What started out as an internal digital kitchen creative excercise, has now turned into a bit of a phenom. My buddy Nick Campbell (of GSG fame) had the idea to give out 5 second projects every couple of weeks with differing themes. Well, it was a great success and through blogging about it on Greyscalegorilla, the world wanted in. So I wanted to spread the creative juices and perhaps some cgpov readers would like to participate. So go make stuff and if you take part, link it back here in a comment.
It all started here. This is the first internal 5 second project.
Here is the channel where you’ll see what’s happening right now.
Here is Nick’s GSG blog.
BTW, I plan on doing more with the gamma series soon. It will cover vray and mental ray.
This entry was written by , posted on March 29, 2009 at 12:55 pm, filed under Uncategorized. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
I know this isn’t really all that new, but I just installed it and I have to say it’s GREAT having a fast SSS shader in vray! I fully recommend making this update. I’m a big V-Ray fan.
New features included:
- VRayFastSSS2 sub-surface scattering material
- Linear Workflow
- Mesh-based lights
- V-Ray light material as direct light
- V-Ray Fog environmental effect
- Vector Displacement
- Import Proxy as mesh
- Support for Max Arch & Design materials
- Region Rendering directly in VFB
The guys at cgchannel have just saved me the trouble of to review it. Check out thier review here.
This entry was written by , posted on March 28, 2009 at 2:34 pm, filed under Uncategorized. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
This is the first live demo of Max 2010. go there now (2pm central time) http://area.autodesk.com/gdc2009
This entry was written by , posted on March 25, 2009 at 7:00 pm, filed under Uncategorized. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
Just got wind of Autodesk announcing 3DS Max 2010. Check out the youtube channel here.
This entry was written by , posted on March 24, 2009 at 7:39 pm, filed under Uncategorized. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
So here I go throwing my virtual hat into the gamma ring. I’ve seen a ton of great posts on other sites that explain why a linear workflow can help your renders no matter what 3D application you use. When I am asked about gamma and listen to people that ask, “why should I work in this new linear space, what’s in it for me?”, I simply reply, “well, you don’t have to light as hard”. That’s the easiest way I can explain it. I’m here to implor you to stop pushing your lights into oblivion.
The best explanation I’ve found was by David Johnson
“What we see on a monitor is almost always the sRGB color space. What comes out of the maya or mentalray by default is a linear color space. When you display the linear color space on an sRGB display the darker parts look too dark. Instead of compensating for this by adding more lights a better solution is to apply a gamma correction to the output of the renderer to convert the colorspace to sRGB.”
There it is. I’m not sure how I can elaborate on that. I will say that by working this way you end up using fewer lights in your renders. You also instantly see how much more real your renders become. The human eye is cabable of seeing quite a bit of detail in the shadows and working in a non-linear fashion makes your renders appear crunched, dark, and with no details in the shadows. The solution used to be, crank up the lights and turn up your fill. So essentially your fighting your render to appear as if it were seen through a human eye. Well stop fighting, and abusing your lights!
If any of you would like to see how I work this way in 3DS Max via Mental Ray and V-Ray or how I work this way in Maya via Mental ray, please reply and force my hand to give detailed instructions.
This entry was written by , posted on March 23, 2009 at 8:43 pm, filed under Uncategorized. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
There is a question that I’ve had to answer more than I’d like to in my professional life. A silly question that has hounded me for years. This subject seems to always come up when I meet new people. I say, “I’m a 3D Creative Lead”. They quickly reply, “So you must use Maya then?” I reply, “no, actually I use 3ds Max”. This is usually followed by a look of puzzlement, then followed up with a cautious, “Why?”
What better place to finally answer that question than in the sanctuary of my own cozy blog. Perhaps you too have used Maya and fallen out of love. Maybe I’m not alone. I bet there are quite a few artists out there who feel slightly embarrassed by chosing NOT to use Maya. This one is for you.
My affair with Maya started WAY back at 1.0. I was beta testing it while working in Alias Power Animator. Power Animator was the very first 3D software I used professionally. I loved it. It had everything I thought I would need. That is, until I met Maya for the first time.
