optimizing your workflow to meet visualization deadlines...

Optimizing Your Workflow to Meet Visualization Deadlines with Autodesk® 3ds Max® Design Eddie Perlberg - Autodesk

AV3499 As the expectations for visualization projects grow higher and higher, the time to complete

them grows shorter and shorter. In this class, we will look at three distinct areas where you can optimize your workflow to make your deadlines with little or no stress: before Autodesk 3ds Max Design, in 3ds Max Design, and after 3ds Max Design software. We will look at model optimization, linking and rendering philosophies, and post-production practices.

Learning Objectives

At the end of this class, you will be able to:

Describe model preparation techniques for ensuring clean data

Optimize rendering settings for efficiency

Take full advantage of key features to streamline output times

Engage compositing techniques to bring a project together

About the Speaker Eddie is a member of the Autodesk family representing Autodesk 3ds Max Design, Autodesk Showcase and Autodesk Revit among other titles. Prior to this adventure, Eddie has performed as a CAD manager where he successfully implemented Autodesk Revit and Autodesk Architectural Desktop for a number of firms in the Milwaukee area. Eddie has over 2 decades of experience developing architectural and visualization solutions. He has taught a variety of classes and is a recognized speaker at numerous seminars including siggraph, VIZ Masters, AIA and The Greenbuild Expo. Eddie is also a contributing animator for the Bradley Center, home of the Milwaukee Bucks, Admirals, and Marquette Golden Eagles. He is experienced as a CAD manager, designer, and visualization artist. [email protected]

Optimizing Your Workflow to Meet Visualization Deadlines with Autodesk® 3ds Max® Design

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Before

Storyboarding

A young Walt Disney looking at storyboards for an animated film.

Storyboarding has been a part of the creation of films from the birth of the industry, yet seems to be the first overlooked component of a Design Visualization project. A storyboard organizes each step you’re going to tell in visual form or a visual script. By taking the time to work out the key visual moments and flows, you will be dictating the required tasks, level of detail and giving you a great preconstruction tool to get customer buy off. The storyboards can be used as part of the contract agreement and will prevent surprises and last minute changes from the customer. Often appearing like a comic book, consider the frames of a storyboard to be similar to the Details of a Construction Document set. Here, the artist can work out creative content and will always help keep the project on track and focused.

Storyboard Template


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(STORYBOARDS: ©LUCASFILM LTD. & TM. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED)

A Galaxy Far, Far Away

One of the keys to success with a storyboard is to make it binding. All artists, stakeholders and owners must “Stick with the Script”.

Hollywood also gives us another great key to staying on a short time table with the concept of sets.


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The Making of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back

Here we can see that the film makers did not create the entire Cloud City to create the shot above. Yet so often, we as design visualization artists INSIST on having the entire project in our .max scene. Again, storyboards dictate the “sets” needed to create our shots and reduce the amount of data processed to create it.

In the following sections, we’ll look at make our Visualization sets more efficient.


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In “Design application” strategies Most of our design visualizations will start in another application. More compiling than modeling, our visualization scenes will focus more on assembly than making. Like a chef bringing ingredients together in a great dish and cooking them in the 3ds Max Design oven, our visualizations will be better for choosing quality ingredients.

But, before we start pulling in the stars of the show into 3ds Max Design, there are some techniques that make them more efficient.

File Linking File Link is best understood through a few simple principles:

Changes in AutoCAD, Revit, and other applications can change the data viewed in 3ds Max, but changes in 3ds Max never change the data in AutoCAD, Revit, or the other application.

Creating a file link is a one-way process that supports the central role of AutoCAD, AutoCAD Architecture, or Revit in developing and keeping a record of your core design database. Many changes made in AutoCAD, AutoCAD Architecture, or Revit will appear in 3ds Max after you reload a file link. These include adding or removing objects, moving objects, changing material assignments (specific to AutoCAD Architecture and Revit drawings), and enabling Live Section objects (specific to AutoCAD Architecture drawings). Changes made in 3ds Max, such as moving objects, changing material assignments, and adding lights, will never appear in your AutoCAD, AutoCAD Architecture, or Revit drawing.

Changes you can make in AutoCAD, Revit, or another application should be made in AutoCAD, Revit, or the other application.

Changes that you make in AutoCAD, AutoCAD Architecture, or Revit become part of the design database, whereas changes you make in 3ds Max appear only in the renderings you produce.

