Olivier Archer

Hello and welcome to my render effects scripts tutorial. Did you know that there are a quite a few render effects scripts that come with 3D Studio Max 6? Well they’re located in the max root folder/scripts/pluginscripts

Well in this tutorial I’m going to show you them and what they do!

Don’t know how to run scripts? Well i'm going to teach you. Open max, then click “MAXScript” at the top tool bar, then click “Run Script…” after go to the pluginscripts folder and select a script.

Don’t know where or what the script just did? Well go to the “Effects” menu under the “Rendering” drop down list and click “Add”

Ok now that you know how to use scripts, lets see what they do!

But before we do that here’s my teapot test scene with not effects added to it so we can use it as reference to see exactly what the effects do.

First up is the “16 X 9 Effect”

This one only has 2 options. “Top/Bottom cropping”, which just says how big the boarder will be and the other option is the “Border Colour” guess what that does.

This effect adds a letter box borders and that’s all.

The next effect is “Checkerize”

It has 3 options, “Checker size”, “Checker Colour” and “Alpha Value” I’m pretty sure that those don’t need explanation.

This Effect adds a checker effect to the image, I’m not sure why you would want to apply it, but it could be good if you’re in an artsy mood or something.

The next effect is “Film Age”

This one has a lot of options to mess around with, there are way too many options here for me to show what they all do but they are pretty self explaining. So I suggest you go and experiment too see what kind of effects that you come up with. One cool thing about this effect is that you can save and load presets so if you make something really cool you can save your settings and send them to friends or use them with other scenes and projects.

Here we have something nice, it gives your image that really old look. Well I’ll let the image explain it. *Note this effect can take a while to calculate, it took 21seconds for this scene.