I have made the windows & wall cut shelfs in my room animation, but since my room is under paintjob i can't post it right now, I m in a cybercafe right now, will soon post, the window was painted with multi-sub materials with material IDs for differnet faces, kinda UVW Map but done manually
now tackeling the problems one by one
nikhil
even with mental ray the shadows won't look good if the settings & photon values are not given properly, remember that scene took 4 hrs to render an artificial shadow, but in real life shadows are different, they are better termed as soft shadows, they blur as U move far from them, because of which the shadow will look darkest or most dence clsoe to the cam but less dence when it is far from the camera, that shadow is not realsictic, the shadow U see in Abhijit's room or my room is close to reality (in my room I have yet to give photon volumes & values)
siriusb
i wanted to know which mode U run Max in as this can help a lot in running max viewport, nvidia GeForce 6 or FX cards will run max better in Direct3D mode as the opengl driver for these consumer lavel cards are not made to run max 7 & maya etc, try running in OpenGL & U will see serious performance degradation & visual loss
The water materials could have been optimised by decresing the noice lavel & placing another copy of water below the primary water, creating an illusion of water while still maintaining low polygon count, & don't forget the Optimize modifier, use it where ever u can use it
Abhijit
If U R suing the defalut scaline rendere, then first remove everything which U don't need & place different cameras to show what u want to show, one simply isn't enough
what type of lights U R using, if they are omni or m area spot or target then change the color of shadow from black to light gray & select shadow map insted of ray traced shadow, also if u r using photon emition then try rendering without it, since the room is closed I guess that won't make a big quality difference anyway, select light effect shadow color
rendering at 640X480 with Sharp quadratic anti allising & hammersity sampleing set at .5 quality is enough, if there are no glass in the view then disable raytracing & set the ray trace value from 9 to 2, that is enough (above the "enable raytrace" checkbox)
in case U R using mental ray, however for this scene the default will do fine too, decrese the photon values to 100 or 500 from 10000 or high, disable scaline
U need to do R & D, yourself, disable whatever which isn't required, & then render, do not go for balckman or camulet - rom AA as they will make the image sharp & anti allised but that isn't required,
do not render field but frames & disable camera effects,
if possible, U can post the .max file here, in rar format & we wil also render it at our place, I will optimise the materials too & this will show u what to do next time
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