Modelling & Rendering an Interior Scene using 3Ds Max and Vray – Day 2

Our recent Stunning Interiors roundup got a lot of people talking about interior rendering tutorials, and today we’re happy to bring in Flavius Cristea to finish discussing his process when creating stunning interior renders using 3Ds Max. With the modelling mostly done, today’s tutorial looks at material creation and the final rendering process, and is a great insight into the art of Arch-Vis Interiors. This tutorial is Day 2 Scene File Download

Step 1

Open your scene from the first part of this tutorial, we’ll carry on from there. As you notice in the final image above, I’ve added a candle and a coaster under the wine glass using very basic modeling as you can see in the image below. The techniques are the ones you’ve learnt from the previous part.

Step 2

Set V-ray as your main render engine. We are going to set some test render settings. Go to the V-ray tab and change the settings to those seen below, and then enable the V-ray Frame Buffer.

Info: The Adaptive DMC Image Sampler is what you’ll use 95% of the time if you’re a V-ray user. Here, we’ve also changed the Color Mapping type from Linear to Rheinhard which is actually a blend between Linear and HSV exponential. Now V-ray is hell of a renderer; it’s quite complex with a lot of options and I can’t explain every single of them here. While I will comment on some of the things I’ve changed, I can highly recommend this online V-ray Help site. It’s the best free source I know so far : http://www.spot3d.com/vray/help/150SP1/index.htm .

Note: Just before we begin, make sure you know how to see the maps in the viewport, by toggling on the Show map in viewport option shown below.

Step 3

Go to the Indirect Illumination tab. Turn on GIIrradiance map and Light cache map values to those shown below.

Info: You can make your own presets with these values. A Very Low preset as shown here would be set with one purpose in mind: fast render times. Make sure you check Show calc.phase on, especially for the light cache, as you’ll get immediate results while this map is computing, and sometimes this is enough for you to adjust the ligtning or colors etc without having to wait for the final image to render.

Step 4 – The Walls

Because by now you should already have an idea of the color of the the walls, there is no point in making test renders with gray walls. Select the walls and isolate them by hitting ALT +Q. Select the two polygons shown. In the Editable poly options for the object, scroll down until you find Polygon:Material ID’s. Where it says Set ID, input 2 and hit Enter. Press CTRL+I to invert the selection and select all the other polygons .In the Set ID, input 1 and hit Enter.

Info: You have assigned a group of polygons to a specific ID ( 1 and 2 ) . These ID’s work in conjunction with the Multi/Sub-Object material which we’ll use later.

Tip: Isolate your object when assigning materials, so that you can easily rotate around them to see if everything is ok.

Step 5

Open the Material Editor (press M ). Pick the first color slot and click the Standard button. Choose Multi/Sub-Object. Set the number of materials to 2. Click on the first material (it says White(VrayMtl) in the screenshot below and will say Standard in your editor) and select a Vray Material. Set the Diffuse color to an off white (RGB: 250;250;250). Click on Go to parent to go back to the Multi/Sub-Object Material. Click on the second material (it says 7 in the screenshot below), and again select a V-ray Material. Set the Diffuse to RGB 106;44;63, and when done, drag and drop the entire Multi/Sub-Object material onto the walls material (the material I’ve highlighted in cyan).

Step 6 – The Ceiling

Unhide the ceiling and drag the white material from our Multimaterial on it. Be very careful to drag the button as I show in the picture below. If you were to be inside the white material and drag it, it would not work correctly, and 3Ds Max would assign the entire Multi/Sub-object material to the ceiling- something you don’t want!

Tip: Remember this way of assigning independent materials from a Multi/Sub-object one because it’s a technique we’ll use quite often throughout this tutorial.

Step 7 – The Floor

Select the floor and isolate it. Add a UVW modifier, set it to Planar and check Real world map size. Assign a new VrayMtl to the floor. and set the Refl. glossiness to 0.78. Now put the wood-01_d wood texture in the diffuse Bitmap slot. Again, check Use Real-World Scale and set the Width and Height to 700 cm.

Info: You need to tell 3ds max how to put a texture( non procedural of course ) on an object. This is where UVW mapping comes in. Since real-world scale was being used, you had to also check that in the UVW settings. I know that in the real-world, my texture would be around 700 cm by 700 cm, so that’s why that value has been used.

Step 8

In the Reflection slot put a Fallof map. Inside the Front slot ( Map#8 in the screenshot below) put your reflection map (wood-01_r) and use the exact same UV Coordinate settings as for the diffuse map (700 cm by 700 cm and check Real world scale). Now go back to the parent (once) and put the exact same map with the same settings in the Side slot, but in the Output tab click Invert. Now go back to the Fallof map settings and set the Side map Percentage (highlighted in pink in the screenshot) to 40. In the Bump map slot, add in your bump map and use exactly the same settings as with the other maps above. Set the Bump value from the default of 30 to 10.

Info: You could have just put the reflection map in the reflection slot but the results wouldn’t be overly realistic. Here you have used a falloff map instead, which changes the reflection based upon the two maps used. This is how it works: If you were to look straight down at the floor, only map#8 (the front one) would be active. The more you tilt your head however, the more the front map would blend with the side one. Finally, if you were to look almost parallel to the floor, only the side map would be active, and only at the percentage value set (in our case 40%) – the rest would be represented by black, meaning no reflection. To find these values I actually studied my own floor! Try it! Look at your floor and change your viewing angle to see how the refleciton changes. I should point out that pure white reflects 100% and pure black reflects 0% – the greys are in between. Finally the Glossiness was adjusted to 0.78 to blur the reflection.

Note: The 0.78 value and the 40% value for the side slot map were obtained by trial and error after completing several test renders.

Step 9 – The Window

Make a new V-ray Mtl and name it Windows (I won’t say this every time, but it’s very useful to name your materials!) Change the Diffuse color to almost black (RGB:8,8,8) and the Reflection color to RGB:133,133,133. Check on Fresnel reflection and set the Refl.Glossiness to 0.94. Assign this material to the window frame. Now create another Vray Material with a Diffuse color of 0,0,0, and a Reflection and Refraction color of around 250,250,250. Turn on Fresnel reflections and set the Fog color to a very, very pale green – I used RGB :243,247,245. Set the Fog multiplier to 0.2 and check Affect shadows. Assign this material to the actual glass.

Info: The window frame material is as basic as it can get.The glass is also very simple, but be careful when using Fog color. Vray is, in my opinion, way too sensitive, and you have to use really, really pale colors and low multiplier values. Checking Affect Shadows is not so important in this scene, because there is no light coming from the outside. But if for instance you had sunlight in your scene, this would allow you to get more realistic, opaque shadows from the glass.

Step 10 – The Lights

Hide everything except the walls and the floor. Now place 3 V-ray area lights as you can see in the picture below. The 3rd Area light is at 100 cm above the ground. The second one almost touches the floor and the first one is at 232 cm on Z.