Max Render Question

pmark23

Veteran
Okay, this may be a stupid question, but after a few hours of trying to figure it out on my own I can't.

I'm trying to render a scene, and the ground-plane is showing through the other objects. You can also see objects when they're stacked behind each other, but you can't see the hidden surfaces of the objects themselves.

Any ideas why this could be happening? I think it has something to do with the render settings, but I've literally tried every combination with no luck.

The only slightly tricky thing I'm doing is using a wire-shader overtop a regular shader to highlight the edges, but this seems to have nothing to do with the problem.

What do you think?
 
can you post a screen grab, from your description sounds like some of the normals are "flipped" the wrong way, very easy to correct just select your object and add a normal modifier.
 
Nope, neither of that worked. I attached the source 3DSMax scene file if anyone wants to take a stab at it.

http://www.dvxuser6.com/uploaded/6097/1217647945.zip

The animation is supposed to be a fly-around of a construction site (rendered as hidden lines), which merges into a helicopter shot of the real site. I'm trying to remove the hidden lines so the buildings stand-out better while still looking like a rough architectural rendering.
 
Also failed to load into max 8.0 SP3.
Missing 5 dlls. A couple Mentel Ray plugins and a Master Layer Control Manager.
 
Looks like your running 2008 and rendering with MR?
Can't open . Maybe you can check the layer properties in the layermanager .
Do you have any editable polys and have some elements hidden ?
Shell modifier perhaps...
Screen shots please.
 
Max 2008. No plugins, although it may have been set to render using Mental Ray.

Resaved without MR, cleaned the layers, and also made a copy to an older format. http://www.dvxuser6.com/uploaded/6097/1217734114.zip

Here's how it's rendering:

1217733647.jpg


Notice that within each "building" the hidden walls are hidden, but you can see the elements behind them.
 
I had a look at the 3ds file and I think you just fix the problem.
Just import the 3ds file (re)apply the shaders and all should be well.

There is one odd thing the camera animation, it went under the plane and pop right back up after the 2 keyframe.Is it suppose to be like that or did something happen when u export to 3ds ?
 
No, that happened during export.

Re-importing the 3ds file didn't fix it, but now I think the problem is with the render settings, since it worked for you.
 
I'm still unsure as to what you actually want rendered?

Is it a wire frame animation, or clay render?

have a look at cell shading presets in Max, that should be easy to tweak to look like a hand drawn building (without it being transparent)
 
No I don't want cell shading, I want a wire render with hidden line removal. It's supposed to look like an architectural rendering fly-by, which merges into a live helicopter shot (which is done and looks pretty cool -- but would look cooler if I could get the wire-render to look right.)
 
That's exactly it. I followed both those tutorials as well! The problem lies with my render settings...
 
Thats usually called a "Clay Render" (with wire composite)

You can get some good prodution quality renders out of the default scanline if you know how to tweak it right.
 
I just tried one (max is not my main app).

I created a sphere and made a copy of it.
Added a push modifier to the copy to make it a hair bigger.
Assigned a new material to the copy, set the diffuse color and checked 'Wire' in the basic parameters and that worked, although it still has shading.

This is with default scanline render settings (jpgs compressed).
See if it loads in your version.
 
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