Changes in AutoCAD, Revit, or another application aren't reflected in 3ds Max unless you choose them to be.

When you make changes to drawing files or FBX files, those changes will not appear in 3ds Max unless you use the File Link Manager Reload command. When you reload a link in 3ds Max, you can choose to update just the geometry from AutoCAD, Revit, or the other application; you can reload only specific objects; or (with AutoCAD Architecture and Revit drawings) you can choose to update both the geometry and the material assignments.

You can transform (move, rotate, or scale) linked objects and blocks that appear in 3ds Max, and these types of changes are not lost upon reload. If you have moved, rotated, or scaled linked objects and want the objects to resume the position and scale they have in the original drawing file, use the Reset Position function.

3ds Max integrates linked AutoCAD, Revit, or other programs' data with data specific to 3ds Max.

In addition to the linked geometry and material assignments, 3ds Max allows you to create or merge into your scene many types of data from other sources, including:

Lighting objects for simulating light fixtures and daylight conditions.

Entourage objects such as surrounding buildings, terrain, trees, cars, and people.


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Advanced rendering material effects that simulate the rich visual variety of any imaginable material. You can take advantage of materials that appear on objects created in 3ds Max, and you can create your own material effects using the Material Editor. Materials created with the Material Editor can be assigned to any component in your scene.

Bitmaps for use as environment backgrounds. You can use still images in a variety of formats, or even animated movies, as a rendering background to create stunning photomontages that appear to place your proposed design right into the actual location.

AutoCAD Autodesk 3ds Max Design and AutoCAD have had a wonderful relationship since the 2 where introduced in the Yost Group acquisition in 1995.

Layers AutoCAD Layers will serve two functions in 3ds Max Design space. First, as part of the linking process, layer allow for filtering data important to the visualization and exclude data necessary to design documentation. Secondly, Layer from AutoCAD are directly translated into layers in 3ds Max Design.

Import/Linking settings One of the most underused aspects of file linking in 3ds max Design is the reload button. During the reload process, visualization artists can add or reduce layers and vary levels of detail.

.dwg linked with ½” surface deviation Total polys 524

Same .dwg reloaded with 1/8” surface deviation and the Box layer added.

Total polys 168,744 not including those added for the box.

Revit Visibility Graphics

Like file linking for .dwgs above, the ability of the technology to reload and reload often gives the artist to control incoming design data. Unlike a .dwg, there are no layers. So, the artist controls what is coming in using Visibility Graphics in Revit. Also, these settings cannot be adjusted outside of the Revit session.

Level of Detail The level of Detail in Autodesk Revit is directly related to Family definitions. As a rule, the Family creator will utilize the naming conventions to define the amount of detail built into the family. I know I do. Using lower levels of detail in Autodesk Revit will


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reduce the number of faces imported or linked. If linked, the LOD can be increased and reloaded.

Section Box When talking about the creation of sets and focusing our models to fit our needs, nothing helps you do that better than using section boxes in Revit.

Section Box turned on Section Box applied and focused

The good news is that the Section Box is assigned in the view. Since the same project can have numerous views, we can isolate numerous parts of the same project for different renderings.

Inventor Body Objects

Body Objects in 3ds Max Design have many benefits. Unfortunately, speed is not one of them. During the rendering process, body objects must first be converted to editable meshes and then passed to the renderer.

Materials Applying materials to individual surfaces in Inventor results in Multi-SubObject Materials in 3ds Max Design. Not that that’s a bad thing, just for your info.

Finding more Models Are you modeling? Why? Chances are that someone has done that for you. Or at least they have given you a great starting point. But, where to look? Well, as the list of importable file formats grows, so does the list of available models.


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I’m not going to teach you how to use an internet search engine. I will point out one of the best kept secrets of most Autodesk design applications, Autodesk Seek at seek.autodesk.com.

Autodesk Seek provides manufacturers the ability to share their design data with you the designer for numerous file formats.

During

Scripts Like scripting for other applications, scripts in 3ds Max Design are sequences of instructions used to automate a task. Scripts are typically text files containing coded instructions for a particular application. In 3ds Max, the MAXScript utility supports a scripting language.

MAXScript scripts have the file name extension .ms. By default, they are saved in the scripts folder.

