Nonphotoreal Architectural Rendering Using OSL Shaders in 3ds Max

STEVEN SCHAIN: So welcome. This is the OSL Shaders class for 3ds Max. It's not the actual title. That's the actual title there. It's a little long.

My name is Steven Schain. I'm also the 3D professor. I go by that. Been doing my training under that for last 25 years.

I work right now for 4D Technologies CADLearning. We're an online training portal. I run their post-production office in Asheville, North Carolina, and develop their M&E content, as well as their inventor and fusion content.

And I'd like to welcome everybody. So welcome. This is a full class. This is great. I hope you enjoy the class. I had fun putting it together. There's some seats up here, too. Don't be shy.

So what we're going to go through today-- and we're going to focus a lot more on the OSL shader side. There are some topics I have that go into creating cameras and lights and some other aspects of 3ds Max. But we're going to stick mostly with the OSL side of things.

So we'll look at where and how to get shaders. We'll look at using the shaders inside of 3ds Max. And then, like I said, I'm going to stick less with the creating cameras. I'll sort of do a survey halfway through, see where we're at, for setting up cameras and looking at composition and then looking at output options for rendering.

So those will be the topics. But we will focus more on the OSL shaders than on the cameras and rendering side. Not that we won't go through it, but I want to spend more time doing what we're here to look at.

Now that there's more people in here, who's working with 3ds Max? I know I asked this question earlier. OK. And how many people are using OSL shaders in 3ds Max right now? So just a couple of people. Anybody writing their own? One person. Excellent.

So I'm just going to go through a couple of slides and introduce what OSL shaders are. OSL is Open Shading Language. And it was developed by Sony Pictures Imageworks as an open shading language as a way to develop shaders that would work with physically-based renderers.

One thing, there's a caveat with the OSL shaders in 3ds Max that we'll get into. But the OSL shaders can work with various renderers. And they also can create a material. The 3ds Max implementation right now with Arnold does not create a material. So there's a couple of statements inside the shader that you can't use. And it's open source. There are a ton of places to get shaders.

So the basics. This is the Open Shading Language GitHub. It's just a high-level language. It's a scripting language, sort of like Mac script, if you think about it. It makes writing shaders a lot easier. So it's simpler to program. You don't have to learn C++. And you don't need to know-- I mean, if you want to get in depth, there's some cool shaders out there. And I've got links in the presentation to a couple of great repositories for shaders.

And it only works with Arnold 5 or newer. So if you're running an older version of Arnold, make sure you upgrade it. So if you're running 3ds Max and you open the Render panel, Arnold will tell you if you're running the latest version. And I'll show you where that is in a little while.

So these are some resources. You've got the Open Shading Language repository. That's the one from Sony Pictures. The Autodesk ADN-DevTech Max Shaders, the gkmotu shaders. There's a shader group on Facebook.

Who runs it? Mads Drescher, Zap Anderson, there's a couple others. They're active on this shader group. So if you're interested or you write shaders and you run into a problem, that's the best place to go. Have you been on there? Yeah. When I was actually researching for this class, I just posted on there. I was like, Zap, hey, can you help me out?

And then Changsoo, Zap and Mads, they've got their own sites. And they are, in my opinion, probably the top guys for writing shaders. We're not going to get into writing shaders today, because it's early in the morning. And you guys will be sleeping by 8:15.

So we'll look at using the OSL map, which allows you to load any OSL shader. Then you also have the ability to use the direct shaders inside of 3ds Max that are there and available.

And there are ways of adding shaders into 3ds Max to load automatically. I'm not going to get into that because, it's not something we need to really get into.

The other thing that's cool about OSL shaders is it's directly editable within 3ds Max. So if you want to tweak it a little bit, you can just open up the script and type in a little bit of code and save it, and you're done. And again, we're not going to get into programming today at all. We're going to get into use and looking at different shaders that are out there and what they do and how they work.

So the other thing is, again, it's renderable with Arnold 5. And I'm going to go through with this little scene here. So I don't know if anybody remembers 3ds Max release 3 shipping courseware book, but that was in it.

Does anybody use like 3ds Max from like release 1? Yeah? A couple of people. Anybody use the DOS, go back to the DOS days? Couple. All right. You feel my pain.

So I'm going to switch over to 3ds Max and just go through a little bit of working with OSL shader. So this is just a little spittoon that I made. And this was for the shipping manual, shipping courseware that came with 3ds Max way, way, way back when. I just figured it's easier to use it.

