3dsmax - render looks 'flat'

5ingh

5ingh

5ingh

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im fairly new to 3dsmax (6 months or so) so please excuse my noob question :p

i've made a hill & landscape scene and added the relevant textures that are included with 3dsmax. anyway, when i render it, it all comes out flat like below:



flatrenderrv1.jpg


the background is a plane with the map image added to it, same with the grass. however, the grass plane is pointing diagonally downwards like a hill, yet it still comes out like that.

i have tried adding lights, and moved the vertices up and down but it makes no difference to the final render. any ideas?
 
I assume you're using the scan line renderer?

This tutorial will help you. Ignore the colour adjustment on the materials, maybe look up elswhere to add a falloff etc. Then all you need to do is add the lights (skylight might not be the best as the scene is only planes) then make sure you use the correct renderer settings.

With a material tweak I get results like so: http://www.duperouzel.co.uk/r65/r65progress1.jpg

Wire, if you're interested
 
Thanks chaps! The bump mapping seems to have done the trick. Obviously I want to make it look as realistic as possible so I will checkout lighting and grass tutorials :)
 
You should make a rough hill with bumps, then meshsmooth/turbosmooth it. This will give a less flat hill.

The reason it looks flat is that it's a plane. Whether it's vertical or at 45-degrees it's still flat. Adding Normal Maps/Bump Maps will make the world of difference. What version of 3D Studio Max are you using? If you're using 9 or above, then the daylight system in 3D Studio Max will add the world of difference to renders and stop them looking so flat.

Remember to edit your settings too, your Final Gather can make all the difference in the world.

You might also want to watch the tiling on the grass, the second something looks repeated it loses any sense of its realism.
 
Just to show that lighting and render settings can make all the difference, these are some renders of an asset in progress:

Scanline Default Rendering:
01.jpg


Scanline w/ Light Tracer [2 Bounces] Rendering:
02.jpg


Mental Ray w/ Default Medium Final Gather Rendering:
03.jpg


Mental Raw w/ Tweaked Settings Rendering:
04.jpg


As you can see, settings can make all the difference in the world to how something comes out. The first thing I always tell people who use 3D Studio Max is that people need to learn to crawl before they can walk. Rendering and composition is one of the hardest parts of 3D Studio Max and even the experts are still learning, so what chance do we have? :p
 
NokkonWud said:
As you can see, settings can make all the difference in the world to how something comes out. The first thing I always tell people who use 3D Studio Max is that people need to learn to crawl before they can walk. Rendering and composition is one of the hardest parts of 3D Studio Max and even the experts are still learning, so what chance do we have? :p
Click to expand...

That is so true, everytime I do a render it always seems to be slightly different (even on the same scene) due to 'progress' with minor adjustments to settings, materials etc. You never stop learning with something like 3ds max, most people only scratch the surface :D
 
Very nice work mate. It makes a lot of difference when you know what you're doing!

Tell me about the settings! There are so many things to fiddle about with you just get lost in them. Usually, I have a play with the settings and see what they do. Sometimes I don't even notice any difference, probably due to my untrained eyes :). And yep I agree, there's so much stuff you can never stop learning it :p


I have version 9. I see what you're saying about a flat plane at whatever angle, but even when I shifted the vertices up and down (after converting it to a editable poly), to get a uneven effect, it came out like above. Nevertheless, the bump maps did the trick.

Tiling is so annoying. If I up the tiling to say, 10,10 - it makes the texture look more fine, like grass should. However as you said you can tell where it starts repeating it self. So if I put it back down to 1,1 it looks distorted and stretched. No win situation :confused:. Changing the texture type to 'environment' makes some difference though, especially when making the sky (using a geosphere).
 
5ingh said:
Tiling is so annoying. If I up the tiling to say, 10,10 - it makes the texture look more fine, like grass should. However as you said you can tell where it starts repeating it self. So if I put it back down to 1,1 it looks distorted and stretched.
Click to expand...
try using mirrored when you scale the map, it will give a smoother join, although sometimes it worth making a larger map in photoshop and using that instead.
 
I would recommend taking it to photoshop and making a better texture from it. If you're unaware of how to make a tileable texture, just ask.
 
Cheers for the replies.

I tried mirrored but it makes it look worse as I can tell where it is mirroring. I have photoshop and don't mind having a bash at making a tileable texture, but I don't know how. How does one make one then NokkonWud, if you don't mind?

