Quick Start Guide

Part 1: Scene Setup

For the purposes of this guide, a very simple scene will do. I will be using a teapot sitting on a box. In this image I have set the teapot's segment count to 16 so it looks fairly round.

Now that we have a scene, we need to set up lighting. Trying to render the scene as it currently is would just result in a black frame.

Part 2: Lighting

For this scene, I'll be using an environment map for lighting. The specific map I'm using is the 4k version of Chinese Garden which can be downloaded for free at HDRI Haven, but any HDRI should work just as well.

To bring up our environment setup, press 8 or open the "Rendering" menu and select "Environment...". In the "Environment and Effects" window click the button at the top under the label "Environment Map:". If you haven't set an environment map yet, this button should be labeled "None".

In the texmap list that pops up, select bitmap and then navigate to the HDRI file on your hard drive. Leave all of the HDR settings as default when you load the HDRI file.

Now the environment is set up and we can do a test render. First, make sure that your perspective viewport is selected and has a decent view of the scene. Then, press F10 to bring up the render setup dialog. In the "Renderer" dropdown, make sure "Cycles for Max Renderer" is selected. With all the options still at default, you can click Render to produce something that resembles this image.

If you would like, you can rotate the environment map by changing the HDRI bitmap's U offset in the 'Coordinates' rollout of the bitmap parameter panel.

Part 3: Materials

Now that we have some basic lighting set up, we need to give the scene some materials. This simple scene will need just two materials: one for the box and one for the teapot.

Box Material

The simplest general-purpose material available in Cycles is the Diffuse material, so we will use this for the box. Create a Cycles Diffuse material and assign it to the box in your scene.

Next, create a Smoke texmap and connect it to the Color input of your Cycles Diffuse material. We will need to change some of the parameters on this texmap to make it work with Cycles. The two changes we need are to change the Coordinates Source to "Explicit Map Channel" and change the Size to 0.3. These changes are needed because Cycles for Max is only compatible with 2-dimensional Max texmaps, not 3-dimensional maps based on object geometry.

Teapot Material

For the teapot we will use the Physical Material that is built in to 3ds Max. This material is largely compatible with Cycles for Max, though not every parameter is respected. See the Max Materials section for more details.

First, create a Physical Material and apply it to the teapot. Then, in the presets rollout at the top of the Physical Material configuration, open the menu labelled <Choose Preset....> and select Copper.

Render

With these materials in place, our render output now looks like this.

Part 4: Cleaning Up Noise

Now we have a completed scene, but the render is quite noisy. This noise is most noticeable on the top surface of the cube, particularly around the base of the teapot. This noise is caused by very bright sunlight reflecting off of the side of the teapot onto the cube.

Cycles give us a few options to help reduce this noise.

First, we can always simply render more samples. By default this plugin will render 100 samples per pixel, which is fine for previews and simple scenes, but will not provide the quality we want for final renders. To help reduce the noise in this scene, let's increase the sample count from 100 to 200. This is done in the Cycles tab of the Render Setup Dialog. Be aware that increasing the sample count will proportionally increase the render time. That is, 200 samples will take twice as long to render as 100 samples.

Another tool available to help clean up noise is sample clamping. This allows us to set a maximum possible brightness for any one sample. Limiting the maximum brightness in this way will reduce the variance across multiple samples of the same pixel and will lead to a final render with less noise.

It is important to understand that the sample clamp option gives you speed at the expense of physical accuracy. This option limits how bright a single pixel can be sampled, which means that enabling it makes the scene slightly darker than it 'should' be. Be careful when using these options, particularly direct clamping, to not remove too much light from the scene.

In this case we know that the noise is being caused by light reflected off of the teapot. This is Indirect light because it is bouncing off of an object in the scene, so we will want to adjust Clamp Indirect here. Lower it to 2.4.

With these options set, let's run the render again.

Here we can see that a lot of the noise from the initial render is gone, but the image is not perfectly clean yet. The quality can be further increased by raising the sample count or lowering the indirect clamp a bit more. Try playing around with the render settings to see what values reduce the noise in this scene to an acceptable level.

Part 5: Where to go Next

Now you have a basic understanding of how this plugin works and how to set up a scene, lighting, and materials.

From here you may want to check out my youtube channel, which has a number of videos covering how to use various specific features of this plugin.

There is not (yet) a lot of info about using this plugin specifically, so you may also want to look up some tutorials on how to use Cycles with Blender. Most information from such tutorials will apply to this plugin just as much as it does to Blender. The Shader Graph Editor in particular should make it very easy to follow tutorials for building Cycles shaders.