Mini Post Mortem of Company For Dinner Project

I am not going to be too critical of this project or things I did on it. After all it is my first 3ds project in over 15 years. However, I think it important to acknowledge some of the things I learned.

First I learned not to place my lights too soon. The default lights should be just fine for all the modeling. This will save some render time as well since the appearance and behavior of the light won’t have to be calculated.

I also found that I should really consider waiting to apply final materials. While it is fun to get to see the materials and how things are going to look as you go along, they will slow down test renders. And you can really get bogged down in choosing and tweaking the right material.

It turns out that there are a lot of tools in 3ds Max and I need to find a few more tutorials and instructions and learn about them because it will likely make modeling much easier. There were some things that I really did the best way I could figure out at the time even though I knew there had to be a better way to do it.

When it comes to rendering I want and need to learn a bit more about some of the different render passes so I can utilize those to enhance the scene or object that I am creating. I also learned that rendering can take a really long time.

Some one asked if I there was anything I was not satisfied with on this project and I can honestly say no. While I think the scene is a little dark and so not the easiest to see, this was intentional. It helps to really high light the highlights and the candle.

I don’t doubt there are other things that I learned or should have learned from this. These are the big things that come to mind for the moment.

 

 

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Company For Dinner…Done!

I have finally finished the rendering and compiled it all into a video.

I have learned a lot of things on this project with the modeling and the rendering, the lighting, and material. And I have learned that I need much more information on using After Effects.

Hope you enjoy it and come back for the next project.

 

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Nearly Done

The rendering is nearly done. I should be compiling the images into a video in the next couple of days and then I will post the final product for you all to see.

As I was watching some of the frames render I noticed some stats (statistics) about the scene which some of you may find interesting. There are 3 lights, 2 are ray traced and 1 is shadow mapped. There are 53 objects in the scene and a total of 123846 faces. If there was something else you wanted to know about it, send me an email and I’ll see if I can find that information.

In preparation for compiling the final video, I downloaded the Adobe Creative Cloud copy of Premiere. Well, it said it was for creating videos. I messed with it a bit and found that when I dropped images in I didn’t quite understand how to make sure the time slider understood that one image was one frame and it shouldn’t hold that frame/image for a certain number of seconds. Yes, I will likely want to figure this out at some point. I may want to use the program for something.

However, every tutorial I have watched and most articles I have read, talk about using After Effects. I didn’t choose it first because the Adobe description indicates it is just for creating visual effects. I tried it anyway and it behaves just as I was hoping. I did a little test with some of the already rendered images and it looks like it will be running at 30 frames per second. Which makes my 300 frame animation about 10 seconds long.

After Effects was much easier to use and it behaved as expected so that will be what I will be using to compile this project into video. As soon as the last frames are rendered.

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