Advanced 3ds Max 01: Water without plugins using the art render

[@thrillhouse900]

I've been using max forever and the noise map with a push modifier for cheap waves is genius.

[@ziongite]

You know what is faster, and even looks better? Just use mental ray's preset water/ocean within the architectural and design material. With that you get almost photorealistic water, and it also renders fast as well. Now of course it won't have real geometric waves (it will be all inside the texture), so it is ideal for stuff where the camera is around 5+ metres above the water at all times, it wouldn't be ideal for a camera that drops down near water level at like only 1 metre above water level (since at that point it starts to become obvious there is no actual geometric depth). Of course Autodesk removed Mental Ray, since they got sick of paying licencing to Nvidia, as a result modern 3DS Max has Arnold renderer, which is something Autodesk purchased outright off some startup guy from Spain who was producing it with Sony originally. Arnold is slow and isn't very effective for the average user on their computer. All is not lost however, Vray still exists, the third party renderer. Vray is basically at least as good as Mental ray (in fact, probably a little better than Mental ray), therefore Vray in my opinion is the best choice for a modern version of Max. I still use an older version of Max to have access to Mental Ray, because I find that Mental ray is so mature as a renderer that it has so many options for just about anything, you have so much sampling control (you can set sampling contrast per colour), you can really make Mental Ray render very fast and achieve high quality, you have caustics, advanced reflections and refraction, so many preset materials, subsurface scattering, HDR etc. The only things that don't readily exist are a powerful motion blur system (however that is easily added in post, in After Effects with Pixel Motion Blur). As well as a good depth of field system (however that can also be added in post if the scene is simple), in a complex scene adding depth of field can't as easily be done in post with single frames (but you instead render out the distant stuff in one set of frames and the foreground stuff with transparency layers as separate frames, and via this you can easily add depth of field in post as well). One of the most important things I found as a creator, is practicality and speed. If the end viewer can't tell the difference, then there is no use wasting hours or days doing something that isn't noticed much in the final product.

[@eorichard]

It s strange to see that art renders more rapidly lots of polygons than bump mapping. Very interesting. ;)

[@HdiKarray]

great tutorial, but I would suggest you make a tutorial with Vray material instead and with much more ''huge'' scene friendly modifiers (I personally cannot use X7 Turbo smooth on a huge water surface along with an 8 million polygons scene)

[@alexandradoroshenko2469]

your video is super useful! thank you

[@Mayn5]

thank you so much for this you saved me

[@tommestre9440]

I like your videos. I have a quest, how can I add Material-ID in render elements. In that list I only see Art renderer noise filter.

[@albemanty]

a great job. Where can I find the wharf material (Wood) ?.. I'm also doing a wharf. Thanks in advance

[@kenzorman]

The material is based on this free texture www.textures.com/download/woodrough0109/36919 . I made it tile in photoshop then simply used the texture in both the diffuse and bump channels. It came out quite well so I didn't spend the time to extract the PBR set from the image using the substance tool set.

[@Chanell_0]

COOL!