3D Studio Max | Isoline render with mental ray
This has been asked often enough by many people, including myself at some point so I thought I'd write a small tutorial on the basic steps to get a nice render with isoline display.
This is a great way of showing off your base mesh and smoothed model. This uses mental ray as the renderer because mental ray will show the isolines where as the default scanline render will not.
- First of all you will need to use the turbosmooth modifier to smooth your model.
Meshsmooth won't display the isolines in the render, but turbosmooth will. So if you already have a model with meshsmooth, just turn that off and apply turbosmooth with the same number of iterations.
- Make sure you turn on 'isoline display' in the turbosmooth modifier panel.
- Next open up the material editor (M) and add a composite material in an empty slot.
- For the base material choose a light colour for the diffuse.
- Next add a standard material to the Mat. 1 slot and choose a dark colour for the diffuse. Then check the 'Wire' box.
- That's it for the material. You can assign it to your model.
- Select mental ray as the renderer in the render scene dialog.
- Click render. You should see the smooth model with nice isolines showing the base mesh.
Adding some nice GI Lighting:
To complete the image you can add global illumination lighting using final gather.
- Select the plane geometry object and place it in your scene for the ground. If you like you can assign it a larger scale (e.g. 100) so it fades off to the distance.
- Create a standard material with a white diffuse and assign it to the ground plane you just created.
- From the command panel, select the skylight from the lights section and place it in the scene.
- Turn on final gather under the indirect illumination tab found in the render scene dialog.
- Click render. If there are artifacts in the render, you can turn up the minimum and maximum samples under the renderer tab in the render scene dialog
