For some time now, I've been fooling around with specularity and such to get the hull to look like it's made out of metal. Does anyone have any advice? Thank you.
The general rule for metel is low diffuse, high spec and reflectivity, don't forget fresnel. Are you rendering in VRay for Max? From the image there, I'd say tighten the gloss so the spec there isn't so spread out.
Thank you, I really appreciate your reply. I'm using mental ray. How do I apply the fresnel? Also, the bump map seems too pronounced in that area, how can that be adjusted? I've made some adjustments, and it is looking better, though some noise has crept up. Is the only solution to raise the image precision slider for the render?
The key to metallic effects in 3D is to give the surface something to reflect. A black background where the lights are only of the type that don't generate larger reflections will not give the the look you're going for. Try large virtual light boxes, or glow panels, or a surrounding environment map set to reflect, only.
If your using mental ray I would abandon all the default scanline materials as they do not respond consistently in Mental Ray. Begin looking at Arch Design Materials. Metal depending on the effect you want requires some setting more than just spec (fake surfacing) and gloss. You need to look into anisotropy and as mentioned environmental reflections. Bump maps are a real pain, you need resolution and sometimes need to foll with mix materials or masks etc to create more gradient in the settings. I would really recommend you use those bump maps in say the spec slot or anisotropy rotation etc. Bump maps really re only good on surface features like a groove or gizmo on the hull. Paneling is best done with what I mentioned above or used as displacement maps. Youll have to wait for me to load up some scenes and screen grap stuff but I can post some of my set ups for arch design. I dunno what sort of surface you are aiming for though. I see a TNG era ship and those more often than not are not very metallic at all. Though if aiming for say a ENT style hull some of the materials I will post should help. For environment I suggest using the tut I have linked below that uses the chrome ball shaders. I think there are others out there based on this method as my tut is aimed at placement of an object into a scene. Generally I use a dark gradient for the images for space or WIP renders. This method will also allow you to insert a backdrop separately from the world map. https://madkoifish.wordpress.com/2011/02/25/3dsmax-compositing-with-a-photo-in-app/ Forgot to add in standard materials gloss has less to do with the finish than anything. Stick with the default settings in the standard material and work with spec, spec maps aniso aniso rotation maps for those as well. Then fool with blend materials to fine tune your maps IE mix with black or white to lighten or darken features in the texture vs editing it in PS. This will also give you the option to blend other maps or increase or decrease the strength of the texture via another texture. Composite is another shader you can use as well. OH also keep in mind reflections are not a consistent sharpness so with standard materials you have to fake it. So make sure to add a fall off distance etc to the reflection. Arch Design will do this for you though.
Thank you. That's a lot of information. And you're right, TNG era ships didn't have that much of a metallic feel, but I didn't want it looking like plastic. And I'm not sure what would be involved in transferring all of the materials. As it stands, this is how it looks right now.
Metal hull material Rendered example: KIM the above material contains a lot more than just the surfacing. For a pure metal you wont need those colour fall offs or really any of the textures. They just add the panel effect. Old materials for the Onimaru. Sorry no raw sample just a processed one
Ok yeah if you want to stick with standard aim more for a paint finish a pearl with a matte finish and go with lots of blurred reflection. The gloss or shininess is what cause that plastic look.
MM What do you have for lighting? It looks really diffuse. Stick a sun MR Omni in there as main light at setting 1 A second one at oh 0.5 or less with a dirty dimish colour say gray blue. Then a skylight at 0.02 this will provide ambient fill. (avoids those ink blacks) You also might want to consider increasing the bounce setting in final gather. Some random settings I use for things. These latter ones are links only as they are large PNG files https://madkoifish.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/madfish-rendering.png https://madkoifish.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/madfish-wip-lighting.png Some are dated but should steer you to develop your own rigging. Either way it is looking ok just a bit dark which could just be the lighting.
I thought I also had a fill, but I was mistaken, I have a free directional light as the key. and skylight at .67 I'll light up this scene properly then. I really do appreciate your help. Edit: My render setup tab says "Global Illumination," whereas yours says indirect. Are they the same in this case?
MM It is likely a change in versions of mental ray. If the options are similar or the same it shouldn't matter. I know 2010 to 2013 the lum shaders are now called glow.
Alright, so forty minutes of rendering later, this is what I've got. Is that much time normal for just this one rather uncomplicated image?
