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Studio Rendering with 3ds Max and Vray

Pratik Gulati on Dec 8th 2009 with 37 comments
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Where 3d product visualization is concerned, one of the most important techniques for achieving realistic high quality images, is your ability to create studio renders. In this detailed 4 part tutorial you will learn every step necessary to create your own high quality studio renders with Vray and 3ds Max.

This tutorial is divided in 4 parts: Scene setup, materials, lighting, and rendering. In the first part, we will set up the scene, create a base, and import our models, in the second part, we will be assigning materials and using Vray lights to light our scene, and in the last part, we will adjust the Vray settings for the final render.

Note: This is a lighting and rendering tutorial. You will need to supply your own model in order to follow along.

Click on Image to Open a High Rez Version

Step 1

Open 3ds Max and set our scene units to meters by going to “Customize>Unit Setup>Metric>Meters.

Step 2

Now lets create an environment for our scene. Create a “C” shape with the line tool and convert it to an editable spline.

Step 3

Select the corner points and choose “Fillet” with a .187m value. Also, set the “Interpolation Steps” to 10.

Step 4

Select the line again, and in the rendering tab, check “Enable in Viewport” and “Enable in Renderer”. Select “Rectangular” for the type, and enter the values shown below.

Step 5

Now convert the line to an editable poly, and your base for the lighting setup is done.

Step 6

Import or merge your model, and scale it according to the size of the base. In my case i am importing a furniture model.

Step 7

Create a free camera in the front view. Now, click on the top left side of the view port, go to views, and select the camera view.

Step 8

Enable the safe frame, and adjust the camera according to your scene and model.

Step 9

Press f10, and under production, choose Vray from the assign renderer tab. This will enable Vray as your renderer, and also enable Vray materials in the material editor.

Step 10

Press ‘M’ to open the material editor, then click standard, and then Vray mtl. The VRayMtl is provided with the V-Ray renderer. This allows for physically correct illumination in the scene, faster rendering, and more convenient reflection and refraction parameters.

Step 11

Click on the diffuse color and make it pure white and apply it to the base. This will help in bringing out the details and
getting diffuse reflections.

Step 12

Now lets texture the upper part of the stool. The basic parameters that will be used in the material are:

  • Diffuse – The diffuse color of the material.
  • Rougness – Can be used to simulate rough surfaces or surfaces covered with dust.
  • Reflect – The reflection color.
  • Reflection glossiness – Controls the sharpness of reflections. A value of 1.0 means perfect mirror-like reflections, while lower values produce blurry or glossy reflections. Use the Subdivs parameter to control the quality of the glossy reflections.

    • Apply a fall off map in the Diffuse slot (as you can see in the image). Also change the reflect color and bring down the reflect glossiness to .7 Apply this material to the cushion of the stool. Note: You will need to adjust the colors and various settings described to suit your own model.

    Step 13

    Now add a bump map, with a bump value of 60, in the maps area of the same material.

    Bump mapping makes an object appear to have a bumpy or irregular surface. When you render an object with a bump-mapped material, lighter (whiter) areas of the map appear to be raised, and darker (blacker) areas appear to be low.

    Step 14

    Apply a UVW map modifier on just the cushion, and select box as the type of mapping style. Also, scale the gizmo so that it can fit the bump map properly.

    Step 15

    Time to create the shader for the metallic legs and the base of the stool. Here are the important parameters you will need to adjust:

  • Fresnel Reflections – Checking this option makes the reflection strength dependent on the viewing angle of the surface. Some materials in nature (glass etc) reflect light in this manner.
  • Max Depth – The number of times a ray can be reflected. Scenes with lots of reflective and refractive surfaces may require higher values in order to look right.
  • Exit Color – If a ray has reached its maximum reflection depth, this color will be returned without tracing the ray further.

    • Step 16

    Now create 3 Vray lights in the scene. Change the multiplier, the color to white, and check invisible. The important parameters you should know are:

  • Color – The color of the light.
  • Multiplier – The multiplier for the light color. Also the light intensity is adjusted by the Intensity units parameter.
  • Invisible – This setting controls whether the shape of the VRayLight source is visible in the render result. When this option is turned on, the source is rendered in the current light color. Otherwise it is not visible in the scene.