So this is a standard 3ds Max shader. It comes with 3ds Max. So it's the Rivet shader. It's kind of cool. You can do a lot of stuff with it. I'm going to delete it and delete that. And we will look at what comes with 3ds Max.

So there is an OSL map. So the OSL map is right-- can you guys see that? Yeah? So the OSL map is sort of a generic map. When you drag it out, it has an A and a B. It doesn't have anything fancy. It allows you to just sort of mix between two colors or textures. That's the default.

So if you look at the language, at the code that's making it up, it's very simple. This is all the code that makes up being able to mix one input with another input. Not going to get into like what it says actually. But you can see it's a fairly small chunk of code. And it's actually just really that part here. This is the header.

So you can edit this. You can add a third line, if you want. You can add whatever you want. If you want to play around and just learn how to program, you can.

If you want to load up an OSL shader, you just come over here. I'm going to go to my Maps folder. And I have downloaded a whole repository of OSL shaders. And there's some pretty cool ones. There's some that are really basic. Some that are more complex.

These OSL Shaders go from black body, which is just a color. So if you're familiar with Kelvin degrees-- there's some seats up here. If you're familiar with degrees Kelvin, black body radiation, 1,800, 1,200 degrees is going to go from like orange to blue.

But I'm just going to pick one. Somebody yell out a shader that you see.

AUDIENCE: Candy.

STEVEN SCHAIN: Candy, all right. Good. That's an easy one. So you'll notice that the candy shader now has a new set of parameters. Those parameters are in the shader itself. And you can see that this is a much more complicated shader. It's not pages and pages. It's not a big, giant shader. But it's a little more complicated.

And it also has different outputs. So it has an output for color. I can bring that and put that into the base color map and apply it. And what that will do is that will assign it to the color of the object.

And let me move this over a little bit, so we can see. And I know this is going to squeeze this down just a little bit. Unfortunately, we're only at 1080p. So we can't really do super high res stuff.

But it assigns the map to this surface. And this surface right now is unwrapped. So it's a flattened surface. How many people have used UVW unwrapped? So a lot. Is anybody not familiar with it? Don't feel bad to raise your hand.

So unwrap UVW is a way of taking a model and flattening it out. So this is just done really simply. I didn't take this and flatten it in a way that would sort of conform to the way the vase, or spittoon, looks.

But what it does is it takes that the texture, and instead of projecting it through the object or around the object, it actually stretches the surface flat and allows you to map the object the way you need to. And it's used for games. It's used for all kinds of interactive stuff. If you sit in on Luke's class, he actually has a great slide on unwrap.

So the shader has the ability to do other things. So you can program in there what output you want to use. And the output can be, in this case, bump. So I can go to Bump. So here's just several. I'm not sure with the acronyms are for.

But one of the things I can do is I can adjust things like the scale, the radius of the dots, the bump amount, the bump shape. And that helps with-- if I do the scale at 5, you'll see these get smaller.

Now, other shaders affect other aspects of the surface. Now, that's just the OSL map. When we come down to the shaders, there's a whole list of OSL Shaders.

There's math shaders. So I can add colors together. There are UVW shaders. And just I'll ask a series of questions as we go through. Are you familiar with UVW mapping? Yes. So UVW mapping, just the ability to take an image and texture and somehow put it on a surface.

And that UVW mapping could be flat planar mapping. It could be UVW unwrapped, like I have on the spittoon. It could be cylindrical. It could be spherical. And there's a stretch map, which I never quite got after 25 years of using the program, or 25 years of using it now.

Anybody ever use stretch? Then I'm glad I'm not alone.

So these are some basics of a UVW mapping is you have the ability to set the channel. So whatever mapping channel, so you can have multiple channels on an object.

And a channel refers to I can come in and add a UVW map and tell it it's channel 2. And it is cylindrical. And let's align it to the z-- no, x. And this would be channel 2. And when I apply that, it's going to change the mapping on this surface. And you'll notice that sort of disappeared. It's because the mapping is now different.

Do I need to do that? Not for this particular texture. But you can.

Other mapping, if I don't like the number of tiles on here, I can come in and do a transform. So come in here and say, well, you know, I want it to tile, let's say, 10 times. It's probably not the best map to show this with. So the tiling is on the inside right now.