Very often, scripts are written to automate or optimize mundane tasks. They are also written to extend the capabilities of 3ds Max Design.

http://seek.autodesk.com/


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For example, as we link in a Revit model, its materials are brought along in the .fbx or .rvt file. The materials now in 3ds Max Design, by default, do not have Ambient Occlusion enabled or their parameters accessible. With the SoulBurn Script collection by Neil Blevins, www.NeilBlevins.com, I am able to collect all materials I want to manipulate and change them all at once.

Before tackling numerous tasks, see if someone has written a script to automate the process. If you find yourself repeating the same task over and over, consider coming up with a script of your own.

Lighting

Raytraced Shadow optimization Adjusts the depth of the quadtree used by the ray-tracer. Greater quadtree depth values can improve ray-tracing time at the cost of memory use. However, there is a depth value where the performance improvement is offset by the time it takes to generate the quadtree itself.

Max quadtree depth.

Attenuation Lights in 3ds Max/Design will shine to infinity by default and will try to calculate shadows for all objects within the beam of light. Calculating light infinitely is truly a waste of hardware resources and nowhere is this more important than exterior lighting where light beams are not contained within geometry.

In nature, light attenuates at an inverse square rate. That is, its intensity diminishes in proportion to the square of the distance from the light source. It is common for attenuation to be even greater when light is dispersed by the atmosphere, especially when there are dust particles in the atmosphere, or fog or clouds.

A. Inverse decay

B. Inverse square decay

The graphs show the decay curves.

http://www.neilblevins.com/


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High rise apartment with 98 instanced photometric lights

Rendered with no Attenuation assigned 44 seconds

Rendered with Attenuation assigned 21 Seconds

Reduce your faces

Billboard background props and entourage

Images are placed on flat planes and positioned beyond geometry

When rendered, the image blends into the background, yet establishes the outskirts of

the village.

LookAt Constraint The LookAt constraint controls an object’s orientation so that it’s always looking at another object or objects. It locks an object’s rotation so that one of its axes points toward the target object, or the weighted average of target positions.

This is a great way to make sure your billboards always point at the camera.


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Tree billboards with a LookAt constraint linked to the camera – Frame 0

Frame 45. Notice as the camera moves around the circle, the tree billboards reorient to continue to show the same face to the camera.

ProOptimizer The ProOptimizer feature is an optimization tool that helps you reduce the number of vertices (and so the number of faces) in an object while preserving the object’s appearance. Options let you maintain material, mapping, and vertex color information in the optimized model.

Stapler brought in from Inventor 303,898 faces

Same Stapler with ProOptimizer applied. Optimization level at 10% 22,255 faces

Same Stapler now with Optimization Level at 2.0% 3381 faces

At this proximity, by reducing values below 10%, you will start to see a noticeable change in geometry. If this represents a prop on a desk, these lower levels would be acceptable.


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Proxies This object type is useful when scenes contain many instances of an object, such as an auditorium with hundreds or thousands of instances of a seat model. It is also particularly useful for objects with extremely high polygon counts, in that it obviates both the conversion to mental ray format and the presence of the source object at render time, thus saving time and freeing up a great deal of memory for rendering. The only drawbacks are the reduced fidelity of the proxy object in the viewports and the inability to edit proxies directly.

Original meshes on the left converted to

proxies on the right Original Meshes and Proxies rendered

Different rendering technologies have different terms and techniques for creating proxies, but the outcome is the same. When you convert an object to mr Proxy format, the proxy does not inherit the object’s material. Also, if you plan to modify the source object, do so before converting it to mr Proxy format. Because the mr Proxy geometry is loaded by mental ray at render time, the renderer ignores any modifiers that change the geometry. The one exception is the Skew modifier, which affects the object’s transformation matrix rather than its sub-object geometry, and thus can modify a proxy.


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Low Poly Modeling techniques

Revit File linked 154,835 faces

Revit File Linked

55 seconds

Low Poly building - UVW Unwrap modifier with a single bitmap Material

65 faces – (50,824 total faces)

UVW UnWrapped model

00:16 seconds

Low Poly building – Camera Map per pixel Material

65 faces – (50,824 total faces)

Camera map per pixel 00:15 seconds


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File Management and organization

Containers The container is a helper object that can control a collection of other objects. You can store its contents in a separate file, which is then available for use by other members of your team. Actions such as transforming, deleting, saving, unloading, and cloning a container also apply to its contents.

Retail Project with surrounding buildings inserted as Containers Unloaded 05:20

Loaded using Low Poly Proxies 05:41

Loaded using full resolution models. 08:31


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Substitute modifier The Substitute modifier lets you quickly replace one or more objects with another in the viewports or at render time. The substitute object can be instanced from the current scene or can be referenced from an external file.

