So there’ve been a lot of posts lately regarding mental ray caustics in 3d studio max, and I figured this would be a great time to do a Monday Movie about creating and playing with a waterbox! A waterbox is basically a caustics test that you can play around with and really get accquainted with this advanced feature of mental ray.
Making a Waterbox
Written November 17th, 2008
Categories: Effects, Lighting, Rendering / Compositing, Videos
6 comments
Categories: Effects, Lighting, Rendering / Compositing, Videos
6 comments
By Chris Brown January 9, 2009 - 5:14 pm
Regarding Settings; How do I set 3ds max 2009 to make the box see through. In the video when you flip the polygons you can see inside the box. When I flip polygons the I cant see inside. As a result it is very difficult to do anything you do in the video. Please email me with how to set it up properly.
Thanks Chris Brown
By Bluesummers January 9, 2009 - 8:38 pm
Hey Chris!
Thanks for posting. The way you’d fix this is by going into your graphics settings and changing it to “Backface cull on object creation”. It’s under Customize>Preferences, in the “Viewport” tab on the left side of the window. This tells your viewports to not draw polygons that are facing away from the camera.
You’ll even get a performance boost! ^_^
By Chris Brown January 10, 2009 - 10:57 am
This actually did not work. I don’t know if it is because I have other settings wrong or if I am flipping the polygons the wrong way. I don’t know a keyboard shortcut for flipping polygons. When I try to flip I convert to editable poly, add the skylight, then I select the whole thing and on the right I click the Flip button under edit polygon. I think this is what I am doing wrong.
By Bluesummers January 10, 2009 - 11:56 am
If you’ve enabled backface culling (you’ll need to create a /new/ waterbox once this is done), and you’ve tried flipping the polygons, there’s not much left I can think of.
In the worst case scenario, you can apply a 2-sided standard material to the whole mess and just delete the polygon hiding the watery part of the box. 😛
By Arsh August 4, 2011 - 2:31 pm
i am speacialy thanks for all tutorials. thanks for this.. very very thanks’
By Mr. Bluesummers August 9, 2011 - 5:14 am
Thanks for reading! 🙂