[Tutorial] Making of "Time is Running"

**KoOL** · **Making of "Time is Running" -** 06-16-2008, 01:16 PM

Everything is modelled in [COLOR=blue ! important][COLOR=blue ! important]3ds [COLOR=blue ! important]max[/color][/color][/color] 2008, mostly from standard geometry and some splines with lathe -- like the lampshade. Modelling is not my favourite aspect, so I will show the materials and the scene, as well as the rendering setup with vray 1.5.SP1.

First of all I will build some kind of a studio surrounding by making a concave fillet and then bend it a little to get a quarter of a cycle. So be sure to get enough studio walls around the objects and make it so that it is big enough.

I then started the modelling. Everything was made from standard forms in max -- nothing special. I almost did not use textures, because I wanted to create real metal materials and silver effects. Just the little factory inside has textures like the ground and some buildings.

The next step is to set up the materials for the different metal objects, the glass and the factory. I’ve used the standard vray advanced materials and modified them for the five ground materials in my scene.

The chromium material:
A standard vray material with a light gray colour in the reflection, refl. Gloss of .71, subdivision of 12 to get nice results but still have short render time. The IOR is at 2.97 and I used ward.

The glass material:
In the reflection slot is a falloff map set to standard and fresnel. Ref. Gloss. Is set to .98, IOR is at 1.517 and set the affect shadow and alpha to get nice shadows on the ground. The fog colour is set to white.

The light material:
Just a simple vray light material that is set to a warm light orange colour and with a multiply of 6 to get a bright effect. Instead of a real bulb I used a sphere with the light material applied to get the light emission.

The hdri reflection map:
This is a map I use very often for interior scenes. I set the overall multi. to three, make a spherical environment and a vertical rotation of 75 deg. To get the ground of the map truly on the ground, I put that map in the environment reflection slot in the vray override slot.

The silver material:
The silver material is very similar to the chromium, it has just a much brighter reflection colour and a almost black diffuse.
I also set the refl. Gloss. to .95 for high reflections. The IOR is at .18 for silver.

The next is the light set up of my studio.
I put two vray plane lights in the scene, one from the right hand side with a blue colour and a multiplier of 5, set it to invisible and the subdiv to 25.

The second light I set on the left hand side of the objects to have some light from the opposite side. Here i used a warm colour and a multiplier of 2 to get a soft back light. Subdivs are also at 28. In the vray light properties, I set the diffuse subdivs to 1500 for all lights in the scene to get a nice soft diffuse effect.

The render setup.

I made some standard setups like switching off the default and hidden lights.

I used adaptive subdivision for faster renderings and catmull-rom for sharp edges. For the environment I used a warm colour and the hdri reflection map with the multiplier of 1.

For more contrast I set the colour mapping to hsv exponential with the dark multiplier of .5 and bright to 2.0.

Be sure to switch sub-pixel mapping on to reduce the highlight sparkle effect in the bright colours. The same for clamp output and effect background.

Before I finally render the image I did some test renderings with low adjustments like ir-map to low and light cache set to 100.

If everything is like how I want, I push up the settings to custom for the ir-map and a higher light cache of 500 and a sample of .005m.

The vray render region is set to 32 for exact rendering. Also set the low thread priority for better performance.
I used distributed rendering to render much faster and skip the waiting time. Here is a small intro:

Install on all slaves the vray render node for distributed rendering and set the ip adress of the master as render host.
Start the vray spawner for distributed rendering. Make sure that the mappings and textures you are using are located on a serverwhere all the slaves have a connection to. It also has to be the same device letter like on the master machine (Z:3dsmax2008mapingfolder...)

If you have the option "check for missing files" switched on, vray will look on every slave for the connection and will tell you if anything is wrong.

To check for the files I use the [COLOR=blue ! important][COLOR=blue ! important]asset [COLOR=blue ! important]tracking[/color][/color][/color] function in max to relocate the missing files.

I hope you find this "making of" interesting and that you got some help or inspiration from here.

All the best and thanks for reading!

Jan K. Vollmer

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