I can adjust the scale up or down. So as I bring the scale down, it adjusts the size. So these are all OSL shaders. These are all affecting that texture map.

You can get as many as you want. There's other OSL shaders out there. And what the class today is going to be about is really talking about taking a particular OSL shader-- in this case, it's going to be a shader that deals with creating a half tone pattern on your surface-- and using that to render the animation.

So instead of rendering just photo real-- now when I talk about non-photo realistic rendering, how many people think like cartoon rendering? All right. Non-photo real doesn't mean necessarily cartoon rendering, although there are cartoon shaders available as OSL shaders. There's several of them.

What I'm talking about is the ability to do other things like these polka dots could be applied just as the color of a surface. So you can have every other surface texture be the same. And the side of your building is this candy texture. You know, I mean, if you're going to have that on the side of a building, it would be a fun building.

So let's get back here. So let's talk a little bit about the project that we're going to work on. And the project is a Revit model. I'm glad there's a lot of people that are using Revit.

How many people have brought Revit models into 3ds Max? So quite a few. So you be familiar with the link Revit model.

So when you bring a Revit model in, the nice thing about using the link is it allows you to keep the model up to date. So it's a live, active link between the file, the Revit file, and 3ds Max.

You can also bring in multiple links. So you don't have to have just one. You can have a view that has objects hidden in and out of view that are in one view, bring in a second link with a different view, and have different resolution for curved surfaces. And then you can apply new materials in 3D 3ds Max than you have in Revit.

So converting the scene, one thing that is an unfortunate side effect of 3ds Max right now is you have to use the same converter, and that messes up all your materials. So everything becomes like a reflective, shiny surface. And you've got to edit all your materials. I'm hoping that gets fixed one of these days.

But it does change your materials into compatible materials. It sets up a physical camera. This right here is from my convert to Arnold script that I set up. And it literally looks at-- I've selected everything and converted it to anything I want. So I don't leave anything out. I also have it remove legacy files or legacy data from the file.

So if I'm going in and grabbing an old file from like-- I literally have files from 3D Studio Max release 1 that I bring in that surprisingly still work. But I do the converter, and all the materials come over. And it switches and it maintains most of the parameters. And then it sets your exposure and lighting.

So to finish the scene, and you can add entourage, like trees. So how many people use the foliage inside of 3ds Max? Couple of people. Has anybody ever tried to program foliage inside 3ds Max? I remember when this came out in release 1, everybody was like, oh, my god, I can program my own trees. And then they opened it up and realized what you had to do. You had to have like a Ph.D. in like astrophysics to be able to program it. And then add automobiles and other things.

So one thing-- how many people use Civil View inside of 3ds Max? Anybody? How many people put cars and stuff inside there? You know you can grab that right from Civil View? So if you activate Civil View in your 3ds Max in your file, you can open up these dialog boxes in Civil View and add things like road signs, stoplights, cars, trees. There's all kinds of stuff available in Civil View that you don't have to use Civil 3D to use the Civil View stuff inside of 3ds Max.

And it is it's probably one of the best hidden features in 3ds Max that virtually nobody that I've run into uses. And I started using Civil View when it came out. I forget what release it was, but it was early on. And it's just gotten better. And the entourage in Civil View is amazing.

There is all kinds of stuff in here-- you know, furniture, trees, signs, different cameras, some primitives. But the vehicles, you can see, I mean they have aircrafts, SUVs. They have a bus.

There's a couple of seats up here too.

And then other things, they had power lines. Those were modeled.

So let's look at working with materials. And I'm going to open up the file. And we're going to start a material and look at using the OSL shaders with that material.

So I will actually look at a couple others here that I want to show you. This is the Rivet's that I had on here before. So I'm going to show you how to get back since we do have a little bit of time.

So the Rivet's shader is kind of cool, because you could do all kinds of stuff with it. It's a really complicated shader, and there's just a ton of options. And I can assign the color, the bump. And then there's other things for like the plates, the rivets. I can use those channels to isolate the rivets. I can use those channels to isolate the plates, all kinds of different aspects of this.

When you start getting into this, you start getting into the ability to take the UVW map and start doing things with it. So I'm going to bring in a UVW offset and a UVW transform. So I'll put this on here. And I'm going to put this into the UVW.

So the scale, I'm going to come down-- I'm going to set that to 0.5-- come over to my offset. And I have the scale. I have the row count. So as I change that-- let's see, I think I wired it backwards. Yeah. There we go.