    • Step 17

    Create a simple plane, rotate it as shown, and apply a Vray light material to it. Add a gradient map on the Vray light material, and set the intensity of this material to 2.

  • VRayLightMtl – A special material provided with the V-Ray renderer. This material is used for producing self-illuminated surfaces, and allows faster rendering than a Standard 3ds Max material with self-illumination enabled. It also allows you to turn an object into an actual mesh light source.
  • Color – The self-illumination color of the material.
  • Multiplier – The multiplier for the Color.

    • Step 18

    The following steps will be dedicated to the render settings for Vray. Press F10, and under “Global Switches”,
    uncheck “Default Lights”. “Default Lights” allow you to control the default lights in the scene.

    Step 19

    For the “Image Sampler” type select “Adaptive DMC”, and “Catmull/Rom” as the filter. Also, change the “Min” and “Max Subdivs”. Here is a description of the important settings:

  • Image Sampler – An algorithm for sampling and filtering the rendered image.
  • Fixed – Always takes the same number of samples per pixel.
  • Adaptive DMC – Takes a variable number of samples per pixel, depending on the difference in the intensity of the pixels.
  • Adaptive Subdivision – Divides the image into an adaptive grid-like structure, and refines depending on the difference in pixel intensity.

    • Step 20

    Under the “Environment” tab, check on “GI Override”, which will allow you to override the 3ds Max Environment settings for indirect illumination calculations. The effect of changing the GI environment is similar to that of a skylight.

    Step 21

    Under “Indirect Illumination”, select “Irradiance Map”, and “Light Cache” as the “Primary” and “Secondary Engine”.
    Also, change the preset to “High hsph”, the “Subdivs” to 50, and the “Interp Samples” to 20. Below is a description of the important settings:

  • Irradiance map – Computes the indirect illumination only at some points in the scene, and interpolates for the rest of the points. This is very fast compared to direct computation, especially for scenes with large flat areas.
  • Current Preset – this dropdown list allows you to choose from several presets for some of the irradiance map parameters.
  • Hemispheric Subdivs (HSph. subdivs) – Controls the quality of the individual GI samples. Smaller values make things faster, but may produce a blotchy result. Higher values produce smoother images.

    • Step 23

    For the “Light Cache” set the “Subdivs” to 1500, and for “No of Passes” set the value to 8.

  • Light Cache – The light map is built by tracing many eye paths from the camera. Each of the bounces in the path stores the illumination from the rest of the path into a 3d structure. This is very similar to a photon map.
  • Subdivs – Determines how many paths are traced from the camera. The actual number of paths is the squared value of the subdivs (the default 1000 subdivs mean that 1 000 000 paths will be traced from the camera.
  • Number of Passes – The light cache is computed in several passes, which are then combined into the final light cache. Each pass is rendered in a separate thread independently of the other passes. This ensures that the light cache is consistent across computers with a different number of CPUs. In general, a light cache computed with a smaller number of passes may be less noisy than a light cache computed with more passes for the same number of samples. However, a small number of passes cannot be distributed effectively across several threads.

    • Step 24

    Hit render, and you’re done. You have just created your first studio render !!

     
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    By Pratik Gulati

    Rollover to read this author's bio or click through to see a full list of posts by this author.

    Hi friends, this is Pratik. I am a professional 3d artist from India. My areas of expertise include: hard surface modeling, texturing, lighting and rendering in both 3ds Max and Maya. 3d art and photography are my passion and my profession, but some of my hobbies are music, movies, computers, latest gadgets, cars and all sorts of tech stuff. Here to learn, inspire, and grow!  

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    Discussion 37 Comments

    1. Lashan says:
      December 8, 2009 at 12:16 am

      Wow, this looks really good.

      Wish there were more Vray/3Ds Max tutorials on interior lighting.

      Reply
    2. Simon says:
      December 8, 2009 at 12:24 am

      Great tutorial and great outcome.

      It was easy to follow through and detailed enough so I didn’t miss/mess up any steps.

      Thanks for doing an awesome step by step, non-video tut. :D

      Reply
    3. Paolo Bruno says:
      December 8, 2009 at 6:38 am

      Great Tut! I would like a lot to learn how to model it… could you someday make the tutorial of how to modeling that stuff?

      Thanks a lot!

      Reply
    4. Simon says:
      December 8, 2009 at 8:48 am

      Really nice Tutorial, please more :)

      And BTW: How can I add HDRI?

      Reply
    5. Rune Egeland says:
      December 8, 2009 at 8:54 am

      Great tutorial. Cant get enough of rendering tips. Would like more on mental ray though, cant afford VRAY. :(

      Reply
      • Friko says:
        December 8, 2009 at 10:16 am

        Yeah, a mental ray version would be great! BTW, is all this process (the vray setup) the same when rendering in maya?

        Reply
        • pratik says:
          December 8, 2009 at 10:50 am

          yes Friko you can follow the same setup in maya
          instead of vray plane use area light with soft shadows and mental ray(gi+fg)

    6. yusuf says:
      December 8, 2009 at 9:31 am

      Great tutorial.. Can the same procedure be applied to a full interior scene, for example a bedroom or a living room..will we get the same output?

      Reply
      • pratik says:
        December 8, 2009 at 10:49 am

        no this tut is especially for studio setups it cant be applied for interior
        the render settings would be same , but scene setup will be different
        i will try to come up with a interior lighting tutor

        Reply
    7. arz says:
      December 8, 2009 at 1:00 pm

      hi pratik really a great great job . can i do the step in c4d.

      Reply
    8. konsol says:
      December 8, 2009 at 9:24 pm

      Great tutorial.. Thank you

      Reply
    9. Sam says:
      December 8, 2009 at 10:22 pm

      im a little bit frustrated right now…
      i followed strickly every single step of the tutorial and when i hitted to render te final image was to-tally blown out

      dont know whats wrong :/

      Reply
      • Manuel Huertas Marchena says:
        December 9, 2009 at 11:07 am

        Hi Sam,

        it’s not cool in fact…to waste time waiting for a render, that does not output what we expect, but I tried this setup myself and got awesome results, so I will just recommend you to re-check your rendering setup / lightning rig, make sure you have everything ok, also check for proper “physical” (dimensions) proportions for your object, I tend to work in a metric scale usually, verify the distance of your lights and your object, etc…
        and finally I will definitely recommend you to do test renders with lower quality specs, one you have an overall look close to what you want, then pull up the values in the render setup, and do a final render again, hope this helps

        Reply
        • Sam says:
          December 9, 2009 at 6:36 pm

          Hey Man!(uel) haha, thanks for taking some time to help me :)

          so… i checked everything once again and had the exact same configs as shown on the tutorial… after having this ckecked i tryied to lower my mutiplier values on the Vraylights, and guess what? the render turned out really really good after this. Now im using the values of 1,5; 1 and 2 for the lights 1, 2 and 3 respectively.

          i guess their dimensions (lights)(i noticed now, mine are a little bit bigger) and their higher multiplier values aswell, affected the final result of the final render. but now the problem is solved and everything is going just fine

          thanks again
          peace

    10. ti-JI says:
      December 9, 2009 at 10:31 am

      Thank you for your tutorial!!
      ….
      and 3D Studio Max on Mac?

      Reply
    11. tom says:
      December 9, 2009 at 1:09 pm

      3D Studio Max on Mac? do you use parallels or other ?

      Reply
    12. Marcus says:
      December 9, 2009 at 6:29 pm

      Yea.. i was wondering the same..

      3ds on Mac?

      Please, tell us :)

      Reply
      • Kaleb Aylsworth says:
        December 10, 2009 at 12:05 am

        As far as I know there are two ways: 1.) Bootcamp – Allows you to partition your hard drive, and then choose either Windows or MacOS on startup. It’s what I use, and it comes bundled with any of the newer MacOS. 2.) Parallels – Allows you to run Windows and MacOS simultaneously. Don’t know too much about it, to be honest, but I hear it bogs down your CPUs pretty bad.

