Here is the first one that was released as well:

If you have the chance take a look through Digic’s site it is well worth it.

Cheers,

Dave

The guys at Ephere have been working on an exciting project that looks quite promising. What looks like a node interface for creating plug-ins for max has the potential to make the SDK even more accessible to artists and TDs. I am assuming the plug-ins it creates are using their .Net wrapper for the SDK. I have to say that it is great to see these guys continuing to add great products to max. I really like that they seem to also focus on making it easier for TDs to be able to solve problems, there .Net wrapper (which the Autodesk’s .Net wrapper is based on) has made my life MUCH easier. I have been able to bust out new tools and plug-ins much faster (perhaps 2-3x) than using the standard SDK.

Check it out below:

In any case it certainly looks exciting. Will watch this space.

Cheers,

Dave

Thanks everyone for you support and happy maxing.

Cheers,

Dave

Aston Martin One 77 Studio

Since I did buy Fusion I have started working on a small animation that has the One 77 in it primarily to put Fusion through it paces and try out some of the new tools like volume fog.

I hope you guys like the render. There is a darker version below for those of you using brighter screens. The above image looks great on my Dell 24 using Adobe SRGB. The render above seems to look better brighter less colour accurate screens. I will let you choose

Aston Martin One 77 Studio

Cheers,

Dave

They were all shot on a 7d with either a 17-40mm L or a 70-200mm L.

Tonga

Tonga

Tonga

Misc

Misc

Misc

Sydney Harbour

Sydney Harbour

Sydney Harbour

Sydney Harbour

Sydney Harbour

Sydney Harbour

Sydney Harbour

Sydney Harbour

Sydney Harbour

Sydney Harbour

Sydney Harbour

Sydney Harbour

Sydney Harbour

Sydney Harbour

Sydney Harbour

Sydney Harbour

Sydney Harbour

Sydney Harbour

So there they are. In the Zip below there some additional exposures. If there is enough interest I will upload the Raw (CR2) files.

Download: Skies

Hope they are of some use to you.

Cheers,

Dave

No Infocenter!

I hate the infocenter in max. I also hate the big “M” button they added when they removed the file menu (this file menu can at least be easily add back). I can understand Autodesk changing/adding these things as they decrease the learning curve for new users which is great as the more accessible Max is to new  users the better.

But none the less, people like myself that have been beating max in to doing what we want for many years no might not always appreciate these small “enhancements”. If it where up to me I imagine max would still look exactly the same as version 2009 before they added all UI tweaks.  So it was with much excitement when a collegue of mine at Ourvision flicked me a link to a script that removed it. As soon as I looked at the 4 or so lines of codes I realised this is something I should had have thought of a long time ago.

None the less if you like to remove the info center check out the script below:

 Close Infocenter

If you would also like to remove the buttons that are to the right of the big “M” button you can use this version below:


(
controlshwnds=windows.getChildrenHWND #max;
InfoCenter=for c in controlshwnds where c[5]=="InfoCenterHwndSource" collect c;
QATWind=for c in controlshwnds where c[5]=="QATHwndSource" collect c;
try(UIAccessor.CloseDialog InfoCenter[1][1])catch();
try(UIAccessor.CloseDialog QATWind[1][1])catch();
)


No Buttons!

Both of these scripts should be placed in your scripts/startup directory. I have not found away to turn off the big “M” yet, if anyone knows how to I would be very interested in hearing about it.

Cheers,

Dave

It has a very simple interface, basically you set the path where you would like the GI passes to be saved, type in a name and hit the button. This will set the paths for light cache and Irradiance maps. I have also added some quick options for swapping the modes of GI passes.

The screen shot below should you give you the gist of what is going on.

V-Ray Set GI Paths

You can download the script here.

Download: V-Ray Set GI Paths

This tool was actually extracted from our (Our Vision) custom Network Rendering Submitter I  wrote which basiclly did all of this automatically. It would submit a GI only job and then send the final rendering as a dependant job. This little tool sped up our workflow a great deal.  You can check it out below.

Deadline Quick Submit

Oh and for those who have been asking it only works with Deadline from Thinkbox Software. I am planning an entire post related to this tool including some tips for when working with the Deadline scripts.

Cheers,

Dave

Here is the short:

Here is the making of:

I hope you guys enjoy it.

The below test was really just to test some camera moves and animation.

Both clips were rendered using Mental Ray in 3ds max. The render times were very quick only 1-3mins per frame. Overall the the clips were turned around in about 2 days. In anyone would like a tutorial on how achieve the effect then please let me know!

Cheers,

Dave

3d Studio Max has had a layer manager for a long, long time. It works very well for what it is, however, as scenes over the years have grown large and complex the layer manager has not evolved to over come this. Scenes these days have more levels of detail and with that detail has come a need for better scene management. When deciding to create a new layer manager there were a couple of things that I wanted to do:

• Keep the existing layer manager, this seems strange but I like solutions to problems that build in redundancy. If my new layer manager decided to stop working in the middle of production I wanted to be able to revert back to the old one. This meant anything new I created would either need to be built on top of or use the existing layer manager as its core.
• The layer manager needed to be more granular. Everyone has wanted layer manager that has had sub-layers. I wanted to be able to have sub-layers of any depth.
• Sub-Layers would inherit the properties of there parents.
• Make it easy to build new tools and features into the new layer manager. If I was going to build a layer manager I wanted to be able to extend it easily.
• Standardise our layers and workflow. I wanted to create a workflow were our files and how we worked in them was standardised so that anyone in the studio could open someones file and be able to hit the ground running.

Custom Features of the layer manager

There are many custom features I have written into the layer manager some of them are below:

• Isolate Layer. Similar to Max’s isolate feature when you right click on a layer and select isolate all other layers are hidden and the selected layer is turned on. The next time you right click on the layer you have the option to de-isolate it. This has proved very handy when yo need to do some quick modeling fixes in large scenes.
• Rename Layers and Children. I wanted an easy way to rename layers and there children right in the dialog. This proved a little trickier than I first thought it would, however, you can now easily rename layers just by double clicking on them and typing.
• Node View. An external view for handling nodes.
• Export Layer. Saves the selected tree of layers as an X-Ref.
• Layer Sets. For saving the layer states of layers. For instance you can save a state for a camera with all of the relevant layers turned on. This is great for large scenes that have multiple cameras.

A new Layer Manager

Below are some screen shots of the new layer manager. As you can see the interface is very simple and faithful to the original layer manager, this lets new artists in the studio get up to speed with the tool right away.

LayerManager v2.0

A screen capture of the standard layer manager. Notice the layer names are the same as in Larry's with each level being deliminated by a '.'.

Most recently we used the tool on the Renovators with great success. Using it in conjunction with a few other tools we were able to achieve the impossible delivering animation for 6 houses in 6 days. You can see some of the work here.

What Next?

Moving forward there are a couple of things that I am currently working:

• Increased Performance. I want to increase the performance of the tool so that I can add support of scene objects in the tree view. So far I have re-written the control and I am pleased to say the performance is much faster. Not to say the current version is slow but there is a difference between adding 200 or so layers and 5000 objects.
• Tighter integration with X-Refs and containers. I want to make splitting up max files to be completely seamless and transparent. This will be a huge benefit on large projects with more than one artist working on it. Hopefully the layer manager will become a bug for scene management.
• Create an connection between render passes and layers. It would be great to expand the layer sets functionality to be able to create different render passes.