3d tutors: Tips For Improve Your Renders

Many people write me emails asking how they can improve their renders, visually and by reducing the render time, it has to do with good optimization of geometry, materials and textures, then I will give some basic tips to help optimize your renders.

1 .- 3D Geometry: We must try every model has the minimum number of polygons, because if the 3d model has a lot of unnecessary poligons the render time will increase.

We need to avoid errors in our gemetry, like opened edges, overlapping polygons, try to keep your models as clean as possible with regard to modeling.

2 .- We need to try to get the texture size is suitable for the size of final render, for example:

If you download a 3k wood texture, but only use a small-scale model in your scene will be overloading the renderer with a texture that is not necessary to be so much resolution.

look this example in this render fro this scene:

We need to have in mind that we need to use Bump and specular maps for add more realism to our materials because in reality every object has relief and reflectivity. If you want take a look to this tutorialabout creating your custom bump and specular maps with Adobe Photoshop

4 .- Light: This is very important, I personally always try to use real physical system lighting like Daylight System and Vray Sun and Sky, HDRI, and always i use photometric lights with IES profiles, this helps the realism of scene because they work with real lights algorithms, and similarly calculated the light in your scene.

Remember to always work on Gamma 2.2 or LWF in your scenes, it helps that the colors are displayed correctly in 3ds Max, you can see an example by clicking here.

Scale: The scale is vital to get good renders, usually my Max unit setup is in cm, so I have more precision in my models, this also helps in the calculation of light and specular.

Render Setup: Some important tips, if you work with Vray, for the antialiasing I recommend using as Adaptive DMC but for best results in scenes with many details and containing many blurry reflections, Fixed is better, because it works better with this type of image, the number of subdivisions is recommended not less than 4, but for best results 6 would be fine.

For indirect illumination use Irradiance Map and Light Cache because it is the fastest time to value, but if you want more detail you can enable Detail Enhancement in the Irradiance Map setup and enable Pre-filter in Light Cache, this will help reduce the noise in your renders.

If you want you can download for FREE this render preset it is optimize for decent renderings, not high quality but nice quality with a decent render time, click here to download

When using vray lights for subdivisions use 15 – 25, this will help to have decent render time, also have pending always use Vray physical camera, this will help them control how light behaves in your scene and have more control over it.

And for having more control of the white balance in your scene try to work with Kelvin temperature, here is a color temperature table for better reference