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Heintje posted:Have any of you tried this at length? How would a Mac fare running XP SP2 x64 and 3ds max? I tried this a year or so ago and Bootcamp would break the Max license. Long story short, the copy protection they use for the standalone license messes with the boot sector. When you boot into OSX, the boot sector is changed, Max's copy protection freaks out and you have to call Autodesk to fix it. Every. Single. Time. This apparently doesn't happen if you use a network license. I know it's still causing people problems, but last I checked (~2 weeks ago) some people had figured out a way around it. If you never boot into OSX you should be fine, but it's something to look into if you're serious about getting a Mac. If the program at SCAD hasn't changed too much since I was there, you won't be using Max unless you're taking classes in the interactive/game program. Everything else will be Maya or Houdini. DefMech fucked around with this message at 14:12 on Jun 19, 2008 |
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Jun 19, 2008 14:00
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Heintje posted:Another thing is that buildings in RL don't have perfectly flat glasswork. I've seen people do renders where there is a slight wavyness or distortion in the apprent geometry. Not entirely sure what they are doing half the time, maaaaybe there's something going on with the bump map breaking up the reflections. Cubicle- any ideas? We subdivide the glass plane and add a noise modifier. It usually turns out looking pretty good.
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Jun 30, 2008 14:10
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SynthOrange posted:Out of curiosity, why wouldnt just a simple bump map work? Or does Vray not do bump maps? To be honest, the method I mentioned was something we saw elsewhere, tried it, it worked and we never really bothered trying anything else after that. Ha. I'm sure you could stick a bump/disp/etc in there for similar results.
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Jul 1, 2008 03:32
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ElecHeadMatt posted:I've learned a crapton of technique in a very short amount of time while being at Lucas, far more than anything I've learned in school. This was my favorite thing about stepping out into the real world. It made me wonder sometimes why I even bothered with school. Three summers of interning and I would probably have learned way more than I did in all of my vsfx and itgm courses.
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Jul 3, 2008 00:16
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Saw this linked somewhere, it's loving incredible: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/09/otoy-developing-server-side-3d-rendering-technology/
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Jul 10, 2008 19:37
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Senor Tron posted:Pretty cool, although while it has a lot of useful applications I don't see portable gaming being one of them due to the lag. Now personal navigation devices and similar things, this could really help out there. Yeah, I have no idea what the eventual applications of this tech will be, but it sure sounds promising for something. Someone in the comments said something about it causing a resurgence in arcades. They'd have the servers on site, making latency a non-issue. While I think they're probably 100% wrong on the arcade thing, keeping the geographic distance as low as possible would be one solution. FOX or EA or whoever would lease space at ISPs, who would cache the content locally, preventing users from having to go too far out of their network. That said, I'm still not sold on this being used for traditional video game entertainment. I can see the government, higher education and the military having lots of interest, though. I'd also like to know a lot more about the hardware they're using. It says most of the load is handled by a bunch of ATI cards working in parallel, not necessarily by lots of computers. That sure sounds like it could be cheaper than the rack of render servers we have at work. Of course, this all depends on the highly specialized software they're using to get all that to work together. What technology are they using for their lighting? How does it handle the gigabytes of texture data and the ultra dense polycounts of those film assets? How do they keep it all that parallel processing perfectly synchronized? Lots of questions...
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Jul 11, 2008 16:13
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BonoMan posted:Also I'm jealous Balistic... I really wish they'd bring it back down south again. I went to it in NOLA twice ('96 and '00), Orlando and San Antonio, but haven't been since due to the distance.
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Jul 29, 2008 17:04
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. I haven't been to SIGGRAPH since 2000 in NOLA.
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The extra $300 you're paying for an Ultrasharp is really only necessary if you're doing color-critical work. The larger Dell panels are just fine for normal use, especially after calibration. In my opinion, a quad core isn't really necessary unless you're running a 64 bit OS and you plan on doubling your RAM.
