Learning 3D, Questions Options

[HERD]

Instead of a nice girl like in tut, got Shaquille O'Neal.
When converted to poly or mesh, tons of vertices appeared (why?),
had to edit as a patch. Mesh smooth did not work well either because of it.
Is there a way in Max to stop a process, if I know I’ve made a mistake?
(Ctrl+Alt+Delete doesn’t work)

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[Sir-Kill]

when building your scene you can zoom (field of view button located lower right when camera VP selected) in or out and change your render size to fit your needs. but this should be fairly early on.
the zooming will change the size of your objects thus scaling the scene.

my basic scene setup:
determine scene size. the aprox size of area you want to create. determined by renderer menu (F10). max bg size 60x80 (X64) but do you really want it that big?
is it indoor or out. if out, you can use those photometric IES Sun lights. it is not 100% accurate but very close and real fast when rendering.
if indoors use multiple omni lights. wherever the scene needs one you will have to set the attenuation for them. the far attenuation is probably the most important, setting the start and end closer together will give you a harder edge to the light, so you will probably want to space them apart for a soft edge.
then there is also decay you can set this to whichever you need. (set somewhere betweenf the near and far end settings in attenuation I like inverse square cuts it off quick but you can pick inverse or even none.
important under shadow parameters rollout: if you set the color or density less than 0,0,0 black and 1.0 the light will start to go through solid objects. now so you do not have 100% black shadows I found that no less than .8 can still work.

ok so scale is done by eye but val and I have been discussing a standard or a way to standardize scene development.
I have not actually tried it yet but in theory it should work. maybe val has tried this and can say how well it works or not
however in the mean time: door height is more important than roof line or a second story starts.

on a square/rectangle building a uvw box modifier with settings of 10,10,10 will stay at that setting even if you determine that you roof height is too tall. just grab some of those top vertices and bring them down. the stone texture will not stretch or compress and this is important when using a stone/brick texture since they should have some uniformity (then you add in randomness )

things that slow rendering:
poly count, shadow type (stick with speed shadow or shadow map since bg does not require photo realism ), texture size, and render size.
on render size and large areas: once your scene is fairly set where you like it you do not have to render the whole thing. you can use crop.
crop is located on the main tool bar all the way to the right (drag left on the toolbar to see more) from a pulldown menu (default is view). select the viewport (camera), select crop from the pull down menu, then click the teapot (quick render production) button. this will place a crop box in that viewport this is sometimes invisible do a left click drag in center of viewport to see). you can move and resize that box, then click OK. it will render the size you have set but only that portion that is in the cropped section. change it back to view to render the whole scene again.

This post has been edited by Sir-Kill: Jul 7 2008, 01:20 PM