Hi everyone. I was hopeing to get some opinions from those gurus out there on Max 2008. I am doing an interior architectural rendering and was wondering what is the best mixture of lights types, shadow type(under general params), scan line or mental ray and if you use radiosity.

I’m currently using shadow maps, mental ray rendering, and std omni lights.

I heard that the shadow type “ advanced raytrace shadows” is the best to use but I can’t use Mental ray as the render engine, just the default...should I be using the default scanline with advanced raytraced shadows?

thanks Rick

Its always sunny somewhere.

how about mental ray with raytraced shadows? (not the advanced)

why can’t you use mental ray?

press F10 go in the common tab and the lower rollout has a “render assigner” there instead of scanline, you can pick the mentall ray one.

press 8 to get a general lighting rollout tab, with exposure control, take the logarithmic one, not the mr_photographic_exposure one… that’s a move advanced one… unless you wanna run where u can’t walk yet :)

other then that… materials.. i’d use arch & design if you’re talking about architectural interiors..

and alot of tutorials and reading in the “help” file helps. i know ;)

greetings

Intel 7 - 2.8Ghz
NVidia Quadro 4000 2Gb GDDR5
8Gb RAM
3D Studio Max Design 2012 x64

http://boomerang-productions.blogspot.com/

here is an easy super fast way to make an interior rendering. delete all your lights, place a sunlight system into the scene. switch the sun to a mr sun, switch the sky to an mr sky. turn on final gather and set it to draft, turn on gi and leave it with the default settings, go to your exposure control panel and choose phtographic exposure and select the preset of interior daylight setting. then render.

now i guess i should have asked if you had any windows to the outside. if there are no windows then this wont work.

without a window in the scene then make sure you are at least using photometric lights so you get real values. you will find the photographic exposure more friendly than any other exposure control. render the little preview and play with the settings in the exposure to see how it effects the preview window. i have found that using the presets and the turning down the highlight burn to .06 and the image looks pretty convincing but i could just be my scene. let me know how it goes.

3ds Max Design 2010/11/12, 64bit, Boxx technologies, dual quad core 2.8, nvidia quadro 4000, 20GB Ram, use mental ray for rendering, windows XP pro 64bit