Weblog: Pieter Vanderwerff Visualisations

This tutorial was created to document my procedure for optimising the render settings in mental ray to create a scene that renders quickly and most importantly looks good. There are 3 key lighting settings that should be looked at to produce a good result, these key setting are Global Illumination (GI), Final Gather (FG) and Ambient Occlusion (AO).

The current 3ds max scene you can see is based on the Jubilee Chapel by Richard Meier and was created for a previous project. The model in this scene is complex but the lighting and materials are set up very simply. The lighting in the scene is from a MR sun and sky with soft shadows, and the materials are Arch & Design with the matte finish template and a diffuse colour.

Move the slider in the flash file above to see the comparison between a non-optimised render (FG - High, GI - None, AO - None) which took 21 minutes to complete vs an optimised render (FG - Low, GI - Low, AO - on) which took 5 and a half minutes to render.

I have made this tutorial to help make it clearer how to do line collisions using my Bounding Shape action in Flint. This tutorial is not necessarily the best or most efficient way of doing this, it is just the way I have found to work well for me.

First you will need to download and extract the Flintcollide.rar file that I have put together, contained within this archive is the Flint code from the Lines and Collisions Branch of the SVN with the addition of my own BoundingShape.as file in the twoD/actions folder. Within the flint source code I have removed the flintparticles/threeD folder to reduce file size since this technique is 2D only. Also within this archive I have included the flash file of the line collisions example shown above.