Cheers :)
 
You need to make the hill have some bumps in it, a flat plane with a texture on it won't look like a hill because it's still flat, there's going to be no variation in light and shadow because it's all the same height. Easy way to add some geometry in there is to up the segments of the plane to about 25x25, then add a noise modifier, lower the scale, up the Z value and tick the fractal box.
Oh and how to go about making a tileable texture-

1) get your texture, find out the dimensions and open photoshop

2) go to filter> offset, then set the horizontal and vertical values to half the pixels (should be in negative value by the way) that the image is vertically and horizontally.

3) remove any seams that the texture has, and also remove any really obvious features the texture has. You could do this with the clone stamp tool, or by duplicating bits of it and using a soft edged eraser to blend it. Whilst you do this you should avoid the document bounds like the plague.

4) go to filter>offset and set the values to half the pixels of the image dimensions like you did before, but put them as a positive value instead of a negative value, you should now have a tiling texture!

I personally, never do it that way, as I try to use tiling textures as little as possible, as it detracts from the realism massively. If you can, then you should try creating a 'megatexture' basically find the dimensions of the area you want to texture, convert it to pixels, usually 1PX= 1CM is a good start. Make a new photoshop doc with those dimensions, and compose a much larger texture out of multiple layers and different grass textures.

If you want to create specular, normal bump and displacement maps for any of your diffuse textures, use this www.crazybump.com. It's one of the best peices of freeware i've ever used. You get realtime 3d previews, great shape recognition and a bunch of sliders to control most aspects of each map.

Hope that helps.

Oh yeah and nice renders nokkon. Did you use MR daylight system for the last one?
 
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grass3dsmaxcv5.jpg


I did have it as a plane before but I've changed it to a box as shown above. Yep its using environment maps.

I'll have a go at the tiling, thanks bud.

Just noticed your edit. Alright! I'll try it with a plane again then. Cheers!
 
Samione said:
Oh yeah and nice renders nokkon. Did you use MR daylight system for the last one?
Click to expand...

Yeah, it's just the daylight system from 3D Studio Max 2008 just with some of the time settings changed. The render itself uses some tweaks in the Final Gather section to get it a little sharper, the wood also has Normal, Specular and Ambient Occlusion maps on it.

It's not finished and is only an asset in an environment I'm building up (slowly) :p.
 
Samione said:
I personally, never do it that way, as I try to use tiling textures as little as possible, as it detracts from the realism massively. If you can, then you should try creating a 'megatexture' basically find the dimensions of the area you want to texture, convert it to pixels, usually 1PX= 1CM is a good start. Make a new photoshop doc with those dimensions, and compose a much larger texture out of multiple layers and different grass textures.
Click to expand...

That's a good way of working it if you have no limitations on stuff. If he was making an environment for a game I wouldn't recommend it :p.
 
NokkonWud said:
Yeah, it's just the daylight system from 3D Studio Max 2008 just with some of the time settings changed. The render itself uses some tweaks in the Final Gather section to get it a little sharper, the wood also has Normal, Specular and Ambient Occlusion maps on it.

It's not finished and is only an asset in an environment I'm building up (slowly) :p.
Click to expand...
Never would have considered that kind of wood to have any specularity but whatever you did to them really made em look realistic.

If you add an ambient occlusion map to a material, do you have to enable anything else in the scene to use it? I couldn't really notice any difference with the maps on. I tried using an ambient occlusion MR light shader on MR sun but things got a little dark.
 
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Just added it to the ambient map, gave it a little more forced detail, very minor, but better for it.
The wood itself has a warm specularity map on it, it's not got a metal reflection to it, but rather a dull, light bouncing reflection off it so it lights up a bit, but not over the top.

When building a scene, every item should have a specular map on it of some form, it's getting the balance right that's the problem, I was fortunate that I was quite happy with what came out. There's a few things I want to add such as a couple of scratches and the nails.

Thanks though :).
 
Quick question lads,

In the mesh select modifier, is there a way to set an ID to a selected area? (polygon) - Thing is one particular ID is selecting polygons from two different areas which is a problem when I want to assign a texture to the model.

btw, I'm using multi/sub-object mode to assign textures to the meshselect ID's.

Thanks!
 
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