What are /r/3dsmax's favorite Products & Services?

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good suggestions here already

i'll add that your ref image from Henry K's tree pack is available on the Unreal Marketplace so you can always buy it and break that open to see how it's actually put together. also, you'd be able to see the shader which is probably a significant part of the overall look of these trees

Max won't do this but MeshMixer will. You can set a specific edge length for your retopo and should be able to get it pretty uniformly in your desired range. It's also free so can't go wrong.

Yes, there is.

If you are a subscription member, you have access to the PFtools Box 2. This has interaction of PFlow particles and MassFX, as seen in this test I did a while ago. https://vimeo.com/51053828

If you aren't a subs member, this is the product you need (or wait for Max 2014) http://www.orbaz.com/products/particleflow/box2/

The character matters a lot less than the rig and the animation. As someone who hires animators, I don't look at the character, I look for the principals of animation. Keep it simple, focus on showing off your talent. Something like this would work - https://gumroad.com/l/opjl

oh also. yes I run An AMD cpu http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html I run the fx-9590 at the time the closet intel cpu in terms of price and performance was 500 dollars more.. but now they have something that is very comparable in price... the AMD runs hot, and requires exceptional cooling. I do not in anyway overclock mine

There are subreddits for pc help, so go there for exact advice but in general there are two methods - the easy/lazy way, and the more time consuming, but cleaner and more methodical (safe) way:

Easy: you'll clone your C: contents to an SSD with a usb-SATA kit and software (sold with or by the same place as the SSD), install it, wipe your old drive once you're certain everything's working, and use the SSD for OS and applications and the old drive for longterm storage.

Better way: Backup everything. Twice if you can. Methodically label actual contents (assets, documents, everything that's not installed by some OS or application - your stuff! - and sort them for storage.

Install SSD. Install OS. Install Applications. Restore backups of content. drive on with life.

You could use p3d

It is a hosting site that lets you make an embedded object that renders your model.

I believe it is free to use with models under a certain poly count/MB threshold

Edit: *example

Allegorithmic Substance Designer is great for this sort of thing. It allows you to create textures using procedural nodes, and would make short work (initial learning curve aside) of something like this.

there might be a way to make it procedural, but i think it would look very uniform until you introduce variations/creases with textures that you would have to bake from a sculpted or simulated mesh anyways. so maybe you want to split the problem with creating your blanket in two. one is creating a blanket that looks awesome and realistic on its own and problem no 2 is to lay it down on something - i believe a procedural method would only help you with problem no 2 and get in your way with problem no 1. no matter what, this blanket is an ambitious goal that involves a lot of tedious work if you want it to be photo realistic. for maximum quality stitch together the whole thing in marvelous designer and hope your PC doesn't melt simulating it. for quicker results sculpt a small area and tile it with nano mesh. for the fastest results model a small area of the pattern out of a 2d plane, make it 3d with the shell modifier (make sure to tick the "select mid part"), apply turbo smooth and then add some wave/noise modifier to the selected mid part - then clone it along some spline/surface.

i know this video is about houdini, but maybe it is interesting to you nonetheless: https://www.sidefx.com/tutorials/knitting-in-3d-building-a-uv-deformer/?collection=40

3ds max is probably not the right tool for the job. The CAD import module of 3ds max is positively ancient, slow and annoying. With it you end up with broken geometry that needs extensive fixing, a job that is loathed by all 3d artists and also way beyond your capabilities.

I've had the best experiences with that kind of thing using Rhino. It has the best meshing algorithm that I know, giving you the cleanest possible output.

Nuke would be my recommendation. Obviously it's a lot more expensive, but it's the industry standard for compositing/post work for a reason. It's insanely flexible and even just built-in tools (let alone all the plugins and scripts) make it very powerful for non-destructive and high quality post work.

I have a couple of links that could help you. This first one covers hard surface modeling - granted, it may not be completely applicable to architectural work but as far as the basics of modeling with 3ds max I've never seen anything better:

https://vimeo.com/10941211

To dress your scene up you'll need lights and materials. Here's a fantastic site for mental ray / 3ds max:

http://mrmaterials.com/

I use them all the time. I'm not really a shaders & lights guy, so I'll often download a preset material that looks right and fool around with it. It's a great way to learn.

Hope this helps!