MM 40min sounds a bit long, it depends on your system power and what not. Im running a uh 4770k slightly overclocked with 16gigs ram. To speed things up you could drop the samples per pixel or mess with the FG settings. Make sure those inital FG points are not too high. Decreasing the Rays per FG might help too. NOW if you have any standard materials present in the scene that could slow things down as well. On a full ship render maybe 30min max. I think my avg on the current destroyer model I am building is 10~20min max (for 1920X1080) depending on what elements are on screen and how big they are. Mostly it is my lum (glow) and translucent materials that eat up time. One way to test is to utilize the material override (this will replace everything in the scene with whatever material is chosen.) I use this for AO passes or other things like wireframe renders etc. Just place your base hull material in there. If the time decreases drastically you likely have a incompatible material in the scene or something causing high calculations. ALSO I see you have planar or unwraped textures this can add to calculations. AMT I find textures Actual bitmaps to really eat up render time more than say poly count. That and advanced surfacing. But a good example are super high rez planets with huge multi hundred meg image files will cause hours long render times. BTW you might want to go into the object properties of the registry object and turn off cast shadows. This way itll look more like a painted element. Oh I forgot to mention my omni I place Really far out to the point my model is just a speck on screen. You might also want to look at exposure settings as MR really prefers to have that on. (rendering/exposure control) I use MR photographic with a GAMMA of 2.2 EV value of -0.6 Image control Highlights 0.7 Mids 1 Shadows .75 whitepoint 6500k Might vary for you. BUT you might want to keep the result you have and just adjust in post. I know some who render out very flat images to avoid any clipping in either blacks or whites and then process the image in comp. EG So it is looking pretty good now and is quite useable output! Just need to ramp up the self ilum or just run a separate no light ship ilum pass only and overlay that in photoshop as additive to add in the glows. Heck just colour select in ps works here is a full comp for laughs. Grain is probably too much as I usually down sample by at least 3 to 4 times IE if it is a 1920 finished image Ill render it out at min 2time that rez. It gives a bit more control over effects. Also, it all depends on your tastes too.
Thank you so much. Tomorrow I'll change some settings, render out some scenes, and post the results. If I were doing animation, rendering to png files, would the settings be the same, or would I want to lower some? 130 frames rendering at 10-20 minutes each is a lot.
You could lower setting etc if you want. Again it is to taste. Make sure to render out with alpha channel support so you can insert a background though. OH also make sure to set up the Reuse FG GI disc caching stuff. It is to eliminate FG flicker in animations. Google about for tuts on this. " Final Gather Flicker" I cannot find the page I bookmarked way back on this. Again this also is dependent on your version of max and Mental Ray.
Madkoifish, thanks so much for helping this chap out. THIS is the sort of behavior I like to see on this board and others.
Didn't have much time today, and thanks again for all the help. I'm sure this thread will also aid many in the future. Okay, so got the render time down. Now I'm just wondering how to get those blown out areas without the exposure going crazy. And I did render out a separate self illumination image, but unsure how to get it to look like the glow extends beyond the nacelle vents.
Optical Glows: Set it as an additive or dodge /screen layer and add various amounts of Gaussian blur. Multiply the layers and strength of the blur to control the expansion and gradient of the blur. Never set the layer as normal overlay etc. These effects always brighten never darken or tone. The new render is starting to get a bit to contrasty as once you loose highlight detail or dark detail you can never get it back. I suggest just brighter overall via the skylight which is adding the GI or ambient light. Unless you are after a specific effect try to keep all contrast settings on all light gizmos no higher than 30. Seeing some of the light on the struts that should be in shadow make sure your lights have raytrace shadows on (or your preference) I do wonder if you accidentally made the ship not cast shadows vs just that registry. Not sure of your exp in max but if the ship is all one object IE select it and the whole thing selects first try un-grouping it (group./ungroup) then try again if the specific elements wont select try going into the modify tab and see what state the mesh is in Editable poly editable mesh etc. I prefer poly. Then you can set it to poly mode (any of the infilled red icons) and select the bits of mesh you want to control and click detach. This way if it is merged into the mesh you can detach it and then control it later. IE you can them set the properties on just the registry to not cast shadows. Though I could be completely wrong here as I am playing sleuth with the image and guessing here. HAH.
Thanks, I figured it had something to do with Gaussian blur, but I didn't know what blend mode. Also, how do I render out the self ilum without the ship's outline in black? Do I just hide the ship, except for the areas I want to render, and do it again? You are correct, I mistakenly selected the whole ship. I didn't know about the detach. That's handy. What do I want specifically to not cast shadows? Also, when rendering with another mesh in the scene whose textures haven't been converted to MR, is there a way to avoid errors when rendering? And here's it with the skylight value at .2