Living Room

In the field of architectural visualization one of the most time consuming tasks is to furnish buildings.
A lack of interior design becomes especially obvious in business towers with big glass windows.

To save time, this script helps to semi-automatically populate rooms with randomly distributed assets.

A simple and bland example facade.

The script, once opened.

Defining the upper left and lower right corner of the facade.

Creating the grid for the room’s width and height.

Option for merging multiple cells to one room or breaking them up again.

Random distribution of lit and unlit rooms.

Basic rendering of the achieved furnishing.

Fixing rendering errors can be time consuming. You can either render the whole image again, make use of “region rendering” (in Vray, however,  you can only render one region at a time and these have to be rectangles) or you can paint a black and white mask on top of the latest rendering in Photoshop, then load that into Vray’s render mask slot. 
With the RenderMaskPainter you can paint a mask directly in the viewport and feed it into Vray automatically, saving a lot of time.

Initial rendering

Interface in 3ds Max

With a click on the “paint” button, the screen turns black, ready to be painted on.

The rendered image from Vray, using the exported mask.

The mask can then be saved onto the hard drive.

Next time when rendering, only the masked area will be computed.

Rendering the whole image takes over six and a half minutes.

Imagine the rims and the tail light need to be fixed.

You could render one big mask covering all areas…

…or three smaller ones. Not included is the time it takes to set up three seperate rendering processes.

Using the Render Mask Painter the rendering time got reduced yet again, without the additional hassle of multiple renderings.

Using the script saves 5 minutes and 43 seconds of render time opposed to rendering the whole image, which is about 82.95%.

This Blender add-on automates the saving and renaming of a rendering and it’s passes based on wildcards.
Besides of saving time, it also reduces the error margin for saving wrong version numbers, forgetting to save certain passes, saving over something you wanted to keep and so much more.

Output Name Keywords:

It can also keep track of the current version number by parsing the destination folder and increments it if specified, saves the scene upon rendering (also incrementally) and can shut off your computer when done.

Unfortunately it does not yet work with Blender 2.8, an update is planned however, as soon as the beta’s API is stable enough in this regard.