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Jul 30, 2008 14:18
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BonoMan posted:The new Ultrasharps are pieces of poo poo too (unless they fixed something I wasn't aware of). The color shift and viewing angle were absolutely abysmal. We returned a bunch of them before settling back on CRTs for the time being. I don't know what they did but they hosed something up...hopefully it got fixed. When were those bad Ultrasharps from? I remember hearing a bunch of bad stuff about Dell for a while, but I thought they had everything fixed up again. At least at the higher end.
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Jul 30, 2008 17:55
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How do you like Onyx? I think we just bought it today. I've used SpeedTree, Xfrog and others, but have yet to even touch Onyxtree. I've noticed that lots of folks are using it these days.
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Aug 12, 2008 00:39
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cubicle gangster posted:and since then (and for a long time now, probably until october) i'm doing work on something I cant show anyone. Will you be able to show it once it's done? The fact that it's top secret makes it about 2.5x more interesting.
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Aug 12, 2008 16:50
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Mickey Eye posted:Anybody here have any experience with 3D connexion mice and Max? I have the space explorer one at work for solidworks and love it but they didn't use to support Max or Maya and now apparently they do. Worth the purchase for just Max though? If you use it in Solidworks and really love it, you'll probably love it in Max. I got one as a doorprize a while back and use it occasionally. It's helpful for some things, but overall I'm pretty indifferent about it.
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Aug 20, 2008 13:14
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Just got a test 3D print done for a big house we're finishing up. The image quality isn't too great thanks to being shot on a phone, but you can still make out the detail pretty well. Compared to the render, you can get a good idea of the resolution that's possible at this scale on the Z Corp printers(that's a quarter there, for reference). We could have probably gotten smoother columns and retained some of the small window detail if we went with an FDM print, but the cost was way too high for the client. It's going to be awesome to see the final print of the entire home.  Click here for the full 1067x800 image. Rendering that the print is based on:  Click here for the full 1000x533 image.
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Aug 20, 2008 18:26
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cubicle gangster posted:
In this scene, could you have just rotoscoped the cranes out instead of all that camera mapping sorcery or was that not an option?
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Aug 28, 2008 00:17
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I've used Photoshop across several x64 systems and never had any issues. The only problems I've had were some special Mental Ray shaders that needed to be recompiled and Quicktime/iTunes not working completely.
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Sep 22, 2008 22:37
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This is for you Vray dudes:  We've got nasty artifacts showing up in some of our frames. Two of the most prominent should be clearly visible in the render above. These appear(and are not always consistent) when using light cache and irradiance map. When we replace irradiance map with brute force, it renders flawlessly. No issues anywhere. Any ideas on what could be causing this? The same thing happens on some of our walkway areas, as well, so it's not necessarily the water shader that's at fault. The sun is also invisible, so it isn't that, either.
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Sep 24, 2008 00:02
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I've tried to jump into Modo a few times, but never really get far enough due to a lack of free time. It's a fantastic program and getting even better with every release. Despite what they say on their site, I don't think it's super easy to pick up. Modo has tons of tools and functions and it can be a little overwhelming to figure out what's essential. For other things, they take properties or buttons that should be grouped together in one dialog and spread them out over different tabs or menus. Much of this can be avoided with good documentation, some of which you'll find on their site and elsewhere like DigitalTutors. As long as you're not too interested in animation right now, I'd highly recommend it. Just make sure to turn off trackball rotation in the viewport 
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Oct 1, 2008 14:05
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Silo is awesome and super easy to use. However, it's just a modeler, so I don't think you can do any rigging in it right now.
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Oct 2, 2008 13:13
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I think it'd fit in really well with something like Moment Of Inspiration. However, I'm skeptical of if or when it will ever see the light of day. There have been a bunch of really awesome demos shown this year and I hate getting all excited over them when there are no concrete plans to make them public.
DefMech fucked around with this message at 04:03 on Oct 13, 2008 |
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Oct 13, 2008 03:59
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I just came over here to post that. I'm really, truly surprised that Autodesk has swallowed all of the major players in computer graphics. That's a fairly scary prospect.