Total Commander not only has the best name, but it also a very good file manager that features an extremely capable rename tool with replacement, numbering, and even RegEx. I've been using it for years and years.

Yeah, the middle mouse button on the MX500 is useless. I ended up remapping orbit to a thumb button because of it. Now I can't work any other way.

Have you considered a used MX Revolution? You really can't beat those things.

I got lucky and bought three of them for a dollar apiece at an estate sale. They had no idea what they had.

Yeah photorealism is definitely possible in Unreal and Unity. It can take some optimizing and a powerful computer. I have had problems getting max quality, very high resolution renders out of UE but my computer is pretty old. If you want absolute max quality and you don't care how long it takes to render, you would probably want to use Blender or Max to render. But I personally think the game engines are good enough for what I do and the workflow is really nice because you can see your changes in real time.

A benefit of using UE is the access to free assets you get. They give away a lot of stuff every month like nature and building assets, and you can use Quixel Megascans for free (which is a huge library of assets and textures). Today is new content day and this month's haul is pretty impressive: https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/featured-free-marketplace-content---october-2020

Here's the part of the ahk script, it maps the wheel actions to regular shortcuts assigned in max (I'm using modifier keys with arrows, see the AutoHotkey docs for explanations).

#If WinActive("ahk_class 3DSMAX") || WinActive("ahk_class Qt5QWindowIcon")

; Mouse Back/Forward -> Undo/Redo ; ================== XButton1:: Send, ^z XButton2:: Send, ^y

; Mouse Tilt Left/Right -> Select Edge Loop/Ring ; ===================== WheelLeft:: Send, !l WheelRight:: Send, !r

; Mouse Shift Scroll -> Skip Edge Loop Up/Down ; ================== Shift & WheelUp:: Send, !{Up} Shift & WheelDown:: Send, !{Down}

; Mouse Shift Tilt -> Skip Edge Ring Left/Right ; ================ Shift & WheelLeft:: Send, !{Left} Shift & WheelRight:: Send, !{Right}

; Mouse Ctrl Scroll -> Grow Edge Loop Up/Down ; ================= Ctrl & WheelUp:: Send, ^{Up} Ctrl & WheelDown:: Send, ^{Down}

; Mouse Ctrl Tilt -> Grow Edge Ring Left/Right ; =============== Ctrl & WheelLeft:: Send, ^{Left} Ctrl & WheelRight:: Send, ^{Right}

#IfWinActive

Do you have a concrete proof showing how much they earn yearly as a company? I'm pretty sure they do earn a lot of money else they would have gone bankrupt due to not being profitable to sustain itself.

Well, I did not say you can't find a real job with a physical work place with Blender, I just don't think most of these 3d companies use Blender so the chances of finding such a non freelance job with Blender is not that big.

I used 3ds Max for many many years now...but I still learn new things each time, learning never ends since new features / tools / plugins never ends as well.

Can't afford spending time to learn Blender if I don't see myself finding a job (non freelance) that requires Blender to begin with.

Their site actually says just that : https://www.blender.org/about/license/

It says on that page you can use Blender for commercial use and earn money from it, and it is obviously going to stay free probably forever.

How low are your specs ? if you can't run max viewport then you sure as hell won't be able to render anything. Especially for archviz. Upgrade your pc or try Blender instead.

Not sure if this is exactly what you need, but you can simply set up an orthographic camera looking at a 3D object, give the object a white self-illuminated material, and render out a jpg (or png if you want transparent pixels where the alpha is).

Here's an example scene (Max 2020, scanline renderer).

Example render.

Is that what you needed? You can move the camera and change its FOV to frame whatever model you need.

Remember 3 important things:

1 - Camera View: you should get more photographic shot, find some references. In this case you cut the couch and the desk, try to find simmetry.

2 - Lights: Try with some natural lights (Sun or HDRI), are there any windows? Try to make soft artificial lights.

3 - Material: Use bump and displacement on materials, especially for the floor.

If you want take a look on my gumroad https://gumroad.com/flaviorizzo

I've been using vray for about 8 years, you should be following Ironic_Name_598's link, - here is a video version of it

increasing the noise threshold will only make your AA work harder, and slow your render down a great deal.

