Speed Tree 7

I received an announcement recently that SpeedTree 7 was released. It hasn't been a plugin for max for several years and in fact I had forgotten about it. The last time I used it was in release 4. I recall IDV ending development as a plugin and devoting their efforts to integration with the game industry's real-time engines, something they were always doing as a high-priced license option if you wanted it. I thought their trees looked very good for what they were as opacity/billboard mapped leaves, branches and canopies. Perhaps not something best suited to Mental Ray and V-Ray but it looks like they have several products now including "SpeedTree Architect" using models from their "Model Tree Store" with the option to export as fbx for Max, Maya, and Rhino including support for V-Ray and Mental Ray.  It seems the software includes a modeling application as well. There's also a much more pricey version for Cinema and VFX with some more robust options for growth and animation. Trial versions are available. Looking forward to trying it out.
http://www.speedtree.com/

Prices very quite a bit:
SpeedTree Cinema going for $4995
SpeedTree Studio (budget version of "Cinema") for $895
SpeedTree Architect for $495
Looks like you can buy individual tree models as needed for about $50 each.

Remove Materials from Objects in Max

It's been a while since I had to do this and it took a few moments to remember how. There's a Utility in Max called "UVW Remove" that also offers the option of removing the material and assigning a default wireframe color to an object. One of those quirky things you get asked in a training session and that you actually want to do in production once in a while.

Visualizations for On Deck Sports

After taking a look at some project folders recently, I was surprised to find that DAS has completed over 40 facility visualizations for On Deck Sports. Keep 'em coming Joe!
Though these are not high quality marketing renderings, as draft previews of the facility layout for their clients, they still represent a significant time investment and DAS has developed quite a unique library of model content to populate these scenes.
Below are a few examples. I plan to add some more samples to the web site soon. These are essentially Nitrous Screen captures from Max. The quality is sufficient to provide the client with a quick representation of what their facility might look like with On Deck's design.

Bay 12 and DAS are back!

After a long hiatus I'm happy to announce that the new DAS web site is up (you may have come here from the web link on the site so no surprise there). Likewise, I hope to keep up with some more frequent blog postings. As one of my colleagues suggested, many of these posts might serve as simply a place to keep a record of technical and production issues as they come along and get resolved for my own purposes, not necessarily as great insights for other users. Of course, I welcome feedback and input if you find yourself here with something to say!
Thanks to all my friends and colleagues for their help and patience over the last few years.

Mental Ray Sampling cont. -- Fast Rasterizer, Shades per Pixel

In this post we'll look at some renders using the Fast Rasterizer having determined that 64 Samples per Pixel will provide a good quality render, as good as the  Minimum Maximum render sampling option set to 4 & 64.
Rendering with 1 Shade per Pixel seems to look good enough but further evaluation of some different parts of our renders will show that we need to increase the 'Shades Per Pixel" to insure the best quality.

Example 1 shows a benchmark using the Minimum Maximum method reviewed a few posts back. We've set min = 4 and max=64 as demonstrated in that post for best quality. Let's focus on the shadow created by the sign highlighted in red. Render time = 16 minutes for the full frame (864 x 486) of which this is only a small portion:

Next is an Example using Fast Rasterizer with Samples set to 64 and Shades Per Pixel set to 1. Clearly some artifacts in the shadows of the signs. These will flicker in an animation also. However, note that the render time = 2.5 min!:

Example 3 shows the result of increasing Shades Per Pixel to 4. Clearly an improvement, but careful examination will show that the shadows are still not quite as cleanly anti-aliased as example 1:



Finally, let's increase the Shades Per Pixel to 6. This will yield a render as good as the Min Max option in example 1, but the render time?.....4.3 minutes!

