incomplete render; very annoying if you have left your machine rendering overnight only to discover that your machine stopped after 3 hours, and has done nothing since.
To overcome this, please read my tutorial on using Backburner.
Backburner will restart the render when Mental Ray crashes, so that you won’t lose any time.
This can make it very tempting not to use the FG map at all. This is not recommended due to the aforementioned noise-flicker artefacts.

Firstly in your 3D package, ratehr than rendering 1 picture, choose selection to render a Range of pictures, say from frame 0-100.

It is always best to render seperate JPEG images that 1 whole avi file straight away.

In order to do this in 3Ds Max open up the rendering menu (F10) select your frames, i.e 0 to 100

then as your output save file select JPEG, Max will automaticlay add numbers to the end of each frame, i.e pic0001, pic0002

You will then end up with an individual picture for each frame.

Now using Bink and Smacker Which can be downloaded here http://www.radgametools.com/bnkdown.htm select your first image, pic0001 or whatever it is u named it, and click BINK IT

and a pop up message should appear asking you something along the lines of “this image seems to be part of a series..” click yes.
should take a few mins to convert all the JPEGs into a video file.

This .bnk file can then be converted into a avi. which will give u a massive file of about 2GB. this can then be converted in Windows Media Encoder 9 into a wmv file. which is a compressed file, without loosing quality.

Another good program to use, that can handle larger file sizes is VirtualDub

Both Bink and Smacker and VDub are Free to use.

First, you need to ensure that Backburner is installed. It will normally be found in your start menu programs, inside the Autodesk folder.

Backburner comes in 3 parts; the server, the manager, and the monitor.

Server

Backburner server starts 3ds max to perform render jobs. This can be run on as many machines as you like, allowing jobs to be distributed over a network.

Manger

Backburner manager receives jobs from your 3ds max session, and stores them. It will then hand these jobs out to the servers as needed.

Monitor

Backburner monitor connects to a manager, and allows you to view the jobs that are queued up on a manager. From here, you can suspend, resume, and delete jobs.

Using Backburner

First you need to start the manager. Start Backburner Manager. When you start it for the first time, it will present you with a settings dialog that allows you to select
the network port that you want Backburner to use. Leave this, the defaults are usually fine.

Now, you need to start a server. The server needs to connect to a manager so that it can request jobs to do. The first time you start the server on a computer it
will present you with a configuration dialog, on which you will need to enter some settings. The Server name or IP should contain the name of your computer. This
may already be filled in for you. In the Enter Manager Name or IP box, enter the name of the machine on which the manager runs. If you are running the manager
and server on the same computer, enter localhost here. Otherwise, find out the name or IP of the manager machine and enter it.

Start the monitor so that you can see what the system is up to. The monitor window will start blank. You need to connect to a manager so that you can monitor it.
Click the connect button (the left most button on the toolbar) and enter the name / IP of the manager (localhost if on the same computer) in the dialog that comes up.

Submitting jobs to Backburner

Render jobs are submitted to Backburner from 3ds max. Set your render up as normal, with all the usual settings (file output, lighting, etc). In the file output section
there is a check box called Net Render. Check it. Now click the Render button. Rather that starting the render, as normal, the Net Render dialog will appear.
The Job Name should be unique; if there is another job in the queue with the same name, the render system will complain. Under Enter Subnet Mask, uncheck
the Automatic Search check box. The box above changes to Enter Manager name or IP. Enter the name/IP of the manager here. Click the Connect button.
The jobs in the managers’ queue will appear in the lower right pane of the dialog box. Find the Initially Suspended check box in the Options section. This will
ensure that the job will not start immediately. Doing this is a good idea, as often you will only be using one machine, and having a job start on the machine immediately
will slow the machine down due to consuming its resources; making it more difficult to load more max files and submit more jobs. Now click Submit button at the bottom.
The job will now be submitted to the manager.
Repeat this process for each job.

Starting the jobs from the monitor

Switch to the Backburner monitor. That jobs that you have submitted will have appeared in the top left pane of the monitor window. They will have yellow icons, which
indicates that they are suspended. Select these jobs, and click the green light bulb button in the toolbar (the resume job button) to start the jobs off.

Suspending and resuming

Jobs and be suspended and resumed from the monitor using the suspend job and resume job toolbar buttons, at any time. This allows you to pause and resume

/>jobs quickly, with very little work, in case you need to interrupt rendering, so that you can make use of your machine.

Render errors

Render errors are the bane of Backburner. Any errors, including missing textures, and warnings about objects not having UVW maps will cause the job to fail in
Backburner, meaning that you won’t get any results. Before submitting jobs to Backburner, attempt a test render from Max in the normal fashion, to check that there
are no errors.
If you are giving models to other people, please ensure that they do not cause these render errors, as they will frustrate your colleagues efforts should they want to use
Backburner.

1. Use an SVN client to download Papervision deposetries
2. Install ColladaMax extension on 3Ds Max
3. Convert models into .DAE files
4. add PV3d (Papervision3D) component to Flash via the Extension Manager

• Create  a new folder, and call it Papervision3d “or whatever you want to call it.
  
• right click the folder and chose SVN Checkout
• direct the folder to http://papervision3d.googlecode.com/svn/trunk
• Choose which directory you would like to install it in, and click ok – now the SVN should be doing all the work downloading the PV3D files into your specified directory.

2 – Downloading and Installing ColladaMax extension

This is the official Collada Website

• but for a direct download of the ColladaMax extension click here
• once this is downloaded and installed in 3ds Max, you can now start exporting models

3 – Exporting .DAE files

• As Papervision only reads .DAE files you need to export your models as .DAE this can be done by:
• Click File > Export , then select COLLADA (*.DAE)
• Make sure that, if you have more that one object in the scene that it is all connected as 1 object. and for Textures, use UVW mapping  and apply it to the DIFFUSE channel in the material editor – otherwise texturing wont work.

4 – Adding PV3D component to Flash CS3

• download the component here
• Open up Adobe Extension Manager, If you dont have it, you can get it from the Adobe site download it here
• once installed hold down Ctrl + O to add a new extension, browse to the component .MXP file that you just downloaded and click ok

• Open up Flash CS3, and now you should have PV3D in the Components window
• To gain access to the PV3D panel  – in the toolbar click

Window > Other panels > PV3D Panel

for more information on this you can visit this blog

more information can also be found here

And thats it!

Now you can start with Actionscript 3.0 and get it on with PV3D!