SolidRocks is an Autodesk 3dsmax plugin which automates for you all the complex process of rendering setup. Just choose the image size and quality you need, and click Render. That’s all !

The purpose of SolidRocks is to bring the best of the powerful V-Ray® rendering engine without any knowledge of its internal kernel. Don’t spend anymore time. Just clic render and achieve professionnal renderings.

SolidRocks adjusts for you all Vray settings according to the choosen resolution and quality to reach the best render time vs quality ratio.

Learn Vray progressively, while observing in realtime changes made by SolidRocks when you change resolution and/or quality.

Before buying an expensive workstation to reduce render times, try our demo for free !

The VRaySun and VRaySky are special features which are provided by the V-Ray renderer. Developed to work together, the VRaySun and VRaySky reproduce the real-life Sun and Sky environment of the Earth. Both are coded so that they change their appearance depending on the direction of the VRaySun.

The VRayPhysicalCamera allows you to use real-world parameters to set up the virtual CG camera (e.g. f-stop, lens focal length etc). It also makes it easier to use light sources with real-world illumination (e.g. VRayLight with physical units, or VRaySun and VRaySky).

Linear Workflow

Linear workflow is a necessary part of any photorealistic (and semi-photorealistic) workflow and should be implemented already very early on by a rendering artist. Linear Workflow makes sure that the colors and brightness we see in our rendered image and on our LCD screen are correct. Linear Workflow was this new thing few years ago since many rendering artists were unaware of it’s existence and had rooted in workflow in low dynamic range, so it took a while to catch on, but now it’s essentially an industry standard. The name itself comes from simple brightness gamma correction, however the entire workflow benefits from other elements that are tied to it and should be kept in mind.

But being an industry standard, it’s surprisingly neglected in terms of tutorials and guides that come with CGI programs, and thus this gets asked very often in forums.

• 1: Quite often renders come out incorrect, off photorealism or simply have something in them that breaks the realism of a render without any apparent reason. And quite often that reason is very simple, artist has build the scene in wrong scale and built an incorrect light setup.
  Part of linear workflow: Check 3ds max Units Setup, especially the System Unit Setup. System Unit Setup is what governs over the actual units in your scene, aka what 1.0 system unit stands for and what is used in the final renders. The displayed units can be whatever, I personally change the displayed units into generic units, which makes sure I always check my units before starting a new scene. Another thing, obviously, is making sure that the models in the world are physically correct. Also, it’s recommended to use photometric lights, which are physically correct, instead of generic lights that allow parameters that can stretch far outside physical parameters.

• 2: Computer screen is only able to display 256 shades of brightness, but real life has objects of brightness levels that reach far beyond and below just 256, which is why it’s needed to work with proper brightness range that is to be captured in the final renders.
  Part of linear workflow: Using physically correct world and light objects, and using exposure control on renders (like mr Photographic Exposure). Another extra would be to render your images out in 32bit Floating Points, per channel, which allows extra control when tweaking gamma curve in post, like with Photoshop.

• 3: Computer screen deals in mathematical brightness values, where 0 0 0 is black and 255 255 255 is white. But while 128 128 128 is indeed gray, mathematical gray, it is not physical gray to how we see it on the monitor. This means that even with physically correct world, our renders may seem dark and have too much contrast, this often leads to artist go out of physical boundaries to get proper lighting.
  Part of linear workflow: Using gamma correction on textures and rendered images. In 3ds max Preferences, under Gamma and LUT settings, change your gamma into range of 1.8-2.2 (2.2 preferred in most cases, as an accepted industry standard, but many fantasy artists also use the other end 1.8). Check the color selectors and affect material editor boxes, though it’s not necessary and is more for artists own convenience. This makes sure that the materials displayed look the way they end up looking in the render. Also change input and output bitmap gamma to 2.2. This means that 3ds max applies a gamma curve on renders and textures, that brings out the proper brightness and light distribution on the image. After adjusting these settings restart 3ds Max, there’s a known bug that may kick in if you don’t restart.
  Note that if the texture you are using as a map is already gamma corrected, then you should adjust its gamma curve accordingly (by setting it to 1.0) when selecting the texture (there’s a special menu when picking a texture, with gamma settings)