From the course: 3ds Max 2024 Essential Training

Interactive production rendering - 3ds Max Tutorial

From the course: 3ds Max 2024 Essential Training

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Interactive production rendering

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In this chapter we'll get an introduction to lighting in 3ds Max. To see most accurate feedback setting up lights, we can run an interactive production rendering, or IPR. We previously saw how to set up the nitrous viewport options to get a good approximation of the lighting and shading. Nitrous can render some pretty good direct illumination but it does not support ray tracing. That means there is no bounce light and no proper reflections. there are some other limitations. When designing lighting we should preview the results in our final production renderer, which is Arnold by default in Max. There are actually two forms of IPR for Arnold. Active Shade and the Arnold Render View. Active Shade is the generic IPR that works with other renderers. The Arnold Render View or ARV only works with Arnold. Each has its advantages. ActiveShade can run in a viewport. The ARV cannot. ARV has helpful features not found in ActiveShade, such as snapshots and rendering statistics. But for the sake of simplicity and compatibility with other renderers, I'm going to use ActiveShade in this course. Let's go into the Render Setup dialog. On the main toolbar we've got some teapot icons on the far right. Render Setup is the one that looks like a teapot with a gear. Click on that. Up at the top is a pull-down list labeled Target. When we choose a different target from this pull-down list the settings that we choose will apply to that target mode. So we can store different settings for each target. The default target is Production Rendering Mode which is for offline rendering of images to disk. It's not interactive. Let's switch the target mode over to Active Shade mode and then we need to choose a renderer. The default renderer is Arnold. If we click on that pull-down list we'll see we have a couple other options. We'll talk more about this when we get to the chapter on rendering. For now we're just going to use Arnold. To maximize productivity we want to make a couple quick adjustments to the processing settings for Arnold. In the System tab in the Render Settings rollout down at the bottom there's a section labeled Threads. And that gives us control over how Arnold uses the computer's processing power. We can set it up to allow some processing overhead so that other operations in 3ds Max won't be slowed down. When Auto Detect Threads is enabled, that's going to use 100% of your computer's processing power. Now you need to know how many cores your CPU has, or more specifically, how many virtual cores are available on your Windows computer. I'm working on a quad-core processor with hyper-threading enabled, which gives eight virtual cores, or eight threads. I want to leave two threads open. That way I won't have any issues with interactivity in Macs. The way to do that is to disable auto-detect threads and then set the number of threads manually. Since I've got eight threads available, If I set the Threads value to 6, then I'm leaving two threads open for other processes, such as interactivity in the viewports. There's actually a more elegant way to do this. If we set Threads to a negative value, we'll subtract that number from the total number of threads available. If I set the Threads value to negative 2, then I will end up using 6 out of my 8 cores or threads. Now of course if you have a different number of cores or virtual cores on your machine you'll want to set these values differently. But for ActiveShade I recommend leaving two threads open. Otherwise you may have some issues with interactivity. I should mention in passing that in the device rollout down here we have the ability to render on the CPU or on the GPU. The GPU mode uses the NVIDIA rendering hardware to accelerate the rendering. It's only compatible with NVIDIA, not with AMD or Intel. And it's usually much faster than the default CPU rendering. But again, there are some limitations. If you want to learn about GPU rendering, check out my course 3ds Max Rendering with Arnold for version 2020. Moving on, in the Arnold Renderer tab there's an option that will give us a little bit faster feedback especially for slow rendering scenes. In the Sampling and Ray Depth rollout at the bottom there's a section Adaptive and Progressive. We want to enable Progressive Render. For interactive production rendering it's helpful to enable the switch Progressive Render. This updates the pixels in the frame randomly. So Arnold draws the image in passes. The first pass is the Preview Pass which is a very blocky image and it's drawn in a series of square regions called buckets. When the Preview Pass is finished Arnold draws the Final Pass. If Progressive Render is turned off then the Final Pass is also drawn in buckets. But if Progressive Render is on the pixels of the Final Pass are updated randomly. And that gives us faster feedback because we don't have to wait for buckets to draw. The entire frame updates together, starting out very grainy and getting progressively more refined. Ok we can initiate the ActiveShade window using the resolution which we've set in the Common tab as we saw previously. We can either click on the big Render button within the Render Setup dialog, or we can click on the ActiveShade Render button over here on the main toolbar which now looks like a teapot with a triangle which is meant to indicate a play button. So we can either click on that or the big render button. Either way, the ActiveShade window will launch and we'll start to see our interactive production rendering. And it is fully interactive. We're rendering the perspective view right now because that's what's chosen here in view to render. If I go over to that perspective view and just navigate, move around with the middle mouse button, we can see that the Arnold rendering is updating in real time. And we can zoom in or dolly in, Control-Alt, middle mouse. We can also manipulate objects. We can, for example, select that desk object and grab the Move tool and reposition it. And the Active Shade window updates automatically. OK, I'll undo that with Control-Z. There's an even more intuitive way to use Active Shade. We can load it directly into a viewport. I'll close the Active Shade window and close the Render Setup window. Let's go over to my Perspective view, and before launching ActiveShade in a viewport we should be aware of the resolution of that viewport. A large viewport will have an adverse effect on interactivity. That is if the viewport resolution is high, for example if the viewport is maximized, then that's going to introduce some latency in navigation, or in editing scene parameters. So ActiveShade works best in a small viewport like this one. Within each viewport, the third of the viewport menus from the left is called the Shading menu, and mine currently says Viewport Realistic because I previously created a viewport preset by that name. Click on that Shading menu, and we can just initiate ActiveShade from that menu from the very top. Go ahead and click ActiveShade using Arnold. And that'll take just a moment to initialize, but once again we have a fully interactive rendering here. So we can move our desk around, for example, and that'll update, or I can undo that with Ctrl-Z, or I can navigate around, once again, with the middle mouse and position, or dolly forward, Ctrl-Alt, middle mouse. It's fully interactive. We can also overlay some Nitrous elements. We can see that we've got the Nitrous viewport highlighting, that's always there. We've got our gizmo for the move tool. We can also do things like enable a wireframe shading mode. So what we can do here is press the F4 key and that will enable edged faces which superimposes those edged faces over our Arnold rendering which gives us a kind of a hidden line effect. Okay, we can turn that back off again with F4. And we can exit out of ActiveShade by clicking on the cancel button up here at the top in the viewport menus. And that is how to use ActiveShade in a floating window or directly in a viewport.

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