engineering.

rsKovacica, Serbia

INTRODUCTION:
Hello Evermotion, my name is Nikola Gluvakov, I am 3D artist from Serbia, and I would like to
share with you how I made my simple furniture studio setup. I will show you some techniques
that I use when I am making my studios that I use for the renderings of furniture. This is
really just a poor mans version of studio, it should have much more than this, but I am doing
this to explain the thinking behind this project. You can download this scene from my
website, so let me know what do you think about my scene, my tutorial and my work here as
well on my website. If you like my tutorial, I will be making more in-depth tutorials about the
material, the camera and the renderer setup. I have done this studio in 3ds max, and
rendered it with V-Ray.

MODELING AND MATERIAL

PL ANK MODELING
First thing I have made is a plank that will be the floor of my studio. I chamfered a simple
box. After that, I have copied the plank to make full floor. Make sure that you do not instance,
because it is important to have each plank as an individual object.

MATERIAL FOR THE PL ANK

Next move is making of the material the wood. I used very simple setup for the material,
which will give me good result without taking too much time for making it. Simple material is
also helping the render times, so using it compensates for realism lack in it. Notice that even
though reflective glossiness has a map on it, I needed to lower the map intensity to 80. This
could be at 100 if I have used the color correction, but I want to keep this simple, so the
decision is to simply lower to 80.

Now when the material is done, I am going to make a Multi/Sub-Object material that is going
to have same material in all of the slots, with maps changed, so that I have some diversity. In
this example, I have made 10 different maps.

RANDOMIZING UVW MAPS, RANDOMIZING MATERIAL IDS

Now I applied that material to complete selection of planks, did the bitmap fit, rotated it to
follow the flow of planks, but obviously, the material is not giving the result that I want, so I
had to call in help a little plugin called Random UVW GizmoTM from Scriptspot.com http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/random-uvw-gizmotm made by amazingly
talented Serbian guy Branko ivkovi. After downloading the script, all I had to do is to drag
and drop it into the 3ds max and small window opens. I selected the button at the bottom
right corner position because I only need to move the position of the UVW map. Very
important move before I hit the randomize UVW Gizmo button is to select all the planks, and
click Make unique button to separate each UVW Map.

We can now just hit the randomize UVW gizmo button.

This came out perfect! Now I have wooden tiles that are not repeating themselves, but still
only one material is being used, and only one pattern can be seen. Again, I have to call the
scriptspot to our help. This time I am going to use HoHa Material ID by superhoha http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/hoha-material-id . Again its just a drag-and-drop
action. In this case, I put number of IDs to 10 and clicked Set material ID by Random! and
was again amazed by ease and beauty of the result! Now I have 10 different materials
applied to planks, nothing is repeating, it looks much more realistic this way.

Next move is to make the room. I made it very simple. It has one big window that is following
the shape of the room and one that is smaller only to add another source of light as well as
some shape to reflections. Window is modeled, grouped and I have added glass to it so that
it reflects inside of the room a little bit. Reflections on the window glass are not so prominent,
but every small touch adds to that realism that you want to have at the end.
GL ASS MATERIAL:

WINDOW FRAME MATERIAL:

ROOM MATERIAL:

INTRODUCTION OF CAMERA
Now I introduced the camera into the scene. I place my camera around 1200mm above
ground level for interior scenes. Unless you are a camera expert or a super-talented
photographer, you probably want to use horizontal camera ALWAYS. It means that you should
not angle your camera. I did the same thing here. I have used VryPhysicalCamera. I put my
desired resolution pressed Shift+F to show safe frames and adjusted the camera.

Because I do not want to use any lights with strong colors, I put white balance to neutral
(white 255,255,255). Shutter speed I changed to 50, which is my starting point for interior
daylight renders.

LIGHT BALANCE
Next thing is my light balance test setup. Here is the link to download my V-Ray lightbalancing setup, but basically it is just this:

Enable built-in Frame Buffer

Color mapping exponential with gamma 2,2
Mode: color mapping and gamma
Enabled GI
Irradiance map low preset
Secondary engine light cache
Subdivs 500

INTRODUCING THE LIGHTS

In this step, I am introducing the lights. First, I put a light behind the window, which will be
my main source of lighting here. Intensity is 30 and check the invisible.

Second light, which will be my side light, will be 2/3 of intensity of the main light.

Two important lights are done, now I have to put one that will light my model, which I will call
the direct light.

TURNING OFF UNWANTED REFLECTIONS:

Next, I rendered the scene to see how good the result is. Do not forget to turn off the option
Use colors in sRGB space, and you will see your render just as it is going to be after you
save it. As you can see, I have reflection from my direct light, which you may or may not
want to remove, but just for this tutorial, I will turn it off.

I selected the direct light, clicked on exclude and selected the glass. That way, only the glass
window will not have a reflection from this light.

Perfect! I got what I like!

BACKDROP
I now introduced the model into my studio and I put a backdrop. Backdrop is a VrayLightMtl
with intensity of 10 and color correction on the map. I did the color correction because I
wanted it to be a bit more saturated and brighter. I did not want that much contrast on this
map. Now it looks as its snowing outside. That makes the person viewing it comfortable
inside where everything is nice and warm.

THE OPTIMIZATION
Now comes the most important and the most interesting part. I would call this part the
optimization, because in this part I want to optimize the scene so that it renders faster and
nicer too. My materials are already closer to what they should be, so I am going to return
values for the reflection subdivisions to 8. In render setup, go to render elements tab and
select these render elements:

VRayGlobalIllumination
VRayLighting
VRayReflection
VraySampleRate
VraySpecular

I am going to include the file for render setup so that you can just load the settings and start
working on my scene. You can download it here.

After rendering with these settings, I get these results:

In these render passes I want to tackle the grain that appears in them. I am going to tweak
some values to get that smooth render even before I increase settings for the final render.
This process involves something very similar to interpolation. If you increase some values,
you are helping the image sampler to do less work thus giving a faster render, but if you
increase too much, you are going to have render time increased without much gain. It means
that this is hard to explain over a systematic tutorial, I would have to make a video about it.
If you support my tutorial, with comments, likes and shares, I will make a video about that
too.
Experiment with these and get to result that I got at the end.

Specular and Lighting grain is solved by increasing the number of subdivisions for
sampling on each light in the scene.

Reflection grain is solved through increasing the reflection subdivisions in the material

editor

GI grain is solved through settings in the render setup

Final, sample rate is showing where the image sampler has to work most. It is the
combination of each individual render pass. Less red color in the render the better,
less difference in color the better. There are techniques to improve this too, but for
now, I will not focus on this, until I make the video about this part.

This is the result. It is not that easy to see the exact difference between two renders, but
once you train your eye to be more sensitive to grain, you will see the difference. Once you
zoom in, you will be able to see it.

This is the render without any postproduction:

I hope you liked my tutorial, and that it helps you become more professional in your work.
You can download my complete scene here: http://www.engineering-cad.com/creating-studiofor-furniture-renders/
My website: www.engineering-cad.com
My facebook page: www.facebook.com/engineering.rs
My LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ngluvakov