Opinions / comments about workflow please

[navbor]

Hello All,

I have been messing about with 3DS Max for several years, but never really had cause to use it in a production environment.

I do a lot of mechanical design work in Autodesk Inventor, and since Showcase is no longer part of the suite, I would like to start using 3DSMax to render my designs for use on my website and other media.

What is the best workflow:

I am thinking that I need to have a couple of studio scenes (to cater for various sizes of design, these could be as small as a shoe box, or as big as a house), and a separate scene for each model (this model will be an import from Inventor).

For the render, I can merge the best fitting studio scene, to match the model and then generate the final output from this file. This does seems somewhat inefficient though. 

Is there a best practice solution?

Also, I would love to know how the ground plane in the attached video was generated. How does one create the tiled floor / bump map appearance?

At around 7:43 minutes into the video below, there is a good example of what I think looks quite nice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48YtLmJCPzE 

Thanks very much

[KurtNeuburger]

I would tend to go the other direction with your merge. open your studio scene that is the appropriate size, then merge the object that you want to render into it. That way you will have all of your rendering settings already where you want them every time instead of merging in the studio objects, cameras, and lights, and having to set up the rendering settings each time.

We use a lot of inventor parts in 3ds Max. Depending on the size of your inventor assemblies, there can be significant cleanup work once you get to Max. The cleaner your Inventor scene is, the better. Get rid of any extra sketches, surfaces, or other work features and 2D info in Inventor. Get rid of any factory tables or extra instances of parts. For the most part I would say don't bother with the Inventor materials, it's much better to set them all with textures in 3ds Max.

And as far as the checkerboard plane, make a plane, then make a material in the material editor that looks like the below image (standard material with checker map in the diffuse slot), apply the material to your plane, then play with the size in the checker map to get the pattern to the scale you want.

[navbor]

Hello Kurt,

Thanks very much for your advice.

The seen from the video seems to have a light bump on the material, any advice how to create this?

[KurtNeuburger]

By "light bump" do you mean faint bump? I'm not sure what a light bump would be if you are talking about lights.

If you just want a small amount of bump or noise on your surface, sure, you could add any map you choose and attach it into the Bump slot of your material. Try a Speckle Map maybe and adjust the amount of bump in the main material map settings and the size of the speckle in the speckle map settings.

[navbor]

I mean that there is (over and above the checker pattern) also what looks like major grid lines. These seem to have a bit of depth to them. I assume that they used a very light bump map to achieve this affect. Apologies for the poor explanation earlier. Hopefully it is clearer now. The affect is a little like a clay floor tile with grouting in between.

[KurtNeuburger · Accepted solution]

ah, well I'd use a tiles map in between the checker map and the main material to get the tile grid look. Alternatively, you could just make an image of one of the tiles with checkers inside of it and assign that in the diffuse slot.

[navbor]

Hello Kurt,

Thanks very much for your feedback. Clearly, I have some self teaching to do, but I am sure I will get the results I am after with your advice.

Everything of the best