Combustion/3DS Max map settings general.

[Halford]

The good part of rendering multiple passes is that you can play/tweak them as you like.

Sure I use several time the same map...lat's say reflection, play with blending and luma or what ever I need to achive the result I want.
How many times I blended together the same shadow pass after re-working it to have a smooth white/black transaction that was too long to calculate in Max.

I personally do not boos too much my setting in the renders, I tend to try to achive the correct look, and finish it on compositing. But well, there are many techniques...


Hal.

[MisterS]

The good part of rendering multiple passes is that you can play/tweak them as you like.

Sure I use several time the same map...lat's say reflection, play with blending and luma or what ever I need to achive the result I want.
How many times I blended together the same shadow pass after re-working it to have a smooth white/black transaction that was too long to calculate in Max.

I personally do not boos too much my setting in the renders, I tend to try to achive the correct look, and finish it on compositing. But well, there are many techniques...


Hal.

Cool, good point about the shadows too. I wish I knew about this sooner! It would have saved a hell of a lot of time!

Re-shadows, would you just blurr them to get a smoother transition?

[Halford]

It realy depends on what you want to do.

You can blur couple of pixel to give a raytraced shadow a more realistic border.

Or you can use the same shadow twice to have a final output as a gradient, at the border nearly clear and more dark in the center.


Hal.

[MisterS]

Cheers for the reply - I had another go on combustion last night and am still really impressed!!



A little off topic - I designed a flyer for a friend of mine (prior to me using Combustion!) and am now animating 5 secs or so of the doors opening and I have a few questions.



(http://www.bangingtunes.com/img/user/posts/SPITTLE_CTFrontFinalJPEG%5bWEB%5d.jpg)http://www.bangingtunes.com/img/user/posts/SPITTLE_CTFrontFinalJPEG[WEB].jpg



In the first 40 frames I plan to have the illumination pass flickering (circular light with logo in the middle) which I plan to do in Combustion. Apart from that, the first 40 frames don't contain any movement so I skipped rendering the first 39 frames.

Should I now duplicate those identical frames to make up the extra 39, or can I used combustion to do this for me?



Also, I'm rendering in passes as TIFFs which each path in a separate folder - should I convert each series of renders into a movie format before compositing them together or will Combustion be able to just use them all?



Also, would another option to save time have been: render one frame of everything apart from the doors once, and then render animation of objects making up the doors separately? This was an after thought but as I'm new to Combustion I didn't know whether I could do this.

[MisterS]

To answer my question.


Yes you can do all of this in combustion, what I should have also done is render the border and cable box once an just composited it over the top of the animated doors.

Have a look at the timeline and you can drag the different layers around.

[Halford]

indeed, you can do all of these.

you can have few frames and make it hold the fist image or last as long as you want....Combustion is been my first compositing software, I moved from itt, but I still love it...first love never forget.

Hal.

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