LookDev

Look Development or LookDev is the art of giving life to a model using textures, shaders and lighting. It is a fascinating stage as you get to see your material take shape, and the story you are telling begins to fall into place. The scene that I used to develop the look of my materials started with a free scene from Bertrand Benoit. 

Scene Can be just a simple scene with a couple of HDRI to test different lighting conditions. A place to tweak, adjust and develop materials.

• Shader ball is great to check reflections, but you can use other models for more complex shaders

• Use multiple lighting conditions - dusk, overcast, studio, interior, midday

• Check the HDRI Tools by Eloi Andaluz Fullá

• 3ds Max 2021 Viewport - allows some basic Lookdev in the viewport • 1K HDRI for fast previews

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Material Libraries

A simpler and most effective way to save your materials

• Use a prefix to help when searching for materials o For example, wood materials start with W_

• Connecter from Design Connected is great to drag and drop materials into your 3ds Max scene

First Steps

• Check if you have the latest Arnold version

• Use Legacy 3ds Max Support if the maps and nodes you use aren’t available initially

• Render Message window is your friend. It will tell everything that is wrong in the scene

• Check Mads’ Arnold Converter to convert materials

• Instal VFB+ for grading. Use Arnold Render View for interactive previews

• Turn off Error Handling if the render aborts. Check for missing textures and materials

• Understand Sampling - renders will be faster

• Noice denoiser is your friend. No need for fully clean renders

• Convert textures to .tx. Renders will be faster

• First time you use Arnold GPU - Pre-populate GPU Cache

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