Teapot Example - 3D Rendering with Vray 3.2 for 3ds Max | Black Spectacles
To view the entire course, click here:
http://bksp.es/yt-vray-2015
In this course, Jorge Barrero from Gensler will show you how to create beautiful renderings with Vray for 3ds Max.
I'm going to hide the topography just to keep things simple for now. At the simplest level, let me just go to zero layers, so I can keep the objects there. At the simplest level, if I go to Create Geometry and make, let's just say, a teapot. There's my teapot. The way to create a proxy is actually really, really straightforward. When you have an object, you select it, you right-click on it, then you go to V-Ray Properties. Actually, I take it back. To create a proxy, you select the object, right-click on it, and then you go to V-Ray Mesh Export. When you click on V-Ray Mesh Export, what it does is it brings up this dialog where it prompts you for a location for your export file. This is going to be the proxy file that's going to live outside of it.
You can see the name here, it's called Teapot 01, then VR Mesh. So, it takes the object name and gives it a proprietary file format. At the bottom here, you can specify how you want that object to be previewed in your scene because you still want to be able to see some of it, but you don't need the actual object in your scene. On the folder, I'm just going to click Browse. I'm going to go to Desktop for now. I think it's fine, since we're doing a test. Export each selected object in its separate file. In this case, yes. We only have one object, so that's fine. Teapot 01 is okay. Faces in preview, 10,000 faces is probably quite a bit. Let's say I only want 2,000 faces. Really don't need that many. I just need to know where it is. Refine clustering qualities, fine. Hit OK. Boom, okay.
If I go and look at my desktop, you can see there's a teapot VR Mesh file right there. So, that's where it lives. When you go to Create Object, if you go to V-Ray at the bottom, you can see here's a V-Ray proxy. If I click on that, I'm able to add an object and it immediately prompts me to go select the VR Mesh. In this case, now I can go to my Desktop, hit VR Mesh for my Teapot, open, and there is a proxy of it. There's the proxy. When I select it, you can see it's referencing a file outside of this Max model. Then, I have different...you can see it's very, very rough in its format. If I were to render this, it's going to look exactly like what I basically exported out. This one is still pretty low-poly. That's not a consequence of the proxy. This is just a consequence of the model itself. I didn't refine it too much. You can see, here's the teapot.
There's different ways of visualizing this in your model. You can make it as a bounding box. This basically is just very few polygons. When you render, it'll still look like a teapot. The representation your model can be a box. If you could imagine a file where you have 10,000 trees, you don't need to see all the trees with all their leaves or part of their leaves. You can just see them as simple boxes, just to save time and it's easier to navigate on your screen. Show whole mesh, show point, show faces, etc. You can scale it here, but you can also rotate it. Here, I'll just do a preview here. You can rotate it, you can move them anywhere you want, you can copy them as long as you instance them they're fine. You can create as many of these as possible.
The nice thing about the instances in Max is they can all still be unique in terms of their location, their size, and their position. But they're still all referencing one proxy. So I can create thousands of copies of these, and none of these objects live in this Max file. They're all referenced from an outside file that only gets called upon when you have to render. It's a very powerful tool.