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Oct 24, 2008 02:34
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International Log posted:Haha, man. It's funny that EVERYONE I know is reacting the same way to this. I also think the same thing, and I wonder what they are going to buy next. C4D? Vue? Lightwave? They've been buying a lot of high profile entertainment oriented companies lately, so they'll probably swing around to the design/engineering side, go mad with power, and buy Dassault Systemes. After that, they form into some sort of software singularity and become fully sentient, removing the need for human operators entirely.
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Oct 24, 2008 15:59
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sigma 6 posted:Also wanted to share this "Unfinished Swan" demo which takes a novel approach first person shooters. Funny how similar ideas spring up simultaneously. Some of the guys behind that Velociraptor Safari game made a rough demo of the same concept recently: http://capnrat.com/29/whitewash/
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Oct 29, 2008 22:57
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I was internetting around at work last week and ran across a couple interesting posts. If you have done any amount of work in Sketchup, or are at least familiar with the typical output of Sketchup users, this will also be of interest to you: http://www.sketchucation.com/forums/scf/viewtopic.php?f=81&t=12513 http://www.sketchucation.com/forums/scf/viewtopic.php?f=81&t=10549 With all of the community-developed addons, there's not a whole lot of obvious features left for Google to implement.
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Nov 11, 2008 17:29
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Zuliban is a natural. Everything I've seen from him over the years is executed fantastically. I'd love to pick apart one of his scenes. For those without Chaosgroup forum access, the rest of the images from the link: Click here for the full 885x1000 image.    Click here for the full 1200x900 image.  Click here for the full 700x407 image.  Click here for the full 800x464 image.  Click here for the full 600x722 image.  Click here for the full 535x626 image.  Click here for the full 932x1100 image.  Click here for the full 774x613 image.  Click here for the full 1420x1065 image.  Click here for the full 848x1000 image.
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Nov 13, 2008 19:17
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Vray is a tool just like any other. The reason why so many renders look the same is because so many people are trying for the same look. It's an aesthetic thing, not technical. Most of my clients want the model in blasting daylight with pure, unrealistic blue skies, no dirt or distractions so that's how most of our renders end up. If we do something more dramatic, it freaks them out. Vray is used all over the industry, but obviously not to the capacity of something like Maya+PRMan. Mainly because in many situations, an accurate GI solution is unnecessary and too slow. Lots of motion graphics and broadcast firms use it. Sway Studio is a fairly prominent one that uses Max + Vray on almost everything. Most archvis firms use it because it's the fastest and best looking GI renderer out there. As far as it being a point and click renderer, that's a little bit inaccurate. There are pages and pages of settings to change, most of which you don't ever need to touch. The work comes in how you set up and light your scene, how you make your shaders and your own personal art direction, just like with any other renderer. DefMech fucked around with this message at 06:49 on Nov 17, 2008 |
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Nov 17, 2008 06:42
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TouchToneDialing posted:Havent posted anything in awhile, so I thought I would post my most recent side project. Just got a new Ikea catalog today and I have to say, you definitely nailed this one. Great job. Did you redraw that painting?
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Nov 28, 2008 05:50
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I've been learning a new piece of software lately that's entirely NURBS based. I just glanced at the thread title again and it popped out at me. Does anyone else here actually use NURBS/Solids modeling very often? I figure most of that discipline is in the engineering field and not so much entertainment/art these days.
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Dec 3, 2008 06:15
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tuna posted:I've seen a few people having a blast in MOI which is free. Mainly for modelling solid, individual objects. The only reason I personally use them is when rigging, parametric surfaces are still a crucial part of everyone's toolset. That's exactly the program I was referring to, but it's definitely not free It's an extremely simple and fun program, basically the Sketchup of NURBS, but still a different enough workflow to be challenging. I love being able to boolean my heart out and still end up with a clean mesh.
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Dec 3, 2008 16:12
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So just how unlikely is it that with Maya and now XSI under Autodesk's wing, we'll see an overhaul of Max's material editor?