        Reply
        • pratik says:
          December 10, 2009 at 11:02 am

          lol its just a theme i am using win xp

        • Evan Schaible says:
          December 16, 2009 at 1:13 pm

          I had a theme like that installed, called WinOSX or something. I installed Panda Internet Security 2010 and it saw that my NTLDR file was modded because of the boot screen changes, and it deleted it. Consequently windows wouldnt boot and I had to reinstall (took my a long time to figure out why my boot loader mysteriously vanished)…

          But anyhow, watch closely anything that mods system files, as AVs tend to wreak havoc on that sort of thing, just due to the nature of the theme (uxtheme.dll mods, NTLDR mods, etc.).

    13. David Cox says:
      December 11, 2009 at 5:49 am

      My rendering time was huge. Seriously it took over 10 hours. Any ideas?

      My PC is of a decent spec Core 2 Duo @ 3.04GHz
      2Gb DDR2 RAM
      6800GS gfx card before anyone asks.
      Oh and I am running XP

      Maybe I will check all dims again.

      Reply
      • Sam says:
        December 11, 2009 at 10:35 pm

        dude…over 10 HOURS!? thats a lot of time for a studio render…

        im rendering furniture too, just like in the tut, simple textures and stuff, but im taking between 6 and 7 minutes to render @ 1024×768

        but im running on considerably stronger specs
        core i7 3ghz, 6gb RAM DDR3 1600, RADEON HD 4890 on Vista Ultimate

        Reply
        • David Cox says:
          December 14, 2009 at 5:45 am

          I foudn out what my problem was, I set geometry to dynamic and it dropped my render to 6mins. Far more acceptable. Oh and I used self illuminated planes rather than VRay lights

    14. manu says:
      December 18, 2009 at 8:20 am

      hi, what config is your pc/ws and how long did it take to render one frame?

      Reply
    15. shri says:
      December 18, 2009 at 3:23 pm

      Thanx for this great step by step tut, and great results….pls post more on interior liting….

      Reply
    16. Anthny says:
      December 26, 2009 at 5:46 pm

      Thank you very much… for this great tutorial… Can you please Make some Interior and Exterior? Rendering Tutorials?

      Reply
    17. Heitor says:
      January 9, 2010 at 2:20 pm

      How long should my render take for something with 80.000 faces? I know it depends on some things, but I’m not sure it should take 8h to build the light cache :P .

      My computer is a Core2Quad Q6600, 4gb ram ddr2 800, geforce 8800GT, Windows 7 Ultimate

      Reply
    18. holake says:
      February 1, 2010 at 11:01 pm

      is it Mac theme or 3ds Max for OSX

      Reply
    19. Diego says:
      February 4, 2010 at 7:18 pm

      hmnm I think you forgot to tell us the color mapping parameters!
      the type, the dark and bright multiplier adn the gamma! please add it! thank you!

      Reply
    20. Toxico says:
      February 6, 2010 at 3:16 am

      Why you add Gradient Map to VRayLightMtl (3 Planes) ?

      Reply
    21. Toxico says:
      February 6, 2010 at 4:53 am

      Maybie for better reflection on chrome material?

      And 2nd question:
      How to make scene if I want reflection only on floor (not on back wall),
      and camera view is some in horizon ?
      To draw only VRay plane (and of course reflection to floor)?

      I see too much tutorials on net but people usualy use studio lighting without floor reflection (like here),
      or with floor reflection but cammera view is above.

      Reply
    22. Dmitry says:
      February 25, 2010 at 7:50 pm

      cool tutorial, Thanks a lot, men!

      Reply
    23. shafeeque says:
      March 8, 2010 at 11:41 am

      ur tutorials r very nice.thank u a looooooooooot .thank uuuuuuuuu i cant express my feeling through this……………….its tooooooooooo

      Reply
    24. Arun says:
      March 17, 2010 at 4:54 am

      pls tell me where i get V-ray for max..

      Reply

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