Discussion of techniques
 

I am pretty new to animation, was just introduced to max last year. But from extensive reading and practice, I thought it would be cool to share exchange ideas on accomplishing parts of your animation.

Rendering in Layers/ passes
 

if you render in passes, you can do this very easily in max,

render > render elements > take your pick.

it allows you to ultimate control over you animation, you can easily adjust many things in your animation this way, lighting, shadows, color, adjust spec highlights.. the uses are endless

Rendering in layers give you the same benefits, You render your forground, background, or anything else you want specific control over, on a seperate layer.

To do this, you need photoshop, or a compositing program such as after effects or combustion for PC, or shake for a mac, the software is very expensive, luckily a team member has some of this type of software.

if you need help with this concept, there are plenty of reasorces on the web under "rendering in layers or passes" or email me and I'll do my best to help you out. riley_ag@attbi.com

okay i like this idea

one thing that hasn't changed, DON'T use motion blur inside max. use it in premiere or final cut pro. when watching the animtion last year i couldn't believe how many team used a camera blur that looked terrible cause you couldn't see what was going on.

once agin multipass rendering is good for adding the blurs in.

You can use motion blur in Max and have it look good if you use Vray as your renderer. There is a free version of it online, do a search on google. It's quite a nice renderer.

okay i have 1 very good question

how do you use crowd?

we've tried finding tutoirals and we still have no freaking clue.

we're resolved to using particle cloud if it doesn't work.

little help here...maybe from some of the teams that used it in last years animation

Ok give me a little time and I can help you out with that. It's quite a complex thing to explain but I'll cover the basics and from there hopefully you can get the gist of it.

Are there some different ways to get the "lightsaber" effect in max?? I only know of one, and that'd be adding a glow filter in video post. Are there more efficient/better looking ways to do this?

Cool stuff
 

a cool thing that we use for a renderer is Brazil. our team purchased it, and its definatelly worth it. it renders complex scenes incredibly fast, and has a better cell shader than the new one in max 5, ink and paint is ridicuoulssly slow, i wonder how many teams will use ink and paint... hmm, who wants to take a bet!??

Light saber effect
 

To get the most realitic effect, make your lightsaber a light emiting object so that it casts its colors, or put a position restraint on a few weak omni lights of its color to the saber, then go into after effects, combustion, commotion, whatever, and do the mask-gausian blur method, it looks best that way in my opinion

To do effects like a light saber you can render to a .rpf or .rla format. These formats can include the G-buffer channel (object) as well as many other channels. These Files can be used in after effects, combustion, and other video programs.

With an .rpf file you can also save the velocity vectors which can be used later to add motion blur.

Re: Rendering in Layers/ passes
 

You can do alpha composites in video post as well. Refer to the manuals for specific details.

Rendering menu > Video Post > Video Post window > Make sure the two child events are in the order you want the Image Layer event to use them. > Select the two events. > Video Post toolbar > Add Image Layer Event > Choose Alpha Compositor from the Layer Plug-in list.

This can be used to render objects in the scene separately. For instance, your team is using raytraces and there are 500,000 polygons in a scene, 9/10's of which you don't need reflected or refracted. You can render every part of the scene to a different image.

1. Begin with the background or environment you created in max (Make sure the camera path is the same for each layer).
2. Render the next layers in the order the overlap each other or in a way where they render as fast as possible.
3. In video post, use multiple alpha compositors to build your scene by layer.

Notes on rendering:
-You must render to image sequences. I recommend this anyway as it only takes, a few minutes to put an image sequence (.ifl) to an .avi.
-You must render using a sgi image type such as .tiff .tga .png or any other format that saves alpha (transparency).
-render every layer except for the background or environment in a black environment (Black is 100% transparent alpha-wise).
-keep the same lights and camera motions in each layer so that the layers match each other well.

Maybe I'll write a tutorial.

good call Bduggan04
 

I forgot to mention that it has to be image sequences.

thanks for getting it. I would write a tutorial myself, but I am totally swamped with stuff to do, even over winter break, you can find some good ones online, but I havent seen one for 3dsmax though.