Hello, didn't want to fill up the tutorial thread with questions that really don't relate to the 3ds max 9 rendering tutorial on this section, anyway, since I got started things have been going well and I am getting some results which are making my desktop look nice.

Ok first question is, do I need to keep the same directory structure for the saved scene to work still, like if I send the scene to someone else do they need all the .jpgs and .dds in the same directories?

Second is a problem I have with rendering a tyre wall logo. The first one I did worked fine, I mapped the dds to it and the logo is showing on the tyre. I move to the next sidewall but I have a problem, I put the same material on it but it has gone on the wrong side of the tyre wall. I hope this picture explains it some. The front of the tyre wall is black but when I look behind it there is a mirror image of the logo like, the graphic has been put on the wrong face of the object.

Any help is appreciated.

It doesn't matter about the image files being in the wrong place, they can always be reassigned again, but it does help if they are in the right directory, just so it's easier and faster to render.

as long as all your maps are stored in the root directory as your max file. The other way to do it is use the 'Resource collector' utility in max. it will collect all maps used in the scene and re-assigned them to a location you want. This is a very useful function, because if you do it manually, you could still missed some maps.

Awesome thanks. Going to try and create a tidy scenes collection with all the pictures with them as backups and maybe if they are ok I can send them to other people! nice tips about speeding up rendering and retreiving all the maps!

The thing with the tyre wall is weird, in the preview window I cant see the cromo tyres logo but when it renders they show, sometimes it wont render the tyre wall logo... ah well, I think its because its such a thin object on the side of the tyre and global shadows are hiding it or something cos if I view it from a very acute angle it shows there.. confusing lol.

Q1) A new question I have, when I rotate a wheel or object it rotates around a different axis and becomes out of align. Like I would like to rotate an object around a 90 degree right angle from the ground rather than do a rotate and then have to move the object into where I think it should be. Like a tyre wall object is a round object right, so I want to rotate it around so I can adjust where the writing is on the wheel, but when I rotate the object it wont stay on the sidewall of the tyre....

Q2) Also I created a huge geo sphere to create an environment, like I wanted to put a sky map / graphic on the inside of this sphere to be like a sky, with my ground plane in the middle, is this a bad idea, how do you go about creating a sky in 3ds max...

This is a render i've been doing with a UFR.

Q3) I have a just skylight only at the moment and I think it shows, the car looks a little plastic from the rear. Do I need a couple of spot lights on there do you think? What obvious lighting issues can you see?

Q4) The UFR dds files are limited, theres 1 parts dds and a material dds so theres lots of blank areas, I managed to fit the RA_seat to the UFR seat, it seemed to fit ok, but I couldnt find the UFR seat or the interior doors etc, is this just something to work around and fit my own materials to it?

Cheers!

For your earlier question about the tyre wall being mirrored, it could be the surface normal is pointing the other direction, try force 2 side on the material to see if it renders ok, if not, rotate the U or V angle to 180 degrees of the bitmap in your material editor.

Q1, You can adjust the pivot of any object. Go to the Hierarchy tab, then choose Pivot, select 'Affect Pivot Only' then you can move your pivot points about. Once finished, remember to de-select 'Affect Pivot Only' button.

Q2, You can do that, some people prefer this way, but you will have to flip the surface normal to point inward, or force 2 side material. because if you don't do that, the inside of the sphere will not render.
The other way is go to Enviroment and assign an enviroment map to the Background. Make sure your mapping is checked on 'Environ' and 'Spherical' and on your Sky light, check on 'Use Scene Environment' that will use the bitmap colour for your light.

Q3, for the scene you have at the moment, it is like a sunset, I don't think you will need a spot light as the sun has gone down, there is more ambient light around and the shadow should be more difussed. The light needs to be slightly warmer and you may need an environment reflection map for the reflection to reflect your background image.

Q4, I don't have a UFR, I can't answer you on this one, but you can always create your own texture by taking a few photos of your own.

