Rendering an Animation

Introduction to Rendering

Rendering with mental ray: Final Gather and Global Illumination

 

Autodesk 3ds Max Tutorials > Lighting and Rendering > Introduction to Rendering > 

Creating an Animated Shadow Study

In addition to animating a camera, you can animate the Daylight system's time of day. This is a good way to create a shadow study.

Set up the scene:

• From the \tutorials\high_rise\ folder, open cityscape.max. If you encounter a File Unit Mismatch message, choose Adopt Unit Scale, the second choice.

  Also, if you encounter the Missing External Files dialog, just click the Continue button.

  This is a scene of nine city blocks, with a skyscraper at the center. The scene contains a Daylight system. The Daylight system is set to position the scene at the latitude of San Francisco, California, and the sun is set at 0700 hours, about the time of dawn on a winter day.

  

Animate the daylight:

1. Make sure Select Object is active on the toolbar.
2. In the Left viewport, click the sun object in the viewport to select it.

   Daylight01 appears in the name field on the command panel.

3. Open the Motion panel.
4. On the Motion panel, scroll if necessary to the Control Parameters rollout.
5. Turn on Auto Key.

   The button, the track bar, and the border of the active viewport all turn red.

6. Drag the time slider to frame 5, and then on the Control Parameters rollout, change the Hours value to 8.

   The spinner arrows of the Hours, Minutes, and Seconds fields are now bracketed in red, indicating that you have set a key to animate the time of day.

7. Drag the time slider to frame 10, and then change Hours to 9.
8. Continue dragging the time slider in five-frame increments, then increasing the time of day by one hour at each increment. Stop when the time is 17 hours (5 P.M.). This should be at frame 50.

   You have set 10 keyframes (and 3ds Max has automatically set one at frame 0, as well) to track the course of the sun through a day. Drag the time slider and watch the Left viewport. The sun moves smoothly: 3ds Max interpolates from one keyframe to the next so each frame is different, even if it doesn't have a key on it.

Set the animation range:

As the animation only lasts 51 frames (0 to 50), you don't need the full default range of 101 frames.

1. Click Time Configuration.

   The Time Configuration dialog is displayed.

   (This button is at the extreme lower right of the 3ds Max window.)

2. In the Animation group, change the value of End Time to 50, and then click OK.

   Now the range of frames is no greater than the length of the animation.

Save your work:

• Choose File > Save Copy As. In the file dialog, name the file my_shadows.max, and then click Save.
  ImportantSave Copy As does not open the copy. The active file is still cityscape.max.
  TipAlways save your scene file before you render.

Render the animation:

Rendering the animation takes about half an hour on a high-speed system. If you want, you can skip these steps and just view the file shadow_study.avi, provided with the other tutorial files. See “View the animation,” below.

1. Choose Rendering > Render.

   The Render Scene dialog is displayed, with the Render panel active.

2. On the Common Parameters rollout, in the Time Output group, choose Active Time Segment: 0 To 50.

   In the Output Size group, make sure that the resolution is 640x480.

   A smaller size would render more quickly, but the shadows don't show up as well.

3. On the Render Output rollout, click the Files button.

   A Render Output File dialog is displayed.

4. Enter a name for the animation, and choose one of the animation formats from the Save As Type drop-down list, and then click Save.

   You can render an animation to either the AVI or MOV (QuickTime®) formats. After you click Save, you see a format-specific dialog that asks you to specify the animation's compression. You can accept the default values, and then click OK.

   NoteIn practice, it's a good idea to avoid rendering directly to movie formats such as AVI or MOV. Instead render to sequentially numbered still image frames, and then convert them to a movie format as a second step. This has practical value if you need to correct mistakes in individual frames, without having to re-render the entire animation.
5. Open the Assign Renderer rollout and confirm that the Default Scanline Renderer is the production renderer. If you see mental ray renderer click Choose Renderer and change the renderer back to the Default Scanline Renderer.
   NoteThe mental ray renderer does not support the IES Sun lighting.
6. Leave the other Render Scene settings as they are, make sure Camera02 is the active viewport, and then click Render.

   3ds Max renders the animation. This takes a while (about a half hour on the high-speed system), so this is a good point to take a break.

View the animation:

1. When rendering is done, choose File > View Image File.

   A View File dialog appears.

2. Choose the file you just rendered, and then click Open.
   TipYou can also choose shadow_study.avi, which is provided with the other tutorial files.

   Depending on the movie type, a Media Player or a QuickTime viewer is displayed, which lets you play the animation.