Chapter 44: Using Atmospheric and Render Effects


In the real world, an environment of some kind surrounds all objects. The environment does much to set the ambiance of the scene. For example, an animation set at night in the woods has a very different environment than one set at the horse races during the middle of the day. Max includes dialog boxes for setting the color, background images, and lighting environment; these features can help define your scene.

This chapter covers atmospheric effects, including the likes of clouds, fog, fire, and volume lights. These effects can be seen only when the scene is rendered.

Max also has a class of effects that you can interactively render to the Rendered Frame window without using any post-production features such as the Video Post dialog box. These effects are called render effects. Render effects can save you lots of time that you would normally spend rendering an image, touching it up, and repeating the process again and again.

Creating Atmospheric Effects

The Environment and Effects dialog box (keyboard shortcut, 8) contains rollouts for adding atmospheric effects to your scene, but the first question is where. Atmospheric effects are placed within a container called an Atmospheric Apparatus gizmo, which tells the effect where it should be located. However, only the Fire and the Volume Fog effects need Atmospheric Apparatus gizmos. To create an Atmospheric Apparatus gizmo, select Create image from book Helpers image from book Atmospherics and choose the apparatus type.

The three different Atmospheric Apparatus gizmos are BoxGizmo, SphereGizmo, and CylGizmo. Each has a different shape similar to the primitives.

Working with the Atmospheric Apparatus

Selecting a gizmo and opening the Modify panel reveals two different rollouts: one for defining the basic parameters such as the gizmo dimensions, and another labeled Atmospheres &Effects, which you can use to Add or Delete an Environment Effect to the gizmo. Each gizmo parameters rollout also includes a Seed value and a New Seed button. The Seed value sets a random number used to compute the atmospheric effect, and the New Seed button automatically generates a random seed. Two gizmos with the same seed values have nearly identical results.

Adding effects to a scene

The Add button opens the Add Atmosphere dialog box, where you can select an atmospheric effect. The selected effect is then included in a list in the Atmospheres &Effects rollout. You can delete these atmospheres by selecting them from the list and clicking the Delete button. The Setup button is active if an effect is selected in the list. It opens the Environment and Effects dialog box. Adding Atmospheric Effects in the Modify panel is purely for convenience. They can also be added using the Environment and Effects dialog box.

In addition to the Modify panel, you can add atmospheric effects to the scene using the Atmosphere rollout in the Environment and Effects dialog box, shown in Figure 44.1. This rollout is pretty boring until you add an effect to it. You can add an effect by clicking on the Add button. This opens the Add Atmospheric Effect dialog box, which includes by default four atmospheric effects: Fire Effect, Fog, Volume Fog, and Volume Light. With plug-ins, you can increase the number of effects in this list. The selected effect is added to the Effects list in the Atmosphere rollout.

image from book
Figure 44-1: The Add Atmospheric Effect dialog box lets you select atmospheric effects.

You can delete an effect from the current Effects list in the Environment and Effects dialog box by selecting the effect and clicking the Delete button. The effects are applied in the order in which they are listed, so the effects at the bottom of the list are layered on top of all other effects. To the right of the Effects pane are the Move Up and Move Down buttons, used to position the effects in the list. Below the Effects pane is a Name field where you can type a new name for any effect in this field. This enables you to use the same effect multiple times. The Merge button opens the Merge Atmospheric Effects dialog box, where you can select a separate Max file. You can then select and load any render effects from the other file.




3ds Max 9 Bible
3ds Max 9 Bible
ISBN: 0470100893
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2007
Pages: 383

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