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Dec 4, 2008 16:12
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Gobelins, one of those awesome French animation schools, just updated their student work section. As usual, lots of stuff worth taking a look at: http://www.gobelins.fr/galerie/animation/
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Dec 8, 2008 16:44
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bigredbutton posted:There's so much geometry in the scene that some passes would need 16gig of ram to render, and if memory serves there ended up being about 70-75 passes in total. Is that 70-75 passes for one scene or one shot? Either way, I'd love to know how that breaks down. I use Vray every day, but not anywhere close to this scale. The complexity of a project like this is fascinating in how it diverges from our own workflow.
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Dec 14, 2008 17:58
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cubicle gangster posted:I'm not sure what you mean by time of day, I dont use the daylight system. By shade I meant ambient light. And by sun, I mean when my main light hits the surface. Do you not use the sun/sky system at all? Just direct lights/HDR or something? I never used Vray for exteriors until after the sun/sky system was introduced. All of my knowledge of exterior lighting before that is with non-GI/radiosity solutions.
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Dec 30, 2008 22:45
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Wow, at first I didn't think much of it, just a really uncreative student reel. Then the completely unaltered track footage from Zero Gear and an art gallery full of Tony Danza's Ho illustrations definitely put it over the edge. That's shameless!
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Dec 31, 2008 20:29
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Unexpected EOF posted:So today I decided to try getting into zbrush, so I downloaded the trial and... The answer to your first question is "Yes". The answer to your second question is also "Yes". Zbrush is an incredible and powerful program, but unfortunately they know nothing about good UI design. If you try out Mudbox and are happy with the results, don't even concern yourself with anything from Pixologic. I've learned Zbrush, I understood Zbrush, but I'll only use it if I have no other option. In my experience, getting a model into Zbrush and starting to sculpt takes many more un-obvious tool and menu selections compared to Mudbox which will get you on the ground and running in just a few moments. Zbrush is really a fantastic, powerful piece of software, but it's not something you just pick up and start using like Mudbox. I hope this makes sense, but: Modo:Zbrush as Silo:Mudbox DefMech fucked around with this message at 06:42 on Jan 7, 2009 |
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Jan 7, 2009 06:36
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You're probably going to need to use a particle/hair system for something that deep. Model a few pieces of piling and scatter them across a mesh.
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Jan 19, 2009 17:48
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I know of tons of freelancers that have held onto C4D and do great work with it, even in games! However, despite the basics being the same, you should really get a working knowledge of Max, Maya and some sort of sculpting program. Most of the industry uses those and you want to be as adaptable as you can be.
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Jan 20, 2009 18:26
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Yeah, by sculpting I mean something like Zbrush, Mudbox, 3DCoat, etc. You use it mostly for creating high-res version of your meshes for normal mapping and other things. If you look at a lot of the good work on Game Artisans and Polycount, some sort of sculpting program is being used. Max and Maya both have their pluses and minuses, but most of that depends on your personal opinion and workflow. They're both great and you need to spend some time with both before figuring out which one suits you best.
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Jan 20, 2009 20:03
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Unexpected EOF posted:I will say this, though. I don't if it's been updated since the 2008 version, but jesus christ 3DSmax has a terrible interface. The interface hasn't really changed in well over a decade. When you think about what's happened in interface design since then, it's really unforgivable that they've gone so long without an overhaul. I've heard a rumor, though...
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Jan 20, 2009 21:33
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I'm don't know a whole hell of a lot(anything) about Gamebryo or Bethesda's modifications to it, but 2 and 3 should be fine. What you're doing in 3 is actually preferable sometimes for optimization.
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Jan 22, 2009 23:14
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AutoDesSys, the creators of formZ just opened the beta of their new product, Bonzai3D. From what I can tell, it's sorta like Sketchup, but seems to be based on solids/NURBS rather than polygons with a much stronger toolset. You can check it out here: http://www.bonzai3d.com/bonzai3d_getbeta.html
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Feb 11, 2009 17:41
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