Maya had me with those cool marking menus and those fancy dynamics. I remember thinking that all those cowboy demos looked lame as hell, but what are you gonna do? No software company has good looking demos. Quickly Maya took over the entertainment market with it’s open architecture and the introduction of mel. This led to endless movies being made with it. Which in turn, led every eager student to demand his school use the same software that made Jurassic Park. The kool-aid was pored and everyone drank. Including me. I thought Maya was the ONLY tool for 3d professionals. I also thought crashing renders, blotchy shadows, and buggy display issues, were just part of the game.
I cant tell you how many times I would kick off an important render on Friday, only to come in Monday to a failed render. Or a popping shadow or anti-aliasing artifacts. I spent more time troubleshooting (and losing hair) than actually animating. All the while, I thought this was normal.
Five or six versions of Maya later (and me much grayer), my buddy Adam Holmes took a job with Discreet (not Autodesk yet). He was an demo artist for 3DS Max and really wanted me to give it a shot. I was a bit snobby at first, afraid of what others would think, but decided to accept his free demo. I installed it and immediately thought, “man, this UI sucks.” No marking menus? My clicking finger got sore from hunting around for every little button and modifier. But damn if the scanline renderer wasn’t blazing fast. I decided to give it a shot on a 3D title for a Footlocker spot I was working on. A simple piece of 3d type that was all chromed out and supposed to fly around our actor in a super slo-mo cornball way. This sort of thing would have been easy enough to do in Maya, but I bet I would have run into at least a couple of issues trying to deform the type around the actor.
By my estimations, I finished that Footlocker title using 3DS Max in about half the time it would have taken me in Maya. But what made me a believer wasnt how fast I turned it around, it was how fast I was able to turn around client changes. The client decided to change a few things at the last minute that would have meant almost starting over in Maya, but Max simply meant tweaking my modifier stack. And right then I saw the power of a non-linear approach. I never drank that kool-aid again.
Later I discovered the power of rendering to elements and passes (something very foriegn to Maya users at the time). The quality of my work escalated because I now understood how to use this funcitonality and how to make my stuff look even better through comping. I could never go back to Maya’s linear approach now. It is only recently that Maya has understood the power of 3d comping, something I was doing with Max 5 years ago. Later, when I discovered Brazil and V-ray, my relationship with Max was set in stone. This app makes amazing looking pictures.
I’m a sucker for bullet point lists, so here is a breakdown of why I dont use Maya…anymore. This list is not in any particular order and only includes the reasons that popped into my mind at the time of writing.
1. Too permanent - Manipulating history sucks. I like to work in a program that allows easy changes (I work in advertising after all). Maya makes that very difficult. I like being able to work a volume select with a falloff into some deformer to do something cool and new. It’s called creativity. Or some call it the modifier stack.
2. The deformers don’t cut it - There are not enough deformers and they are difficult to manipulate and turn on thier ear for artistic means. Ever try to extrude a ribbon along a path for some mo-graphy element? It’s a pain in the ass! Lattice based spline deformers? Pah-leeze!
3. Redundant menus - Ever look around Maya and wonder, “what the hell is with all these menu tabs that I never touch? And why are so many of them called the same cryptic thing?” I’ve spent many a minute traversing these rabbit holes.
4. Sorry MEL, I’m not a programmer - I have no interest in spending weeks writing tools to make up for Maya’s deficiencys. I also don’t have a budget for a fulltime TD. If I hop over to Highend3d and flounder through thier search engine, I usually find some out of date script that was made for Maya 2.0.
6. The Maya community is selfish - Don’t get all crazy defensive on me here. I’ve posted to both Maya and Max forums. In my experience, I’ve found that I get double the responses from the Max community than the Mayans. ScriptSpot.com blows away Highend3d in terms of sheer amount of free scripts/plugins. Actually if it weren’t for scriptspot.com, I’m not sure how I would finish half the jobs I’ve done.
7. Not enough plugins - I’m sorry but just because Maya has built in fluids, doesn’t mean they are good. I love what Duncan does for the world of 3D but his numerous examples never seem to apply to the jobs I work on. Max has far more third party developers which means more choices for the artist. Plus, Max has easier ways for artists to do technically difficult things faster.
8. No V-Ray.
9. Particles pain - I know Maya’s particles have been called “powerful”, but if your not a scripting genius they are extremely limiting. I have yet to see a student reel using them to any effectiveness. I myself never fully understood how to utilize particles until using Pflow in Max. Now, we solve problems with Pflow on almost every job.