In summary, the Fast Rasterizer is a much faster rendering algorithm than the default Minimum Maximum option and with some tweaks can provide superb quality renderings in 1/2 to 1/4 the render time. I noted an exception to this in an earlier post. This occurs when you are rendering a frame that contains mostly a blank background or background image, for example a render intended for compositing. The Minimum Maximum sampling option discriminates about the amount of sampling to do for each pixel based on the Spatial Contrast settings. Some buckets will render very fast while others will take a long time. With an absence of 3D elements in the bucket, the renderer will blow through these buckets very quickly. The Fast Rasterizer is not so discriminating and will render all buckets with a more uniform render time, regardless of what is being rendered and hence these types of frames can take longer to render with fast rasterizer.

Next I'll show some quick examples of the parking lot stripes rendered in an animation to show how the results affect anti-aliasing "flicker".

Mental Ray Sampling cont. -- Fast Rasterizer

In this post we'll consider the same scene as the last post but we'll change the Rendering Algorithm and Sampling options to "Fast Rasterizer". This option ignores the Minimum Maximum and Spatial Quality settings and includes its own "Samples" and "Shades per pixel" settings instead.

Example 1 : This is rendered with the default settings for Fast Rasterizer, 16 samples and 1 shade per pixel.

An improvement over anything but the best settings from the Minimum Maximum option discussed earlier, however, still rather poor quality anti-aliasing. Note that this will also flicker badly in an animation. Render time for the full frame (640 x 360) =  35 sec.

Example 2: Fast Rasterizer Samples set to 36. 1 Shade per pixel. Again, a slightly better quality as expected:

 Next Example is the same as above but uses the "Mitchell" filter (4x4). Still a better render:

Finally, a Fast Rasterizer Example with Samples set to 64 and 1 Shade, using the Mitchell filter: 

Now the big news. The above example, rendered at full frame (640 x 360) and equal or better in quality than the best render with Minimum Maximum method, rendered in 45 seconds. That's half the time!
Next we'll look at the 'Shades per Pixel" option with the Fast Rasterizer.

Mental Ray Sampling cont. -- Min/Max method

This is a multi-part post continuing with findings related to Mental Ray's various "Sampling" settings in 3ds Max. The test scene (taken from a recent project) involves an exterior with a camera fly-down. Included in the scene is a parking lot with 3D stripes on a terrain surface and later, a view from near the surface of the parking lot with a few street signs casting shadows. Both the stripes and the shadows figure strongly in decisions related to the sampling settings required to create a quality rendering, both for an animation and for still shots.

First some examples to help make some decisions about utilizing the "Minimum Maximum" sampling option. The "Fast Rasterizer" and "Min Max" options are mutually exclusive with some different choices related to quality and speed of render. In a previous post I mentioned that the Fast Rasterizer method seemed a better choice for speed vs quality and the examples in these next 2 posts will bare this out with one exception which I'll note later. Before we discuss the issue with animations, lets take a look at some single frame renders. Note that all the following renders are zoomed in portions of a full frame at 640 x 360. The zoomed in region will make the differences presented more easily seen. We are interested in settings to create the final beauty shot here, not previews or test renders.

Example 1 shows a render with the Minimum Maximum method set to 1 and 16 respectively. No pixel will be sampled less than once. A decent setting but as the render shows, the parking lot stripes barely even show up, so this is not a viable option for a quality render and so not worth discussing further. (Note that 3ds max considers this to be a "High" quality setting).

Example 2: So what happens if we increase the Minimum to 4. Notice that it's an improvement, but some of the stripes either don't show up or show up poorly:

Example 3: Well, what if we increse just the Maximum option (1 and 64 repsectively). Again, missing or poor quality stripes:

Example 4: If we use 4 and 64 for min and max respectively we'll get an acceptible rendering:

All of the above renders used the "Box" filter set to 1 x 1. Render time for the full frame of the last sample at 4 and 64, min & max, was 1:33. As a comparison, here is the same render with the "Mitchell" filter set to 4x4 which provides a slightly better anti-aliasing computation at the cost of a little more render time (1:53):

In the next post we'll look at the same scene and views with the Fast Rasterizer.