So you can see, the row count is how many rows it offsets. So if I just do two here, and I just the offset-- oops, not 20, 2-- so we'll go to the offset and say 0.25. And you can see that this changes. So now, it's a quarter of the way through. If I do half, it gets back to the beginning. Because there's 2, I have two rows. And my scale is at 0.25.

So let's set the scale at 1. Let's come over here and connect the output to the input here. So now, I have these two shaders. And now, ignore the complexity of what's going on. These are just using OSL shaders to be able to manipulate the mapping on this surface. So you're taking OSL shaders, and if I adjust the scale, I'm just taking the scale down.

So let's say it's 0.25. Everything else I'll leave at the same. And then I can come over here and say, well, let's make this 0.25. And I get these offset tiles. So this shader is doing the scaling. This shader is doing the offset. And then it's feeding it into my actual color, which is the rivets.

So again, don't think of this as, oh, my god, I got to know all this stuff about UVW mapping. Think of it as how do I go from one texture, one big texture of this rivets pattern and say I want to create a floor of rivets? I want to put these on the floor.

So I think I have the floor frozen. Let's unfreeze all. And let's assign the material to the floor there. No. Oops. Zoom out a little bit. So you can see the surface. And you'll see that pattern a little better.

Now, this offset-- oh, that was what I hit-- all right, so my row count is 2. If I take the row count and go to 1, notice that I no longer have that offset. So no matter what I do with this offset, there's no variation, because it's offsetting one row by itself.

Here, I can increase the number of rows that are going to be in that offset. And you'll see that as I change it, it changes. Now, this is going to change the scale of that offset.

Now, could I do that in here? Yes, I can adjust the scale. And I can adjust the tiling.

But it gives me more flexibility. To be able to separate all this stuff out, it gives me more flexibility to be able to take and say, I want this shader. I want to be able to map it this way. And, oh, you know what, oh, it's a brick, it's a single brick. Well, I want to make a whole wall of bricks, and I want to make the wall of bricks look like a wall of bricks.

It will also depend on the mapping that's on that surface. So here I have the tiling set, the scale here. And also, there is a scale here. And if I change this to 1, you'll see what happens.

So you can drive yourself absolutely batty trying to figure out if you start building this chain of shaders, because they all have the same parameter of scale. So you have a scale and a scale and a scale. Be careful. That's all I say. Just be careful when you start putting these together.

You can have a lot of fun with them. You can play around, do all kinds of stuff. You can open this up and modify it if you start getting into programming. There are some really cool Mads Drescher has a course he's coming out with. And his I think lesson 1 in lesson 2 are on YouTube. You can get to it through the Facebook page for OSL shaders. And it's a great introduction to OSL programming.

So let's look at the file that we're going to be working with. And that is the [? Palok ?] Street project. So this is an actual project. So this was not something that we did or I did. But this is a project that was done in Bellingham, Washington.

And one of the guys I work with, David Cohen, happens to live like two miles from there and they were building it. And he said, you know, this is great thing. He found out who the architect was. They gave us the Revit files. And we've been using these files for the last two years, just showing people. It's a great set of files.

Does anybody have any questions so far before we move on? Any? No? OK. Just making sure that's up there.

So this is the entourage. So like that's a Prius there. That came from Civil View. These trees came from the foliage, the AEC extended foliage. And to get to the foliage, just to show you, go to AEC Extended and click on Foliage. And you can pick-- there's not a huge variety. But if you're in a pinch, you can use it. I'm using banyan trees as shrubs. So it gives you an idea of what you can do.

And the materials have to be edited. So if you're going to do your scene conversion, do your scene conversion after you add your trees, because these come in as standard materials. They don't come in as physical materials.

And when you're working with Arnold, you're either working with the Arnold material or you're working with a physical material. How many people use Arnold regularly? Anybody use Vray? Wow. OK. Who uses the art renderer built-in? Anybody still using old version of Max with metal ray? Couple people.

What other renderers is anybody using? Anybody? Other than those.

AUDIENCE: Corona.

STEVEN SCHAIN: Oh, Cor-- yeah, that's a good renderer. Anything else? No?

So the nice thing about the physical material is the physical material right now in 3ds Max is probably the most universal material that we have to work with. So what I'm going to show you is just working with the physical material to take-- oh, I just created a tree. Let's get out of that-- to take this surface, apply the map that we want to use, and then look at other ways that we can work with the shader to get a non-photorealistic look.

