Preview Outline Highlight

Dumb Max tip of the Day: Turn the Preview Outline highlight

In 2016 version there’s a maya style mouse over object outline. It’s kinda fun, but can be distracting. With high polycounts it’s really slow and irritating. Mouse over a million poly object and max freezes as it calculates glow. You can disable it in the 3dsMax preferences.

Customise > Preferences > Viewports tab > Selection/Preview Highlights.

Turn off selection highlight Outline

UVWmaps

UV map plugins for 3ds Max

UVmapping improved a lot in 2017 but there is still room for dedicated 3rd party tools.

Though one day I’m kinda hoping nvidia will write an AI driven unwrap tool …

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Making 3dsMax Xref Scene objects Invisible to the camera

ground_Mattesurfacematte_surface_shadow

Its useful to hide objects in the scene from the camera yet still have them contribute to the lighting. This means that other objects in the scene will still receive shadows and reflections from the hidden objects. This especially important for compositing . Here are a few useful tricks to help manage xReferences in 3dsMax

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3dsmax modelling for buildings tutorial

Modelling Scroll work

A short video crash course for modelling building detail in 3ds max. Shows shortcuts, tricks, tips and gives a quick round trip through some of the most useful modelling tools in 3dsmax.

Looks at:

  • Splines
  • Lofts
  • Editable poly
  • Turbosmooth Modifier
  • Symmetry Modifier
  • Chamfer Modifier

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Iray performance tips to reduce fireflies

fireFlies_in_IRay

Picked up a few tips on the  Nvidia IRay forum

There is an Iray Performance tips PDF that suggests a couple of tricks to reduces fireflies.

Adjust texture resolutions to the scene requirements.

  • Textures compete with geometry for the GPU memory. The higher the resolution of
    textures, the less the memory available for geometry, and vice-versa.
  • High frequency textures at high resolutions may become a source of further noise
    and require more time to converge.

The total reflectivity (reflectivy * reflection_color) should be capped to 0.7. It’s OK to use a white reflection color with a reflectivity of 0.7. It’s also OK to use a reflectivity of 1.0 and a reflection color of 0.7.

At blog.irayrender.com/ I found a maxscript filter firefly-removal-max-script that may help.

I’m tempted to design a custom filter in fusion to deal with fireflies in animated sequences. But unless things improve with iray I’m likely to move over to VrayRT for GPU rendering