Low level of detail blocks in design app

VIZBlocks in 3ds Max Design with the Substitute modifier applied.

When you file link to a DWG file, the file is imported to 3ds Max as groups of VIZBlocks. If the pivot points of the VIZBlock and the substituted geometry do not match, you may not obtain the desired results. Adjust the pivot point of the VIZBlock object using the Adjust Geometry button to align the substituted geometry correctly.


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The Level Of Detail Utility The Level Of Detail utility lets you display different geometric complexity or level of detail based on its size in the rendered image. You create several versions of the same object each with different levels of detail, group them as one, and then run the Level Of Detail utility, which automatically creates a special LOD controller as a Visibility track. The LOD controller then hides and unhides the objects in the group, depending on their size in the rendered scene.

High Level of Detailed model rendered when close up.

1,224,584 faces

Multi/SubObject Material with transparency and reflections

Render Time - :34 seconds

Low Level of Detail model rendered when the building is 25% the rendering size or below

592 faces

Single Unwrapped material with no reflections or transparencies.

Render Time - :02 seconds

The main purpose of this utility is to save time in rendering complex objects and in manipulating objects in the viewports. Since a portion of rendering speed is directly related to the number of faces that must be rendered in a scene, using the Level Of Detail utility lets you reduce the number of rendered faces as an object reduces its apparent size. In addition, you can use this utility to display a simple stand-in for a more complex object in the viewports. Since the stack is not calculated for objects hidden in the viewports, you can speed up viewport manipulation by using this utility to substitute complex stack objects with simple stand-ins.

Like the substitute modifier above, you can use the Level of Detail utility to create objects that display very simple geometry in the viewports, while displaying complex geometry in the rendered scene. Create a grouped Level of Detail object consisting of only two objects, the complex object and the simple object. Select the simple object in the list window and, in the Thresholds are, set its Min Size and its Max Size to 0. This will display the simple object in the viewports, but the complex object will always appear in the rendered scene, regardless of its apparent size.

In order to work as expected, the user must first change the Custom UI and Default Switcher… to Max.mentalray


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Animation preview tools Grab Viewport - You can generate a preview of an animation. These commands are in the Grab Viewport group on the Tools menu.

A viewport grab (Create Still Image File) appears in a Rendered Frame Window, where you can save it to a bitmap format. A preview (Create Animated Sequence File) can help you preview the animation in your scene. The preview uses lighting but not materials, so it renders much more quickly than a fully rendered animation.


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After

Rendering Rendering is when all of the ingredients are brought together and cooked. Often it is thee focus of conversation when it comes to ‘making our projects go faster’. And while we could dedicate our entire session to this single topic, we would barely scratch the surface. It would be literally impossible to cover all of the countless tips, tricks and settings changes that can have a dramatic impact on frame by frame rendering times. So, due to the broad nature of the subject and plentiful rendering technologies with unique settings and terminology that could be introduced, instead, I am going to encourage you to master your render of choice. Whether you work within the shipped renderers like mental ray, iray or scanline, or if opt to purchase a third party system like Vray, finalRender™ or one of the many other third party products available, the best way to tune the renderer is to be familiar with it.

Rendering tools

Rendering Presets After coming up with your favorite settings, take a moment to capture them to a rendering preset. Render presets also allow for numerous configurations at varying levels of quality and speed.


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These presets will also be available in the batch rendering tool discussed later in this chapter.

Net Rendering Network rendering is a means of mass-processing multiple rendering tasks or jobs. In order to facilitate network rendering, Autodesk Backburner

TM is installed with 3ds Max. The Backburner

software is responsible for coordinating how job assignments are processed.

Rendering networks are sometimes called “render farms.” In 3ds Max, one computer is set up as the network Manager. The Manager "farms out" or distributes the work to rendering Servers.

In the diagram above, 8 images are being generated at a time.

Manager Server 8

Server 1

Server 3

Server 4 Monitor

Server 2

Server 5 Server 6 Server 7


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With 3ds Max Design installed on each of the servers, the manager starts the software and sends the file to be rendered. Settings allow for sending all of the required auxiliary files or, with a little planning, required files could be loaded on a network server for simultaneous access and storage.