And again, when I say non-photoreal, I'm not talking about cartoon rendering. I'm talking about something that-- it might render as a photo real look, but I want some kind of texture on it, whether it's, in this case, half tone or any other kind of texture. And there's all kinds out there-- scratches, lines, the candy texture that we looked at before.

So I'm going to select that, come up to the Material editor and say Get from selected. And that brings me the-- this is the converted materials. So this is the initial file after that material has been converted. I don't think I modified it. Ah, I did. Sorry.

Let me get this back to where it is when it gets converted. Yeah, don't worry about it. Ignore that, because that is something that we're going to talk about in rendering.

So the material itself is a rough surface when it converts using the Scene Converter. It converts into a standard-- and I'm going to close this. Ignore those for right now, because there's a setting in Arnold that you need to change. And there's a reason why I'm getting these pop-ups and it's because I have not set that yet. So it comes up as a standard material.

How many people use the advanced regularly? How many people are using physical materials? No? Mostly using the Vray material who are using Vray? Good choice. And by using the Arnold material who's using Arnold? A couple of people.

So physical material is sort of my material of choice, because I don't know what renderer I'm necessarily going to. So it's a good universal material.

Reflections come in always at 1 when you convert. So I'll bring this down to 0.3. And I'll keep the roughness up around 0.7. So that's going to create a rougher, less reflective surface.

And when I apply the noise to it, I'm going to get this error. And the reason I'm going to get this error is because I have to turn on in Arnold under the System, Legacy Map Support. Why is that-- there it is. So I don't know it was on, but it wasn't taking it. So if you don't have that turned on, or you're getting the error message, just turn it off, turn it back on again. And that's really important if you're going to use anything like a noise map or any kind of tile map, anything like that, which is a legacy 3ds Max map, that needs to be turned on.

As a default, just as a side note, I turn that on regardless, because I don't know what I'm going to end up using. And it just is sort of a safety net. So I don't leave at the end of the day and go home and come back in the morning and there's an error. It says, oh, you didn't turn this on and you haven't rendered a single frame. So keep that on.

I'm going to get rid of-- oops, not the whole map-- going to get rid of the noise. And I'm going to load in the OSL map. And the reason I'm going to load that in is because the map that I have is not a standard map that's in 3ds Max.

But even if I grabbed-- it doesn't matter what map I grab. So if I grab this checker map, it doesn't matter. I can still load a different map. It's still loading the OSL map. It's just loading it with that shader assigned to it automatically.

So we'll get rid of that. I'll grab this. I have a shader in my scene assets. Let's see where I have those. Oh, no, where'd I put those?

Well, let's go to the videotape. Let's go to OSL Shaders, Tune. Here's my half tone. So this half tone map is-- huh, that's weird. Not good.

Let's do this. Let's open a different file. We'll open one that already has the half tone shader in it. See, you check these things every day. And it's when you do your demonstration that it breaks.

So let's go back to-- here, I'm going to pick that, Get from selected. And you'll see here is like a whole thing of spaghetti. This is what I'm looking for. So I'm using this OSL half tone shader in multiple places, because it's the same material. One just has one bump map and the other has a different bump map.

So there's two materials on here-- let me go into and I'll show you what those are. So this wall right here, that surface, has one bump map, which is just those simple lines. And then this surface has another bump map. This surface is a third material with the same color, but no bump map. So these textures are all using the same OSL shader, just connected to the color.

So what I did was that the color was set based on the photograph that I used to pull from-- I pulled the color from a photograph. So-- I need coffee-- so I pulled the color from the photograph.

And the nice thing is that if you use-- 3ds Max has a tool-- oops-- View Image File. And I'm not sure what I have. I'm going to go to Render Output. I'll just grab that picture.

So this is the final rendering. But if I right-click and I grab a color-- how many people are aware of this feature? A couple of people-- I can copy that color from the picture. This could be a photograph. It could be anything. It could be a graphic. If you right-click and hover over it, you can grab the color from it and then come up to the Color Swatch, copy it and paste it into that color swatch.

And over the years, this has come in super handy, especially when you go out and you have a photograph of a building and you're trying to replicate a color or you're trying to replicate the color of a surface, like take a picture of this carpet or the walls, and I'm trying to get the beige color that's on the walls. I can get a good photograph, bring it into 3ds Max, right-click, copy it, paste it, and I've got at least an approximation of the color.

