Large group of objects...

Anonymous · ‎11-12-2021

Ok - so I'm a complete noob with respect to 3DS Max.

But I have a feeling it's maybe the tool to use for a particular idea I have, and I'd like to know your thoughts on whether I'm right, or indeed what alternative tools I should maybe seek out to bring my idea to fruition.

This may take a short time to explain, so please bear with me.

In advance - please be assured that any advice is really gratefully appreciated.

So - my idea is this.

Using 3DS Max, is it possible to batch generate scenes which could then be used to batch create rendered images?

Say I have a basic object - eg a glass with liquid in it.

And I need 10 versions of a scene with the glass in it, but in each version the liquid in the glass is different - eg colour, opacity of liquid, texture.

Is it possible to set up scenes, but have the variables in the scene (ie liquid colour/opacity) referenced in an accompanying file - eg a .csv?

I have used Adobe Indesign to generate document pages for PDF using it's Data Merge tool - where you set up a template file, with image and text placeholders. The Data Merge tool looks at the .csv - and for each row on the .csv, it will create a new page, and populate the page with the other content referenced in that row of the .csv.

Once the page is populated, it then moves on to the next row of the .csv, creates a new page and populates the page with the corresponding images and text.

So - is it possible to do something similar in 3DS Max?

10DSpace · ‎11-16-2021

@Anonymous

There are ways of doing what you want in Max, but I don't think using an external .csv file is necessary or even the best way.

Say I have a basic object - eg a glass with liquid in it.
And I need 10 versions of a scene with the glass in it, but in each version the liquid in the glass is different - eg colour, opacity of liquid, texture.

If all you want is a scene with 10 variations of the liquid in the glass, then you don't need to create 10 separate max scenes. Just clone the liquid in the glass 10 times, tweak the material variations for each and hide all except 1 to preview them one at a time. Or while you are setting up your variations keep them all visible but offset them along an axis so you can compare them. Then you can always realign each variation to the original location and render out 1 at a time, with the others hidden. You asked also about automating parts of the process and with max script you could certainly say make 10 or a 100 copies of the liquid and randomly select color, opacity, specular, etc values.

"Is it possible to set up scenes, but have the variables in the scene (ie liquid colour/opacity) referenced in an accompanying file - eg a .csv?"

Yes, with maxscript you can write to external files and load information from them. But as I alluded to above, I don't know why you would want to.

You are also asking about automating the process of rendering and that can also be done with maxscript.

Probably I am not fully understanding your overall goal with Max as I don't see any of the Adobe Indesign workflow you describe with data merge from external files as being necessary or helpful in generating 10 different versions of the liquid in a glass in a max scene. But I hope this is helpful in some way to you.

Anonymous · ‎11-16-2021

OK - I maybe simplified what I need. The reason I'd like to reference a csv or something is thats 10 variations may not be enough. 200 variations may be more like it. Maybe more. And in the event I wanted to try a different angle in the scene, I could tweak the original template and run the batch again. Would be way faster than trying to do it all by hand. It just sounds like the sort of thing you should be able to do - though I'm not sure how much call there would be for this functionality.

10DSpace · ‎11-16-2021

@Anonymous

Take a look at Scene States and Batch render in Max. This is close as I know of built-in functionality to get what you are asking. Check out the first 2 short videos in the link below as an introduction and to give you some ideas that might help your workflow.

https://www.google.com/search?q=3ds+max+batch+render+scene+state&oq=3ds+max+batch+rendering&aqs=chrome.5.69i57j0i22i30l8.16067j0j15&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

domo.spaji · ‎11-16-2021

You can (try to) make it much more complicated...

Max is animating software. It has "time variable".

You just have to "record" parameter changing and turn "your glass" to any color, shape, number of shapes, ... or whatever - in single file.

And you don't need MaxScript or any "text editing" to accomplish anything that is possible in Max.

Anonymous · ‎11-18-2021

Thanks so much for the responses so far - very much food for thought.

So - have I been barking up the wrong tree a bit?

In that 3DS Max is more geared to animation and instead I should be looking at tools that are more focussed on modelling and rendering?

Is there something that is more suited to my project?

3D design is something that has grown arms and legs since I first got to know about it over 20 years ago - so I dare say that over that time, more specialised tools will have been created that are better suited to specific tasks,

but because my knowledge is so limited, I'm not sure what to search for on the internet to find the solution I need.

And - just to clarify things - what I'm trying to create is a library of product shots.

Without giving the game away as to the type of products I'm talking about, all you need to know is that the products I make have basic platforms - (ie each product is the same basic shape) but the characteristics within the product may be different (eg colour/opacity/texture).

Historically, these products would just have been photographed - and edited in Lightroom/Photoshop.

To get consistency, I'd try to set up the shots in the same way for each product (as the only difference from one product to the next was maybe it's colour, or opacity etc). But to be certain of this consistency - the whole group of shots would need to be taken at the same time. And it could mean, of new products came along, it may be tricky to emulate what had been done before to get that consistency. Of course, you can automate stuff in Photoshop etc.

But given the number of products in question, if something is changed to the base product, in order to update the image library to reflect this change - every item would need to be reshot. And if you wanted a refresh of the library in a year or two, you'd have to reshoot everything again. A lot of grunt work.

But - if you had a good 3D model to begin with, and a process to take the base model product and propogate from it the hundreds of daughter products - I could have much more flexibility, and consistency in the end results (assuming the renders were as photorealistic as possible).

Hopefully that gives you more of an idea of what I'm talking about. Right now, animation is the last thing I want to do.

10DSpace · ‎11-18-2021

@Anonymous

Thanks for the clarification. Max is a perfectly capable 3D modeling application, one of the best available IMO. And you certainly do not need to do any animation for the use case you describe.

In terms of the library of product shots (which means in the context of Max, a library of product models), there are several approaches I can think of within Max, depending on how much the daughter products differ from the base product. But this will take initial work to set up the library of products. You can Xreference objects between scenes in Max which allows you to work on the base object in a master scene, and make changes to it and the changes will propagate to all scenes which cross reference this object. So I suggest you check out the Xreference feature to get a handle on how this might suit your needs. See link below for some video tutorials to get you started:

https://www.google.com/search?q=3ds+max+xref+scene&oq=3ds+max+xrefe&aqs=chrome.2.69i57j0i13l6j0i22i30l3.6529j0j15&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

As I mentioned previously, you can also use the clone feature of max to create multiple versions of a model within the same max file and then Scene States to hide or show different versions.

As already mentioned you can automate rendering in Max either within a scene with Batch Render or multiple scenes via Backburner. There are 3rd party plug-ins also for overnight batch rendering that you can find via google.

So you are probably in the best position to figure out which of the above approaches (or maybe a combination of within scene and external scenes) works for your particular library of products. It definitely will take some time to setup initially, but thereafter variations should be easier.