10. No noise - I still can’t believe there is no noise deformer or noise animation tool. I use noise all the time in both modeling and animation. Sure you could write a cryptic noise expression in Maya but that is both cumbersome and limiting if your not a math wiz.
I could go on (no free Mental Ray render-node licenses), but ten is a good number to end on. I don’t want you all to think I’m some kind of software snob. I’m not. I actually love where Maya has gone with it’s addition of framebuffered elements. I also think it’s render pass system is now one of the best. I even used it recently in a creative fashion. So from time to time I check in on my old friend Maya to see how she’s doing and whether or not I could come back to her. If/When they ever decide to move to a more non-linear workflow (ICE or Modifier Stack), I probably would go back. If for nothing else than to be able to answer that annoying question with a simple, YES.
This entry was written by , posted on at 2:57 pm, filed under Uncategorized, news. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
I just got an update to HDR Light Studio that addresses some issues with the first release. Most notably, the addition of useful hot-keys that make working in the app a bit more familiar (cntrl+z undo, etc). They also fixed the .HDR output that was having issues with Hypershot on the Mac and V-ray (yay!).
It’s great to see a company releasing updates so quickly and listening to their customers. I have a feeling we are going to see great things from Protograph. I’ll keep you all posted.
This entry was written by , posted on at 2:46 pm, filed under Uncategorized. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
Just found out that the nodejoe plugin for 3dsmax which enables users to edit materials in a node based workflow, has just been accepted into the ACAP program. This legitimizes the plugin and makes it a bit more attractive to bigger shops that need to be careful about tools they add to the pipeline.
I hope that nodejoe is a huge success. Perhaps then, Autodesk will see how much of a need there is for this tool and they can either buy it outright or develop one of their own. It seems ridiculous to me that Max is still without this feature.
press release here
This entry was written by , posted on March 18, 2009 at 2:51 pm, filed under Uncategorized, news. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
HDRLightStudio V1 is a standalone app that generates studio light hdr’s that the user designs. It’s extremely useful for those of us doing the occasional cg product and cant find a suitable pre-fab studio HDR. You simply drag and drop studio light boxes around your viewport and adjust their color and intensity. Once you’ve got something you like, you render it out at a preset resolution of your choice in either exr or hdr format. We recently used it at dk when our on set hdr’s weren’t cutting it. We thought we may be able to reconstruct the on-set lighting using this product. It worked fairly well but I have some ideas on how they could improve it.
The Good:
1. Simple interface, easy to understand.
2. The ability to preview different exposures, very handy.
3. You can adjust both wattage and falloff of all lights.
4. Exr support.
The Bad:
1. no cntrl+z undo
2. Can’t load hdr’s into background. This would rock if you were trying to match an on-set hdr.
3. All light boxes seem too perfect. I wish there were slight wrinkles or a slight fabric feel to the light boxes. When viewed up close, it is apparent that they are just gradients.
4. No mouse over light box selection. You must select your light in the light lister before you can edit it. I kept trying to select the light with my mouse over it’s pivot point and it kept moving my current selection around. Very frustrating.
5. No F1 help.
Summary:
For a 1.0 release, this app is pretty strong. I think it has tons of potential while being very useful in it’s current state. I fully recommend it to people looking to create custom studio hdr’s. My hope is that they build off of it and make it a bit more robust in features and realism. Click the image below to download a zip file that contains a .hdr and .exr I made to give away.
This entry was written by , posted on March 17, 2009 at 6:28 pm, filed under review. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
Welcome to //cgpov.com! The concept is simple, I’m Chad Ashley, a professional 3d artist and self proclaimed software addict. This site will be a place where I can share what I’ve found that works and blab about the stuff that doesnt. Those of you who know me, know that I’m never in short supply of opinion. Please subscribe (this site aint that pretty for a reason). I’ve become quite fond of google reader so if you haven’t found a reader that you like, give it a shot. I plan on doing reviews, mini-rants, and who knows, maybe I’ll even give some stuff away for free!
//coming up…
I’ll review HDRI Light Studio Pro and be giving away a few HDR’s of my own design!
This entry was written by , posted on March 16, 2009 at 1:28 am, filed under news. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.