So this OSL shader is a really simple shader. It's just one of the many shaders that are available. So I came in and I decided that I wanted the different surfaces to have different textures when it rendered. So I wanted different scales. I wanted different angles.

So as I was putting this together, I said, well, how do I want to set this up? I want to render this, and I want to be able to animate it and have the look of the surface be this texture. But I don't want the surface to be the texture. I just want the color.

And what's interesting is when you get into views where the angle is different, the color sort of fades. You get the reflection or you get to the surface of the material in the object. And the color is just there for coloring. It does not affect like-- it doesn't block out the surface itself. And I'll show you a little bit. It will explain it a little better.

So I came in, and I looked at this, and I said, OK, the scale of 6, what is that? It's just some random scale. I don't know what 6 is. I don't know if it's 6 pixels. So it's a lot of experimentation.

So I'll bring that image back and show you what 6 is. So that's 1 to 1. And I know it's a little bit dark. But that is 6, whatever 6 is. I never went in to see if it's like 6 pixels. I don't know.

So I based everything on 6, whatever that is, the scale. And if you notice, that some are the same size, but a different angle. So I went in and tediously copied this material, or this OSL shader into every material in the scene. And I made slight modifications to it.

So I adjusted the fuzz, the color. This material, the background, is the white dots. And the foreground are the black dots. So the black dots are the circles. The background is the white.

And I use that to my advantage, because I looked at it and I said, well, do I want black dots on a field of orange, or do I want orange dots on a field the black? And I chose, after looking at a couple of renderings, orange dots on a field of black because it just looked better. It looked more like what I was going for.

So you'll see, this can take a lot of time. I mean, you have a lot of materials in here. And this is all the materials in the scene. I don't recommend saying Get all materials from scene. I did that for this. Because Arnold renders every material in the your Material view, and the more you have, the longer it will take to just refresh.

But you'll see, like come in here and this is the door. This one is at an angle of 65, but also a scale of 6. The trees-- let's grab a tree-- Material, Get from selected, and this one is a scale of 5 with an angle of 90 degrees. That's a scale of 6 with an angle of 90 degrees.

So all these individual OSL shaders, if I wanted to, I could probably go in-- and I wouldn't be able to do it. I'm not a programmer, but if you know how to write OSL shaders, you could probably go in and just add a button that randomizes those values between certain numbers.

So if you wrote a shader, say random OSL half tone shader, you could come in and write a random value, so that you come in and just click a button, and it changes that for you. Or maybe something that automatically does it on render time, so that when you go to render, those values will not be the same in any one of the shaders. So there's all kinds of things you can do with it.

So let's get back to the presentation. And how many people use the Sun Positioner? So we have about 10 minutes left. So I will go through working with the Sun Positioner and setting the render up. So I'm going to just go through here and talk about basic composition rules.

So you're familiar with the rule of thirds, right? Try and place interesting things on the lines and in the intersections. Diagonals, if you have a flat image, it's not as exciting as something that has either receding lines or has a focus.

And then the golden ratio is another one of those composition rules that photographers use. How many people are into photography? So this is a rule that if you look at all the great photographers and all the great artists, they use this rule as sort of part and parcel for what they do.

Camera correction modifier, a lot of people do architectural work. So adjusting for perspective. So you get a two-point perspective instead of a three-point perspective. In the physical camera, how many people are aware that you have the vertical tilt correction? So it comes in very handy to just automatically remove that perspective. And it gives you a nice vertical. Vertical lines are vertical.

And then rendering the scene, configure your renderer, set your Arnold. So let's go through and just do that real quick. And then I want to open for questions. And that's the end result there.

So you can see like I decided different surfaces would have different angles to separate that surface. That way it didn't look the same. And some are smaller than others. Some are bigger than others. The plants have a smaller size than some of the others. So I'll just go through real quick. And we'll look at using the Sun Positioner.

So the Sun Positioner, when you convert your scene, is the daylight. So it handles daylight. It handles your illumination for sun. You can also specify an offset value. So in this case, north came in correctly from Revit. It's 34 some odd degrees, or 43 some degrees.

