V.ray

Among a number of rendering engines, in terms of popularity, VRay has his permanent place in the lead. It is the one of the most widespread rendering plug-ins worldwide. Though, as far as I know, a great majority of VRay users have only superficial knowledge of VRay possibilities. The book might be a good occasion to change it: start learning or develop and strengthen this knowledge.

When I first time took VRay - THE COMPLETE GUIDE into my hand, I thought to myself: how to read through such an amount of information and don't give up? But it was just the first impression. The second was completely different: I couldn't help feeling that it's more a book of graphics provided with explanations, than a text supported by graphics. It's because of author's assumption: "images and tests (...) can explain a renderization program better than words". That's why we can find here over 2300 color images and around 3200 renders, referring to all the VRay commands. A whole closed in a hard-covered, 1024 page book.

But let's start from the beginning: what kind of publication are we talking about? Well, as we can see on the hardcover, it is "a book for professionals". But please don't be put off by these words: the "reader's system requirements" are just basic knowledge of 3D technology and 3ds Max or other 3D software, such as Rhino, Cinema 4D and more. The word "professional" in this context means that it's mostly destined for CG artists working in 3D section. Just like Francesco Legrenzi (born in 1977), the author of the book. Currently he is a freelancer, after four years working as a director of the Modeling & Lighting department in an architect's studio in Milan, Italy. With VRay renderer he met a bit earlier, in 2001, when he had started taking part in the management of a small Italian CG portal, www.treddi.com.

The main aim of the book is to show how to create photorealistic visualizations and simply achieve the result we want to. Author believes that to gain this purpose, one should has, leaving aside the VRay itself, a basic knowledge of instrument we use: a computer with it's software and hardware and a little bit of art and science information. As VRay renderer versions for different programs vary from themselves only by interface, the guide is helpful for all the VRay users. Thus, in this book it's secrets are presented on the 3ds Max VRay version example. Let's take a look inside. 

After Effects

Shape layers are created automatically when you draw a shape with any of the drawing tools. You can customize and transform an individual shape or its entire layer to create interesting results. In this lesson, you will use shape layers to build dynamic and whimsical designs on the street and driveways of a neighborhood.

First, you’ll preview the final movie and set up the project.

Make sure the following files are in the Lessons/Lesson04 folder on your hard disk, or download them from your Account page at www.peachpit.com now:

In the Assets folder: Beat.aif, drop.aep, Melody.aif, tracking.aep, Tracking.mp4

In the Sample_Movie folder: Lesson04.mov

Open and play the Lesson04.mov sample movie to see what you will create in this lesson. When you are done, quit QuickTime Player. You may delete this sample movie from your hard disk if you have limited storage space.

As you start After Effects, restore the default application settings. See “Restoring default preferences” on page 2.

Start After Effects, and then immediately hold down Ctrl+Alt+Shift (Windows) or Command+Option+Shift (Mac OS) to restore default preferences settings. When prompted, click OK to delete your preferences.

Close the Start window.

After Effects opens to display a blank, untitled project.

Choose File > Save As > Save As, and then navigate to the Lessons/Lesson04/Finished_Project folder.

Name the project Lesson04_Finished.aep, and then click Save.

Creating the composition

Next, you’ll import the files you need and create the composition. You’ll import two footage items and two saved project files.

Double-click an empty area of the Project panel to open the Import File dialog box.

Navigate to the Lessons/Lesson04/Assets folder on your hard disk, Ctrl-click (Windows) or Command-click (Mac OS) to select the Beat.aif and Melody.aif files, and then click Import or Open.

Choose File > New > New Folder to create a new folder in the Project panel.

Name the folder Audio, press Enter or Return to accept the name, and then drag the two audio files you imported into the Audio folder. Then expand the folder so you can see its contents.

Double-click an empty area of the Project panel to open the Import File dialog box again.

Navigate to the Lessons/Lesson04/Assets folder. Ctrl-click (Windows) or Command-click (Mac OS) to select the drop.aep and tracking.aep project files, and then click Import or Open. The video files and other elements you will need later are imported with the projects.

Now you’re ready to create the composition.