Some artists opt to purchase a render server which takes numerous computer systems, motherboards, memory, gpu’s, etc. and puts them into one box. Often, these render systems are configured and optimized solely for the purpose of rendering and dramatically speed up the process.

Split Scan Lines It’s apparent how network rendering can help with animation rendering. What may be less apparent is how networking rendering can help with large format still images. In the Options area of the Network Job Assignment box check On Split Scan Lines. Despite the renderer assigned, it will divide the height into strips and assign each strip to each server. This utility will also stich the strips together to form the final image.


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Batch Rendering Network rendering can be equally useful if you have only a single PC and need to render a number of images. You can assign the jobs that need to be rendered and Backburner can manage the rendering of each job while you're away from the computer. Commonly, jobs are assigned submitted just before you leave the office. When you arrive the next morning, all your rendering are waiting for you to review.

The Batch Rendering dialog is for rendering different aspects of the same scene, such as views from different cameras. To batch-render a number of different scenes, use Backburner or command-line rendering.

Distributed rendering Many rendering technologies, including mental ray included with 3ds Max Design, provide for distributed bucket rendering. Like Satellite rendering above, this technique takes advantage of multiple machines to add horsepower to completing the task. Unique to “DBR” rendering is that from the rendering machine, the technique does not start a session of 3ds Max Design on other machines to complete a frame, but instead adds the processors of the machines to assist with the frame its working on.

In the example below, this rendering will be using 34 total processors to complete the image on the rendering machine.


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Of course, sending large amounts of data over the network may dramatically add to translation times. Also, when rendering, 3ds Max Design will use 100% of the processors of the machines included in the DBR list. This will cause performance on those machines to drop. Using these machines without alerting their users may induce stern emails and loud discussions throughout the office.

Area to Render I’ve often commented that up to 1/3

rd of visualization project’s timeline is dedicated to “tweaking”,

adjusting materials, shadows, lights, etc. Area to Render allows the artist to focus the test rendering directly on tweaked element. This drop-down list provides the available Area to Render options. Choose View, Selected, Region, Crop, or Blowup.

When using Region, Crop, or Blowup, set the region with the Edit Region control (red square below).

4 Cores

2 Cores 12 Cores

12 Cores

4 Cores

Rendering Machine


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Original Rendering – 400x467 01:48

Wall color change – Region Rendering 167x124 00:41

Wall Color Change – Cropped rendering 167x124 00:42

Wall Color Change – Blowup Rendering 400x467 02:27

Test Rendering Using the options in the Time Output area of the Common tab in the Render Setup dialog box, we can create multiple forms of test and validation renderings.

Then utilizing the Skip Existing Images option in the Render Output area we can continue to build our number of frames while controlling quality and catching potential errors.


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Range: All the frames between and including the two numbers you specify.

Every Nth

Frame or Regular sample of frames. Available only for Active Time Segment and Range output, it allows you to capture renderings at a set interval. For example, type 8 to render every 8th frame. Almost like storyboarding your animation, with this option you can see the effects of your settings through a number of frames.

Compositing

Render Elements Rendering to elements lets you separate various types of information in the rendered output into individual image files. This can be useful when you work with some image-processing, compositing, and special-effects software.

Very often making adjustments to specular highlights or replacing images is faster and easier in 2d space rather than re-rendering.

In the following example, we’ll take a good rendering and make it great in a photo editing software to make it great. We’ll also use 2D photo editing techniques to change the color of the floor and add richness to the furniture fabric.


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Original rendering Some of the Rendered elements

Ambient Occlusion render elements Multiply blend layer

Object ID 1 render elements Soft Light layer 40% Opacity

Object ID 2 render element Gamma Corrected Normal Layer

Material ID render element Used as a mask to change the color


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Z-Depth render element Used as a mask for Depth of Field Blur

Rounded corners (PhotoShop layer)

Original rendering Composite in Photoshop

Notice: The Color of the floor is enhanced The glow around light fixtures is added The fabric on the furniture is richer Ambient Occlusion is darker Background is blurred


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Original rendering (again)

Final Results

Conclusion Without question, this does not represent the entire list of time saving practices, techniques and workflows available to 3ds max and 3ds Max Design users. By having experienced these, I am hoping you will start to see gains immediately, and those will in turn, help you become more profitable.

I’m also hoping they afford you the luxury of adding extra creative effort to your projects. And most of all, inspire you to see the value of finding time saving effort and search out techniques of your own.


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Notes:__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________


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Notes:

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