You have the ability to set the date, time, and location, or use of weather data file. So you can go to-- I think it's the US Geological-- whoever does the weather for the US government. And you can download a weather data file. In this case, what time is it? It is 8:50, so we'll do 8:50. Today is the 13th, right?

The location of this is in Bellingham, Washington. If I come down and try and get close to Las Vegas-- I'm not sure if I can-- here we go, Las Vegas, Nevada. So that changes the position and lighting for this.

If I create a camera, I have a couple of ways to create a camera. I can create one in the Create panel, just create a physical camera in here. So there's my camera. Or I can get a view, say I like this view, and do Control-C and that will create a camera. It will also select it and allow me to come and edit it.

And here, I'm going to set my exposure. So my camera has exposure control, a physical camera has exposure. As long as up in the scene exposure control, you have physical camera exposure control and use physical camera control if available. So that's really important. If you're going to use a physical camera, set your exposure control to Physical Camera, Exposure Control. And then set your exposure in your camera.

So roughly 14, 15 is good for daylight. I'll come down here to perspective. I'm just going to turn on auto. And I have the wrong camera selected. There's a camera. So if I turn off Auto and go to 0, you'll see I can really do some weird, like cinematic effects.

Tilt shift lenses, has anybody ever bought a tilt shift lens? $2,000. Cheap ones are like $900. So if you do it in 3ds Max, it's free.

And then come up to the renderer and set your render parameters. So with this, I want to make sure my legacy is turned on. Set my Arnold. And you'll see here this Max to A, right now I'm running the current version. It will come up here and say, current version, new version, and it'll give you a link to go and actually download the latest version.

So if you open the Arnold renderer tab, you'll actually see if you're running the newest version. If you're not, it'll give you a link to go get it. And it's free to download and free to install.

So when you work with Arnold-- and those of you who work with Vray, don't worry about it, stick with Vray. Arnold is an amazing renderer, though. It's been around since 1999. And Solid Angle does an amazing job with it.

So when you come down here, your camera AA, that's anti-aliasing for your final view, the higher that is, the smoother your view will be, the less noise you'll have. The higher any of these values, the better your image will look and the less noise you'll have.

For the ray depth, the higher the value, the better your lighting becomes. If you think about lighting, if you have one bounce or zero bounces, you're only seeing the direct light. There's no bounce light. The more bounces you have, the more subtlety you get in your lighting. So the higher the number of bounces, the longer it will take to render. But the better lighting you'll get.

And if you have really highly detailed scenes, that higher number of bounces can make things look really, really nice. You get really fine contact shadows. Everything looks really good and really crisp. And your lighting, indirect lighting can look fantastic.

Renu Muthoo has a class on rendering with Arnold. And she goes into that aspect of it specifically. And has slides that actually show you like what that does.

And then just click Render. Here, I'm going to come over, I'm going to turn on Single because I only want to render one frame. And I'll turn off Save to File. And I'll just click Render.

And this is a new laptop by a company called Eluktronics. It's a no-name brand, but it's like super highly rated. And I recommend if you don't want to spend a gazillion dollars on a laptop. It's like a brand new eight generation core I7 with an NVIDIA 1060. And I am surprised how fast this thing is. I will keep the expletive out. Because this is being recorded. But this is not a ad for Eluktronics. I just am pretty fascinated by the fact that you can get a cheap laptop nowadays that's equal to my render farm years ago.

So this is rendering. You can see that I even have the texture on the wires for the poles. And even though it looks photoreal, the idea behind this is, you know, I want to create something that has a visual texture to it and allows me to do something that I wasn't able to do normally. To make that, something like this, I've got to go find a shader that works with Arnold. Or a map somewhere or make a pattern in Photoshop that I can tile.

With OSL shaders, that shader is available. Actually, if you look at it, it's not really difficult to write. I opened it up, and I looked at, and I was like, wow. You know, my limited knowledge of being able to write OSL shaders, I figured I could probably write that. It might take me a week to try and figure everything out. But I looked at and I was like, yeah, I can do that.

So any questions? We've got a couple minutes left. Yes? No? Anybody? Bueller? Bueller?

So I want to thank everybody for coming. I'm going to go back to the presentation here and just put this up. Thank you for your time. Enjoy the rest of your show. I think we are out-- we've got a couple of minutes left.

Again, my name is Steve Schain. Please fill out your survey for the class. Give me high marks. I don't have anything to bribe you with this year, unfortunately. My 3D printing class last year, I was able to-- yes.