Those using Max on Vista know the woes of quicktime. Here is a script that allows you to export previews as quicktimes thru vista 64. Works very well. Thank you Mayec Rancel for this useful script.
Download it here. Check out his site here.
This entry was written by , posted on April 13, 2009 at 2:55 pm, filed under Uncategorized. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
Check out this cool Machu Picchu short made at Supinfocom Arles in 2008 by Clement Crocq, Margaux Durand-Rival and Nicolas Novali.
Machu Picchu Post from Machu Picchu Post Team on Vimeo.
This entry was written by , posted on April 9, 2009 at 3:39 am, filed under Uncategorized. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
An open letter to anyone introducing me at events, client calls, industry parties or the likes:
To whom it may concern,
Please do not ever again refer to us as “3D guys, THE 3D guy” or the particularly nauseating “3D Guru”. It’s dismissive, degrading, and just sounds fucking dumb. Those titles always seem to be delivered with a subliminal dismissive tone that insinuates that when these robots speak you probably wont understand a single word they say, so if your smart you’ll tune them out. It’s like your buddies are over and your Mom is making you include your noisy little brat brother. “Mom says, we have to include Bobby”. Well fuck that, we are designers/artists that just so happen to be able to work in one additional dimension. Besides, we aren’t anyone’s “guy’s” and some of us might not even be guys (although lets be honest, that is rare). Oh John, he’s our 3D guy, he’s a faceless, nameless vessel of indecipherable techno-garble, there is no way he could be creative. He doesn’t even look like a Jonas Brother.
Why is it that 3D artists/designers get the prefix of “3D”, yet 2D designers are simply, “designers”? Wouldn’t this insinuate that somehow the 3D designer is limited in some fashion? As if he is only capable of designing in 3D? Well most of you that read this blog know this to be the exact opposite. In fact, it is the simply named “designers” that are in fact limited to mainly two dimensions or the occasional 2.5D. Interesting huh? I believe there is an inevitable trend growing that will unite us all. More and more 2D artists/designers are picking up 3D and it is my hope that we will all shed the prefix of a dimension and become simply Aritsts/Designers.
So please drop those phrases from your vocab. Unless you plan on referring to everyone with the postfix of “guys”. Like here’s Stan our 2D guy, over there is Hank, he’s our Producer guy, and way back there is Russ our Janitor guy. We are not action figures.
Sincerely,
Artists/Designers who happen to be good at 3D
This entry was written by , posted on April 7, 2009 at 9:39 pm, filed under Uncategorized. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
From the Hoop is a very cool short done by 3 students of Supinfocom Arles in 2008. All 3DS Max scanline! Crazy good.
From the hoop from From the hoop Team on Vimeo.
This entry was written by , posted on at 3:25 pm, filed under Uncategorized. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
This isn’t so much a battle royal as it is a comparison based on experience. I actually am very fond of both Mental Ray and V-ray, but I find myself always gravitating towards V-ray. In this first installment, I’ll explain why I find the anti-aliasing methods in V-ray to work better for my needs. