Shadow's Simple Rendering Tutorial
This tutorial is meant for complete beginners, that may have never opened 3ds max before and want to learn how to make their first render. I am making this tutorial because when I was first learning to render it was very difficult because their weren’t enough detailed tutorials.
Keep in mind that the beginning of this tutorial is only really for 3ds max 9 users because you can skip most of these steps by using many plug-ins that don’t work in 3ds max 9. Regardless you can still do it this way in other versions it may just be unnecessarily long.
In this tutorial we will be making a default ak render, but you can apply it to whatever weapon you want to render. Also, the pictures are hyperlinked so clicking on them, twice, will bring up the full-size image.
- Download and install these required programs Also be aware that you will need SourceSDK in order to run MDL decompiler and you must have 3ds max or it is pointless even reading this tutorial.
- Create a folder on your desktop called "weapon render" and in this folder create 4 more folders called "input","ouput","texture","final". This is not required but it keeps everything more organised.
- Make sure steam is not running.
- Open gcfscape, click file then open, and open the "counterstrikesource.gcf" located in "steam/steamapps".
- Locate this folder "cstrikemodels/weapons".
- Copy the appropiate model files, in this case they will begin with vrifak47 because we are rendering a knife, but if you were rendering a knife they would begin with v_knife. There should be approximately 6 of them, place these in the input folder we have made earlier.
- While we are in GCFscape, we should get the default texture, because that is what we are rendering it with, locate "cstrike/materials/models/weapon/vmodels/rifak47" and copy the normal vtf file called "rif_ak47skin1.vtf" and place this in the texture folder we also created earlier.
- Open mdldecompiler, located in "steam/steamapps/username/sourcesdk/bin".
- In the choose model file window, locate the .mdl file located in input folder which we extracted from GCFscape, In the output file window locate the output folder.
- Make sure "dump old unweighted SMD's" and "do not fix rotations on animations" are checked. Make sure that "use steam file access" is unchecked aswell.
- Decompile the model, now you will have files in "weapon render/output".
- Open Milkshape 3d, Click file then import .smd located near the top.
- Import the .smd called "rifak47reference" located in the output folder.
- Now go to file then export and export this as a 3ds. file without changing anything to the model. Save the 3ds file also in output.
- Now open 3ds max and after its open click file import then import the 3ds file located in output.
- Now that the model file is in 3ds max you should notice it in all the windows, the top, side, front, and perspective view.
- If you already haven't, right click in the corner of the perspective view, and make it, smooth and highlights, and right click in the corners of the other views and make them wireframe.
- Now you must create a plane, ie. a flat surface underneath the model, to use as a background as such, you do this by first clicking the button at the top right corner of the screen which looks like a little arrow pointing to a star, and says create.
- You then click plane, then choose square and ignore the other options.
- Then create a giant square using the top view that cover right over and much beyond the model.
- Now that this is done, keeping in mind that what you see in the perspective view, is what you will see in the render, rotate the model and move it around, using the tools at the top, so it looks either something like the picture below, or the layout you want it to.
- Make sure that on the front view the model is moved as close as you can to the plane without it touching for a more realistic effect.
- Now that this is done, you need to add some textures. Before you can do this you need to export the vtf texture file located in weapon render/textures as a tga file so 3ds max can open it. <http://img292.imageshack.us/img292/2905/programmanager436ba7.jpg" alt="Exporting vtf." width="512" height="384" />
- Now that this is done press "M" and the material editor will open.
- Click on the first sphere and then click the open box next to diffuse in the properties.
- Then click bitmap and located the tga file in the texture folder, that you exported from the vtf file a few steps before.
- Now click the blue and white looking cube button which makes the texture update as soon as its applied.
- Now select the model by clicking it, then click the assign to selection button.
- Now you will need a texture to apply to the background. A good place to download textures from is mayang.com, because they have many good floor textures, that are high resolution and some seamless ones, but you can simply google words like "floorboard textures" and find images that way.
- Once you have found a texture you want to use in the background save it in the textures folder.
- Now in 3ds max, once again open the material editor, then once again click a new sphere, click the empty button next to diffuse, click bitmap, then choose the floor texture.
- Now select the plane, click assign the selection and you will notice it will be applied to the plane but it maybe be out of scale and blurry.
- Change the tiling numbers to higher integers like 5-10 until you get the texture the right size that you would want it for the floor. Keep in mind that you dont want the gun resting on just 1 floorboard, or tile, because it will look out of scale, and make the gun seem really small.
- Click the render toolbar at the top, then click create render, or use the shortcut, f10.
- Now you must change the following settings to make a test render preset.
- Mental ray renderer, under production tab
- Output size - 320X240
- Global illumination enabled, default settings
- Final gather enabled, sample size - 250, radius size - 16
- Minimum samples per pixel - 1/16
- Maximum samples per pixel - 4
- Filter type - lanczos
- Now click save preset and save those previous settings as a preset called "quick render".
- Once this is done, make sure you are in the perspective window, load the preset, then click create render, and watch the render get made.
- To begin this, click the button that looks like a little spotlight.
- In this case we are going to create an omni light but you can find out more about the other lights in teh maestros rendering tutorial. Before we create an omni light we will create a skylight, this light has to be in every weapon render you create.
- Before we create the skylight we will change its density to 0.6 and its colour to a light grey.
- Now create the light and you can place it anywhere in the scene, so dont worry about its placement.
- Now we will create the omni light but first change these settings:
- Shadows checked, using "Advanced ray traced shadows"
- Under the "Shadow parameters" tab, shadow density, lowered to around 0.7
- Under the "Optimisations" tab, tranparent shadows turned on
- Under the "Shadow parameters" tab, i also normally lower the intensity of the light to about 0.8 because i find it can be too bright
- Now when you create the omni light make sure you move it with the selection tool a few grid spaces above the model and make sure its light covers the whole model.
- Open back into the render menu, and now change these settings
- Mental ray renderer, under production tab
- Output size - 1248 X 1024
- Global illumination enabled, default settings
- Final gather enabled, sample size - 1000, radius size - 30
- Minimum samples per pixel - 1
- Maximum samples per pixel - 64
- Filter type - lanczos
- Now save these settings as a preset called "good render" as we did before.
- Once this is done, make sure you are in the perspective window, load the preset, then click create render, and watch the render get made. Be aware that it may take ages to render , it all depends on what your scene looks like. Be prepare to wait around 30min for this one.
- Now that this render is made, click the save file icon, that looks like a floppy disk, and save it as a jpeg, with maximum quality, maximum filesize and no smoothing.
Congratulations the weapon model is now in 3ds max. Now for the rendering part
You will now notice you can see the texture on the model in the perspective view, if you cannot make sure smooth highlights is checked in the perspective properties
Now that you have textured these models its a good time to do a quick render of the image
Now we will add lighting to make the render more realistic and higher quality
Now this is the part where you have a choice to make, you can create many different lights, but its always good to try and find out optimal settings by searching around, and following tutorials.
Now that all the lighting is set up, its time to create a good render preset, and to do the final render
Congratulations, you have finished shadow ravens beginner tutorial on rendering.
Tips and hints
- After creating the render, try opening it up in photoshop, then adding a border approximately 3 px wide, in either white or black, using the edit stroke menu, also adding your name at the top in a good font can make your render look much better
- If you want your renders too look more interesting try adding some magazines and or bullets to do this, convert the normal model to editable mesh, by right clicking and press "change to editable mesh", then open up the menu on the right and click "element". This will now change the selection type to element, now select the magazine or the bullets located in the chamber, and hold shift down and drag them to a new location. This will now duplicate them. That is how you add extra items to the scene.
- Play around with different settings, try changing the lighting, the angle of the render, or even add a wall and a floor, and try doing some tutorials on reflection and other extra effects. Once you know the basics of rendering the only thing that is really limiting you is your imagination.
I would like to thank Teh maestro for providing lots of useful information that i could use in this tutorial
for reading this, and all i ask for return for making this tutorial, is that, if this helped you in some way please 
favourite it.