Press Ctrl+N (Windows) or Command+N (Mac OS) to create a new composition.

To specify 10 seconds, type 10. in the Duration box. The period indicates that there are no units in that position. To specify 10 minutes, type 10.. in the box.

In the Composition Settings dialog box, name the composition Spiral, select the HDTV 1080 24 preset, and set the Duration to 10:00. Then click OK.

After Effects opens the new composition in both the Timeline and Composition panels.

InPage

InPage is a word processor and page layout software for languages such as Urdu, Persian, Pashto and Arabic under Windows and Mac which was first developed in 1994. It is primarily used for creating pages in the language of Urdu, using the Nasta`līq (نستعلیق) ('hanging' calligraphic) style of Arabic script. As a de facto standard Urdu publishing tool, InPage is widely used on PCs where the user wishes to create their documents in Urdu, using the authentic style of Nastaliq with a vast ligature library (more than 20,000), while keeping the display of characters on screen WYSIWYG (What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get). Overall, this makes the on-screen and printed results more 'faithful' to hand-written calligraphy than all or most other Urdu software on the market. This is achieved while keeping the operation easy, akin to that of earlier versions of standard English Desktop Publishing packages such as QuarkXPress and Adobe InDesign.

Before being used within InPage, the Noori style of Nastaliq, which was first created as a digital typeface (font) in 1981 through the collaboration of Mirza Ahmad Jamil TI (as calligrapher) and Monotype Imaging (formerly Monotype Corp.), suffered from two problems in the 1990s: a) its non-availability on standard platforms such as Windows or Mac, and b) the non-WYSIWYG nature of text entry, whereby the document had to be created by commands in Monotype's proprietary page description language.

In 1994, an Indian software development team - Concept Software Pvt Ltd,[1] led by Rarendra Singh & Vijay Gupta, with the collaboration of a UK company called Multilingual Solutions [2] led by Kamran Rouhi, developed InPage Urdu for Pakistan's newspaper industry, who up until that time had been using large teams of calligraphers to hand-write last minute corrections to text created under Monotype's proprietary system. The Noori Nastaliq typeface was licensed for InPage from Monotype & augmented for use as the main Urdu font in this software, along with 40 other non-Nastaliq fonts.

InPage is reported to be in use on millions of PCs in Pakistan & India (mainly illegal pirated version). It has also been widely marketed & sold legally in the UK and India since 1994.[citation needed]

InPage launched its Version 3 at ITCN exhibition Asia in Karachi, Pakistan, held in August 2008. This version is Unicode based, supports more Languages, and other Nastaliq fonts with Kasheeda have been added to it along with compatibility with OpenType Unicode fonts. In addition to Arabic, Saraiki, Urdu, Persian & Pashto, other languages of the region, such as Sindhi and Hazaragi can be handled in InPage.

Adobe Photoshop

From Photoshop Elements 12, the Guided Edit mode offers a Zoom Burst effect, which you’ll now find in the Fun Edits category.

Traditionally produced by manually zooming in on a subject while the shutter is open, the Zoom Burst effect creates an impression of speedy motion, while the limited area of focus draws attention to the central subject.

While the Zoom Burst effect emphasizes movement towards (or away from) the camera, the Speed Effect, the latest addition to the Fun Edits category in Photoshop Elements 14, creates the illusion of motion parallel to the picture plane.

In the Organizer, select the image 07_07.jpg; then, click the Editor button . If you’re not in Guided edit mode from the last exercise, switch modes now and click the Fun Edits tab above the preview pane.

Click the Speed Effect—the second-last guided project on the Fun Edits tab.

Despite the absence of motion in the photo, the wind in the girl’s hair, and her animated expression, will work well towards creating the impression of forward movement; now, let’s see if we can add a sense of speed. The Speed Effect treatment consists of four steps: designating the object to which you wish to add movement; applying the motion-blur effect; defining an area of focus where the effect is to be reduced; and refining the effect by adding to or subtracting from the motion blur.

In the panel at the right, click the Quick Selection Tool button. By default, the tool opens in Add mode. Starting at the left of the girl’s head, drag over her hair, face, arms, and body to make a rough selection; then, extend the selection to include her legs and the yellow buoy.