Quote from samyip :

For your earlier question about the tyre wall being mirrored, it could be the surface normal is pointing the other direction, try force 2 side on the material to see if it renders ok, if not, rotate the U or V angle to 180 degrees of the bitmap in your material editor.

Q1, You can adjust the pivot of any object. Go to the Hierarchy tab, then choose Pivot, select 'Affect Pivot Only' then you can move your pivot points about. Once finished, remember to de-select 'Affect Pivot Only' button.

Q2, You can do that, some people prefer this way, but you will have to flip the surface normal to point inward, or force 2 side material. because if you don't do that, the inside of the sphere will not render.
The other way is go to Enviroment and assign an enviroment map to the Background. Make sure your mapping is checked on 'Environ' and 'Spherical' and on your Sky light, check on 'Use Scene Environment' that will use the bitmap colour for your light.

Q3, for the scene you have at the moment, it is like a sunset, I don't think you will need a spot light as the sun has gone down, there is more ambient light around and the shadow should be more difussed. The light needs to be slightly warmer and you may need an environment reflection map for the reflection to reflect your background image.

Q4, I don't have a UFR, I can't answer you on this one, but you can always create your own texture by taking a few photos of your own.

Hiya, thanks for taking the time to reply and help me.

The whole tyre wall thing is driving me mad, I click editable mesh, then I click element, then I flip and it all goes into triangles, does flip normal do that normal face flip thing? I cant pivot it, doesnt seem to do anything, its very tempermental wether it renders or not, I can shift the view and it wont render. See the pics of what I see in 3ds max and how the render turns out.

See attachments.

On the render, it shows the rear tyre wall because of the acute angle but the other one wont show, if I render it at a wider angle neither show. The strip above the doorsil doesnt show in my preview but in the render its there, you can see from underneath the car that also 2 bits by the rear number plate are also showing up in a strange way, reversed. This just happened randomly while I was working and now I dont know how to reverse it. argh what am I doing wrong.....

If you want to adjust and rotate an element's pivot, it is better to 'detach' it from it's mesh object first, so it is a seperate object, then you can go to Hierarchy tab and do the pivot adjustment.

The reason in your viewport not showing some bitmap texture is because it is a preview window of your work, not necessary represent what your render would be. to see bitmap in the viewport, you will need to enable the 'show map in view port' button of your tyre material.(see attached image 01)

The reason you seeing some element reversed and some disappear in the viewport is because it is only showing the 'normal' face in viewport. Use 'force 2 sided' in viewport config, (see image 02) then you can see both sides of the faces in viewport. (but remember, this only allow you to see 2 sided face in viewport only, doesn't mean it will 'render' 2 sided unless you have made the materials 2 sided or 'force 2 sided' in the render tab (see imsge 03))

It is difficult to say what is your problems on the tyre without seeing the file. it could be some extra faces on the tyre wall causing the problem. If you can upload the file in zip for me to have a look?
Go to 'File' and select 'Archieve' it should collect all materials and the max file together in a zip file for you.

Hiya, I have definately done the 2 sided thing, I've ticked it on all materials I can (thats why the windows + lights look chromey) and when I render I tick force 2 sided.

In the final render you can see the front tyre is blank but its definately mapped there cos you can see it on the other side.

Trying to find a way to upload this scene, it's 2.28 MB so it's just over. I've deleted the skin file so I can upload it here. You may need to add a skin to it...

Just changed my viewport config to show 2 sided too but it wont.

Going to retry rotating on the pivot again!

I am still using 3ds max 8, so I can't open your file. Did you have them as Obj file originally? may be send me that instead.
However, there may be an extra duplicated tyrewall mesh overlaid on the existing one. that could cause problems in render that sometimes the texture appear and sometimes it doesn't.
If the rear wheel is render ok, why not delete the front and copy the rear to front?

Quote from samyip :

I am still using 3ds max 8, so I can't open your file. Did you have them as Obj file originally? may be send me that instead.
However, there may be an extra duplicated tyrewall mesh overlaid on the existing one. that could cause problems in render that sometimes the texture appear and sometimes it doesn't.
If the rear wheel is render ok, why not delete the front and copy the rear to front?

