Are there any "official" Arnold trainers for 3DS Max?

[Mchapman]

Hey there,

The company I work for has a library of 3DS Max files set up in Mental Ray, and we are struggling to make the transition over to Arnold. We have purchased Mograph Plus tutorials and tried to find forums and resources to learn the program, but we were hoping to find and Arnold/3DS Max trainer to be able to get us up to speed faster and be able to set up our library and material libraries (as well as optimize our rendering production). Is there any recommendations to find such a resource that we could bring in for a few days of specific training in late summer/fall 2018? Thanks for any recommendations.

[lee_griggs]

What areas are you finding problematic?

[madsd]

It sounds like you would like someone to help you rig a pipeline along with understanding what you need to focus on to get the conversion going as well and so on. gkmotu @ gmail dot com Hit me up on mail, I can help you setup this pipeline and anything else you may want.

[Mchapman]

@Lee Griggs - There are several things that we could use some assistance on - most we would be able to manage on our own but, having some specific on-site help for a few days/week would allow us to keep up with our production schedule and condense the learning curve. A few problems we have had are:

1. optimizing the render settings to get a quality result at a decent render time and automating the denoising process.

2. We’ve also encountered a number of issues using the compact material editor vs slate material editor with the new Arnold materials. The new mix shader has been particularly troublesome and seems to lose input shaders when the program is closed.

3. We render mostly parts created from engineering files and imported into 3ds max. Initially, these models re-scaled in the conversion process unknowingly, and as a result, our scenes are not to real-world scale. This has made learning/getting support a bit more difficult because our scale values are out of whack.

4. With our current production schedule, it would be incredibly hard to have all of our designers simply pick up the changes on their own while also coordinating with one another. Having some form of specific, bespoke training that could help speed up the transition would be incredibly valuable as we wear many hats here and have limited time to spend on rendering R&D.

@Mads Drøschler - to be clear, we have our pipeline set up, but the bottleneck is transitioning from a library of about 3000 parts to a new renderer with new materials. I went through this once before when using Splutterfish Brazil and I just seem to have terrible luck when choosing rendering engines. That said, I will send you an email to discuss further.

Thank you both for responding.

Mike

[lee_griggs]

1. There are some removing noise tutorials here.

If that doesn't help, then you can post specific examples here (with settings).

2. Do you have a simplified scene that demonstrates this?

3. How exactly is this affecting your renders?

4. There are some training resources here.

[jshill]

Hey there guys,

I'm a 3D animator/motion graphics editor working with @Mike Chapman. First, thanks for your replies and assistance in this matter. A few things about the above list of problem areas. It was more meant to illustrate why we would like to have an onsite or person-to-person training session because we are going to have specific questions that have so far not been covered in the online training resources we've found. We don't have the down time to all solve these issues individually amongst ourselves, so we're looking more for an inclusive group training where we can ask task-specific questions. I know that might be a big ask, but the change from mental ray to Arnold was a bit more abrupt that I would have liked and there doesn't seem to be the same level of support out there for random questions/issues like there was for mental ray or like there currently is for v-ray in Max.

I've looked over the training resources link you provided, @Lee Griggs, and it's one I've stumbled across before while searching solid angle's site. We've gone through a number of videos in the Online Training portion, however, the bulk of the in-depth topics are Arnold for Maya and we seem to keep running into 3DS Max specific issues and barriers. Most of the 3DS Max specific videos are simply introductions or primers to get you started (which have been helpful up to a point). I think what we're really looking for is more like what the Universities listed would provide. However, none of us have any plans to enroll in Clemson for the Fall, so we're hoping to find someone familiar enough to teach us directly. Again, I know that's probably a big ask, but our deadlines don't seem to care that mental ray is going the way of the dinosaur.

Thanks again for your support in this matter

-Jake

[madsd]

Awesome, I was on the brazil train as well, and helped the guys at caustic/Imagination afterwards. I totally see Arnold as B3 🙂

I belive I can help you, so just reach out and let's take it from there.