Zoom in for a clearer view of the girl’s hands using the Zoom slider; if you need to pan the view, press the spacebar to temporarily activate the Hand tool. The default brush size should be small enough to add the girl’s fingers to the selection. While you’re still zoomed in, switch the Quick Selection tool to Subtract mode to deselect any parts of the background you may have included accidentally, including the shadow on the sand beneath the yellow buoy.

TIP

Your selection does not need to be precise; in this step, you are merely defining the area that will be “smeared” to generate the motion-blur effect.

Click the Add Speed Effect button; then, click the Decrease button once, so that it’s easier to see both of the girl’s legs through the blur. For our lesson image, the motion will be horizontal, so you won’t need to change the angle of the effect.

Click the Add Focus Area button. Hold down the Shift key to constrain your movement to the horizontal as you drag from a point near the right edge of the photo, at the level of the girl’s waist, to the small of her back. Repeat this step, and then drag from the ring at the pint of the buoy to the same end point.

Click the Refine button; by default, the tool opens in Subtract mode, ready to clear the motion blur from areas where it’s not wanted. Use the sliders to increase the brush size to around 100 (pixels) and its opacity to 100%; then clear the remnants of the motion blur from the area in front of the girl and the buoy. Reduce the brush size to 75 and paint over the girl; you don’t need to be very accurate—especially around the “trailing” edges of her figure. Zoom in using the Zoom slider, and reduce the brush to 12 pixels to clear her hands and fingers.

Click Next at the bottom of the panel; then, click the Save As button. Name the file 07_07_Speed, and save it to your My CIB Work folder in Photoshop (PSD) format, with the Layers option enabled. Include the new image in the Organizer but not in a Version Set. Choose File > Close, or click the Close button (X) at the upper right of the Guided Edit preview pane.

3D Max

3ds Max is an immensely powerful program with a myriad of features and capabilities that require time and practice to master. However, it is intuitive enough for one to grasp the basics relatively early on, and the possibilities of creation are truly fantastic. Part of the beauty of the design process, of course, is that there is always room to improve the way you work and scrutinize what you create.

Here are a few basic points for consideration and working tips for designing and creating with 3ds Max.

1. Deal with Geometry

When modeling in 3ds Max or dealing with geometry, always use a 1:1 scale and give elements logical names. It will be far easier to identify “South Wall” than “Box 095” in a complex scene. Use layers and the Group function to group multiple elements together, and when making repetitions of the same thing, create instances instead of outright copies. That way, when you make a geometry or material change on one item, all of the instances will also change accordingly.

2. Isolate

In complicated scenes, isolating individual objects (right click > Isolate) will allow you to focus on editing or texturing one individual item while the rest of the scene is hidden.

3. Populate

Use 3ds Max’s populate feature to place large groups of people in your scene from the built-in library. They are pre-animated for slight body movement when standing still or walking motions if placed along paths and are fully textured.

4. Model Efficiently

Move your camera around inside 3ds Max to select desirable points of view and frame shots prior to going into detailed modeling. This way, you will only need to model what the camera can see and will save enormous amounts of time. This will also help to avoid the temptation of wanting to show off all of your painstaking modeling in one unrealistically wide-angled image that attempts to capture the entire scene. Instead, try using narrower-angle lenses, and if you do need to include more of the scene, pull the camera back and use the clipping plane to clip foreground elements from view.

5. Embrace Real-World Photography

Rendering software allows endless tweaking of camera and environment settings to bypass real-world photographic constraints in order to curate a very specific image, but doing this will invariably result in a distinctly CGI look. If you adopt the philosophy of attempting to replicate real photography, your images will begin to take on a photographic quality.

6. Master Rendering

If you are using a specific render engine (such as V-Ray), ensure that all the scene materials are optimized for that particular engine. Thus, you avoid strange behavior in materials and lighting when you render.

7. Create Realistic Objects

Look to the world around you for clues of how different materials and surfaces behave under varying light conditions. You would rarely find completely pure blacks or whites in the natural world, so avoid using the pure black RGB value of 0, which will absorb all of the light that hits it, and the pure white RGB value of 255, which will reflect all of the light.

