So you have modeling down, and you want to show off your work.

Well there's all sorts of ways to render, but some people have inquired into how I do mine.



You need Photoshop and 3ds for this.

First off, if you're going to have it from different directions it's best to have 3 cameras since you need to render from each position twice.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3332789/misc/Tutorials/Rendering/Cameras.jpg

Once you've done this press F10 to bring up the render dialogue. In advanced lighting ensure light tracer is enabled, with the default settings. In the Renderer tab check Enable SSEm and Enable Global (Under Global SuperSampling), use max 2.5 star. Continue scrolling down and disable the apply checkboxes in Object Motion Blu, and Image Motion Blur.

Go to the Common tab and set your output size.

Now goto your first camera view and add a skylight to your scene. Begin rendering.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3332789/misc/Tutorials/Rendering/GE%20Sky%20Ex.png

Remove the skylight, and replace it with an omni light, or two (depending on the size of your model, and how much is neccesary to get it mostly lit on the side you're looking at)

Alter their positions to light up a reasonable amount of the model.

Render again from the same camera, since they both need to be exactly the same when you put them in photoshop.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3332789/misc/Tutorials/Rendering/GE%20Omni%20Ex.png

I usually save as PNG when it comes out of max, just so I can have the transparency in ps, makes my life easier, and you can always change it to jpg afterwards.

Open both of the images in photoshop. Select the omni image's layer, and drag it onto the skylight picture, holding shift as you do, so that they align properly. Save this as a new PSD.

Set the omni layer's blending mode to Overlay

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3332789/misc/Tutorials/Rendering/Photoshop%20settings.jpg

Boom, finished. Additionally here is the psd file, in case you have some need to look at it : http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3332789/misc/Tutorials/Rendering/GE.psd

There's a lot more you can do with this in photoshop, but this is my favourite, feel free to experiment though.

I also only really use this for final renders, since it's a lot more time consuming than what I would otherwise do (for the record, 2 omnis and a skylight with light tracer)

Anyway hope this helps.