Yeah this is the obj file I used; http://www2.arnes.si/~mocko/LF ... Tutorial/LFS_cars_obj.zip

I have .obj files for all the cars but I seem to be getting problems all over now, like I thought I would just start a fresh render with an XFR but I get even more "black" areas of mesh that dont show the maps I apply.

A couple of other questions:

Q1) Is there a way to get windows to preview a .dds file for me instead of needing to view it from a program?

Q2) Is there a way of seeing which .dds are related to which car other than by guessing?

Q3) I would like to trim the brake discs down so they are round instead of the black square as standard, should I just get a brake disc from elsewhere and import it, or can I get it to trim off the black corners / border for me?

Sorry about the million questions and irritating stupidness. lol.

Just an amateur wanting to make me own LFS renders. Thanks everybody.

The Nero Photosnap viewer will show DDS files.

Quote from LineR32 :

The Nero Photosnap viewer will show DDS files.

I can see the previews of the .dds as I open them in photoshop and 3ds max but I just wondered if it was possible to get windows to do a little preview thumbnail like for jpgs or bmps... if not I will just use the program I am editing in.

Q1, In 3ds max, you can go to 'File' and then 'view image file...' then select any dds file and you can see thumbnail of it, and if you click 'view' it will browse the image in a window.

Q2, I think the file name do suggest what car it is for in most cases.

Q3, you can use the cropping/placement in bitmap of the material editor. Once you selected the crop area, remember to tick on 'Apply'

I have looked at the UFR, a lot of the face normal are reversed, including 3 of the tyre wall, apart from the right rear tyre. However, it should render OK as you have already 'Force 2 sided' in render. The reason it render the logo sometimes, it could be because that tyre wall is touching the actual tyre. Try move it off a little so they are not touching and do a test render to see if that solve your problem.

Quote from richy :

I can see the previews of the .dds as I open them in photoshop and 3ds max but I just wondered if it was possible to get windows to do a little preview thumbnail like for jpgs or bmps... if not I will just use the program I am editing in.

Yup.. go to the nvidia site, there's 2 useful downloads there; one that'll produce thumbnails in windoze exploder the same as for most other images, and 'WTV' is a nice tiny tool for viewing DDS files.



Regards,

Ian

Quote from Ian.H :

Yup.. go to the nvidia site, there's 2 useful downloads there; one that'll produce thumbnails in windoze exploder the same as for most other images, and 'WTV' is a nice tiny tool for viewing DDS files.



Regards,

Ian

Ah nice thanks Ian, went over to the nvidia site and downloaded the thumbnail viewer and WTV (which it says is good for viewing textures with alpha channels).



Edit: This is the link to the tools section on nvidia for anyone who is looking for this same previews, dds plug ins for photoshop etc. etc. http://developer.nvidia.com/page/tools.html

Ok I think this tyre wall thing is definately because of it being too close to the actual tyre, I moved them very slightly and no more problems.

Nice!!

Lighting is still hard, my reflections are too strong on the windows yet too weak on the body, need more tweaking and stuff to get it right I think. Everytime I add lights it goes too dark or too bright and always looks best with just 1 skylight.

Heres a little picture of my hot hatch scene.

Havent really figured out much with the environment....

Q1) When I crop the brake discs, it stretches the .dds to fit the original polys, I guess I need to edit this whole object.... ?

I am glad that you sorted the tyres.
What is your windows' reflection strength? may be lower it to 20.

Quote from samyip :

I am glad that you sorted the tyres.
What is your windows' reflection strength? may be lower it to 20.

Yeah it's a bit bright isnt it, I think I have it on 100% with a black and white graphic so the white is showing too much...

Im still toying with the reflections, I think I might make a new reflection map since the one I have is too detailed and has water in it so the ripples look weird. I want more defined reflections, simple yet effective.

Thank you for the help, i'm sure I will be back with more questions.