Likewise you will rarely find a physical object with sharp edges. Smooth 90-degree edges allow an object to behave more realistically under its light source.

8. Use Realistic Lighting

Base your lighting setup on real-world environments and your material texture and color will appear far more convincing. Take a photograph in an environment similar to that which you are rendering in automatic mode and note the shutter speed, aperture and ISO speed that the camera uses. Apply these values to the Physical Camera inside 3ds Max and tweak your light-source (for example, your HDRI or Sun) intensity until the resultant render’s lighting levels resemble those in the real photograph. Now you have essentially established a lighting setup that uses real-world values, and you can adjust the Physical Camera’s settings to control the lighting as you would do to take the real photograph.

You may still need to add fill-lights around the scene to highlight certain elements, but their intensity will now have a realistic basis, and you will avoid heavily blown-out areas and over-the-top reflections. Remember that the more light sources and reflective materials you have in your scene, the longer the render will take to complete.

9. Optimize Your Output

Always save your renders as 32-bit TIFF files and never JPEG. JPEG is a compressed format and will restrict the amount of information you can deal with in postproduction. A 32-bit TIFF is an uncompressed file and will allow you far greater control over postproduction lighting and exposure adjustment.

10. Update and Save

3ds Max is a very complex program. Regularly check for the latest service pack to ensure any updates and bug fixes are implemented.

Due to this complexity, 3ds Max is also prone to crashing unexpectedly. Always save before making any major change or starting a render. You should also save incrementally to ensure that you have backup files to revert to if your current save becomes corrupt. 3ds Max has an incremental save feature (file > save as > click the + button), which will add a numbered suffix to your filename each time you save.

Douglas Fenton is a designer and visualizer based in New York and London. For more tips and tricks on your favorite software packages, check out these articles:

CorelDRAW

The size of raster image files is positively correlated with the resolution and images size (number of pixels) and the color depth (bits per pixel). Images can be compressed in various ways, however. A compression algorithm stores either an exact representation or an approximation of the original image in a smaller number of bytes that can be expanded back to its uncompressed form with a corresponding decompression algorithm. Images with the same number of pixels and color depth can have very different compressed file size. Considering exactly the same compression, number of pixels, and color depth for two images, different graphical complexity of the original images may also result in very different file sizes after compression due to the nature of compression algorithms. With some compression formats, images that are less complex may result in smaller compressed file sizes. This characteristic sometimes results in a smaller file size for some lossless formats than lossy formats. For example, graphically simple images (i.e. images with large continuous regions like line art or animation sequences) may be losslessly compressed into a GIF or PNG format and result in a smaller file size than a lossy JPEG format.

Vector images, unlike raster images, can be any dimension independent of file size. File size increases only with the addition of more vectors.

For example, a 640 * 480 pixel image with 24-bit color would occupy almost a megabyte of space:

640 * 480 * 24 = 7,372,800 bits  = 921,600 bytes = 900 kB

AutoCAD

Autodesk has also developed a few vertical programs (AutoCAD Architecture, AutoCAD Civil 3D, AutoCAD Electrical, AutoCAD ecscad, AutoCAD Map 3D, AutoCAD Mechanical, AutoCAD MEP, AutoCAD Structural Detailing, AutoCAD Utility Design, AutoCAD P&ID and AutoCAD Plant 3D) for discipline-specific enhancements. For example, AutoCAD Architecture (formerly Architectural Desktop) permits architectural designers to draw 3D objects, such as walls, doors and windows, with more intelligent data associated with them rather than simple objects, such as lines and circles. The data can be programmed to represent specific architectural products sold in the construction industry, or extracted into a data file for pricing, materials estimation, and other values related to the objects represented. Additional tools generate standard 2D drawings, such as elevations and sections, from a 3D architectural model. Similarly, Civil Design, Civil Design 3D, and Civil Design Professional support data-specific objects, facilitating easy standard civil engineering calculations and representations. Civil 3D was originally developed as an AutoCAD add-on by a company in New Hampshire called Softdesk (originally DCA). Softdesk was acquired by Autodesk, and Civil 3D was further evolved.