Choosing Lens Effect Settings

Lens Effects provide the ability to add optical effects such as lens flares, solar coronas, and object glows to your scenes. Lens Effects offer so many options, a whole book could be written on them alone. Table 11.5 describes the appearance of some of the lens effects options.

On the Options tab for Lens Effects is an Image Sources section. This selects which parts of the image will be altered by the effect. Table 11.6 describes the different source settings and how these select the pixels to be affected.

Applying Render Effects Interactively

A tremendously powerful feature of the Render Effects dialog is its new interactive rendering of Render Effects. When you check Interactive, the renderer will open a Virtual Frame Buffer to view the result of the applied Render Effect. It will then re-render just the post-process pass in the VFB as you change the parameters of the effect. You can also move a source object like a light and click the Update Scene button to update the VFB. This saves an enormous amount of time rendering in order to see the effect of your settings.

Hands-on MAX: A Complete Faucet Animation

Now that we have covered skills of modeling, animation, materials, lighting, and rendering, let’s complete an exercise incorporating all of these tasks.

Suppose a client has hired your team to create an animation segment of a bathroom sink. They want the water tap to turn on and off and a burst of water to bulge from the faucet as it moves toward the spout (very unrealistic but fun!). The burst of water is to come flying out of the faucet opening and splash into and out from the sink. Your job is to first to build the faucet with its bulging water effect, water burst, and materials; then to incorporate this animation into the rest of the scene created by your team; to cause the water to deflect off the sink; and finally to fine-tune and render the complete animation.

In this exercise you will:

•  Create and edit spline shapes

•  Create and edit a faucet using Loft

•  Use the Displace space warp to distort the faucet

•  Create water using Super Spray metaparticles

•  Assign and modify existing materials

•  Merge 3D Studio MAX files

•  Adjust animations in the Track View

•  Use the UOmniFlect space warp to deflect the water from the sink

•  Render the animation

	NOTE The finished file waterburst.avi is included on the CD if you would like to see the desired result.

Preparing the Faucet Loft Path

Let’s begin by creating the shapes that will make up the faucet loft object.

1.  Open file faucet_1.max from the CD. This file is has been set up for you with the following parameters: units are set to Feet w/Fractional inches of 1/8; the grid displays lines at 1 inch intervals, with major lines every twelfth line; and the viewports have been adjusted to display an area of about one square foot.

2.  The designer has provided us with a hand-drawn sketch. The scanned file is shown in Figure 11.18. Choose View File under the File menu and double-click faucet_template.tif on the CD. We will create a path similar to the centerline shown on the sketch, create the shapes that will be lofted along this path, and then adjust the loft to create the finished faucet. Close the image file

FIGURE 11.18  Sketch of the faucet

3.  Click the Line button (Create Ø Shapes Ø Line). We are going to start the path at the base of the faucet at the World 0,0,0, extending it 9 inches high and 6 inches over the sink.

4.  Open the Keyboard Entry rollout in the Create tab. With 0,0,0 as the X, Y, and Z values, click the Add Point button. Enter an X value of 3" and a Y value of 9" and click Add Point again. Enter an X value of 6" and a Y value of 9" and click Add Point again. Enter an X value of 6" and a Y value of 5" and click Add Point again. Click the Finish button to complete your line.

	WARNING Be sure to enter the ” character or MAX will default to feet.

	TIP This keyboard entry method is useful for precision work. You could also create the approximate shape and move the vertices using the Transform Type-In.

5.  Under the Name and Color rollout, rename this spline from Line01 to path_faucet.

6.  Right-click anywhere in the viewport to get out of the Line tool. Right-click your spline and select Modify Mode from the shortcut menu to take you to the Modify tab.

7.  Right-click the spline again and this time choose Sub-Object Ø Vertex from the shortcut menu.

8.  In the left viewport select the two topmost vertices of the spline, enter 1.25" in the Fillet field in the Geometry rollout, and press Enter. Your spline should now look like Figure 11.19.

9.  Right-click the spline and choose Sub-Object Ø Base Object from the shortcut menu to exit Sub-Object mode.

© 2000, Frol (selection, edition, publication)