9 times out of 10, it's due to extra vertices that should either be removed or welded. Here's and example max scene - I started with a box with 4 face segments and had to weld two vertices on both the top and bottom of the left and right sides of the heart cutout.

http://www.sendspace.com/file/mdwdov

Blender is already a legit competitor feature-wise. But in order for Blender to truly compete for usage in the various entertainment industries, studios and companies must take up the software. Right now, besides Ubisoft I don't know of other big-name studios willing to take the plunge with Blender and use it in lieu of Autodesk products.

I ran it through B2M and STGPro for you, which automates the process of making an image seamless. Results aren't perfect, but they're better than how it started and you can probably clean it up nicely in photoshop. Here are the results.

Here you go: https://gofile.io/?c=9DfmbN

https://i.imgur.com/tFokgNB.png

There were some lights and cameras in the original file and it used a plugin I don't have, so I got rid of all that and just exported the model.

Yep. If you don't have access to Illustrator, then you can use an online converter too. Albeit you lose minor details, it's quick to use and you can fix the spline in Max anyway. https://convertio.co/png-ai

I think you should download xNormal, it is totally free, faster than max at rendering to texture, and gives an option to create many more texture types like cavity, AO, etc... It is a lot simpler to setup than 3dsmax's render to texture dialog.

http://www.xnormal.net/downloads.aspx

This is a great tutorial video showing the methodology to get quality bakes, it helped me a lot with understanding how I was creating anomalies in my textures.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGszEIT4Kww

What is with this fad of people setting all their smoothing groups to 1? You're not supposed to do that. Your smoothing groups also come into play when you bake your normal maps so you want the breaks in the smoothing groups to follow the same as your texture seams.

As for the model it needs it's smoothing groups redoing and then rebaking, take time getting a good cage or perhaps look into using xNormal - http://www.xnormal.net/1.aspx

Also I think the green channel is inverted on what you currently have.

So as you can see on the picture the box is really wierd, it doesn't rotate the way i want it to and when i try to animate it or port it into another scene it screws up the shield, like it will stretch it wierdly.

I can provide more pictures / details if needed.

EDIT: Heres a picture of what it does when i try to animate it or import it into another scene: https://gyazo.com/d8249ba30fee039fb3b2435cf216931b

Do you know about MeshLab?

http://www.meshlab.net/

It's open source and in my opinion works better than Pro Optimizer. I first learned about it when I started playing with 3D Coat...

I would try cleaning it up in Meshlab and then exporting it to Max. Meshlab is a free program that is really amazing at some things. Hopefully it can help you too!

http://www.meshlab.net/#features

If you import a STEP then it should be movable. Max imports them as Body objects (like nurbs) but at render time will render them as mesh using the Body object settings you have set. You can also drop an Edit Poly modifier on top of it and see if that unlocks movement but I don't have that issue in my Max.

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Max 2019 can import Creo PRT and ASM fine too but If that fails then I ask for STEP.

I also use FREECAD when things play up, import the step into that, check it looks ok, if so then export STEP again from that app. Might be worth a shot. You could always try IGES and as a very last resort STL

Awesome advice I appreciate it! This is the computer I have https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B077YSVGWQ?ref=em_1p_1_ti&ref_=pe_41037230_437291320

I would think that is sufficient, but I don’t really know..

Also I have portal lights from each of the windows (I haven’t modeled the window in the kitchen yet). I also have a disc light in the kitchen for extra light. Do you have any tutorials that you’d recommend?

If you already know how to code you can just poke around with the listener, the online help and maybe this reference book: https://www.amazon.com/MAXScript-Essentials-Second-Autodesk-Maxscript/dp/0240809327

I got the Sabrent 1TB Rocket NVMe 4.0 Gen4 PCIe M.2. Top in benchmarks. It's a bit of a premium price but my OS and apps are fast to load.

It would behoove you to invest in a good SSD if you're going to be working with visual production tools.

Sabrent 1TB Rocket NVMe 4.0 Gen4 PCIe M.2 Internal SSD. Of course you can find something cmpairable but this SSD is at the top in benchmarks.

Awesome! Yeah its not a terrible system, and works well for my modeling. Prob 2-3 years old now for Mobo/CPU. I made sure to get Cool Master when i upgraded last time, and seem to be working great. Ill find someone to check my temps when rendering. Yeah like i said, I wasnt too sure if its common or not so good to know.

If you're looking for a good book that covers 3D basics, I'd highly recommend this: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1598220071 ...definitely prefer it much more than the 3ds max bible (what a headache to read)