Sumrio

Water Drops ...................................................................................................................................................................... 1

Modeling ....................................................................................................................................................................... 1
-Leaf- ......................................................................................................................................................................... 2
Texturing ....................................................................................................................................................................... 2
Scene set up .................................................................................................................................................................. 3
Lighting .......................................................................................................................................................................... 3
Rendering ...................................................................................................................................................................... 3

3d Max - Water Drops and Leaf

By Olivier Archer
Software used: 3ds Max

Imagine if you could freeze time, how cool would that be? Well in this little
overview i'm going to show you how using 3d studio max.
Modeling
This scene is very simple so the models are not very complex at all.

-Drops- the drops are just spheres which I converted to editable poly and went into
vertex mode and enabled soft selection and made sure it grabbed a fair amount of
vertices in its selection, then I grabbed the top vertex and pulled it up and with the help
of the soft selection it got a "drop" shape, but that's not all I added a noise modifier and
a bit of bend to give it some distortion then I topped it of with mesh smooth to
smoothen it out.

-Droplets- these are just half spheres with mesh smooth, and a few where joined together to get the water
attraction look.




-Leaf- the leaf is basically a plane that was made to in the shape of a leaf nothing complex, I gave it the bend with
2 bend modifiers and mesh smooth to make it look good.



Texturing
There is only one texture in this scene and that's the leaf, the drops are just vraymats shaders.

-Drops- in the vray mat options I have it set too completely white diffuse, reflect and refract.
Plus checking the box for Reflect set it to Fresnel and the index of refraction set to 1.331 and that's it simple huh?

-Leaf- the leaf is made with a texture I found at www.mayang.com/textures/ and I applied it to the leaf mesh in a way so
that I wouldn't have to edit it in Photoshop. The shader is a vraymat with reflections set to 5, I added translucency and put
it to a nice green and I had these settings:
Thickness 1.0 fog multiplier 0.0
Light multiplier 2.0
Scatter coeff 0.5
fws/bck coeff 0.5

And finally a bump map I made by Gray scaling the texture in Photoshop and applying it at 100 and that's for the
texturing.
Scene set up
-Drops- I cloned the drop several times and changed their position and scale to give it a randomised falling from the sky
look, then I animated them coming down right through the leaf from frame 0 to 100 but made sure its not doing to fast,
the reason for this ? To get a nice motion blur!

-Droplets- I cloned them several times and hand placed them, there are basically 3 types of droplets in this scene, the
"normal" ones "small" ones and the "merging" ones.


Lighting
The lighting is pretty simple it's basically vray's sky light an omni for directional light and another omni in its same
exact location for the caustics

-Omni 1- I have it set with a multiplier at 0.8 with a yellowish tint and a vrayshadow.
-Omni 2- for the caustics I have the multiplier set at 15 with white light and a shadow map also the decay is set to inverse
square at 1.0 and finally in the vray properties I have it set not to generate diffuse.
Rendering
This is pretty standard affair.
Image sampler set to adaptive default settings.
Depth of field on with focal dist at 200 (may vary depending on the scale of the scene) shutter size at 2.25
irradiance map set at min rate -3 and max rate at -2 with global photon map for secondary bounces
caustics on with a multiplier at 9000, search dist at 10 and max photons at 120
Environment colour set to a light yellow multiplier set at 1, reflection/refraction an hdri map was used, and
multiplier set to 1
Motion blur turned on duration at 0.3 interval centre at 0.5, geometry samples at 2 prepass samples at 1, blur
particles as mesh and Monte Carlo sampling.

Post production - time to fix it up a bit by adjusting levels, brightness, contrast, curves and sharpness and one you have it
looking good add some diffuse glow and tweak it till you are satisfied.





Well I hope you enjoyed this mini tutorial/overview. If you have any questions or comments contact me at
archerx15@yahoo.com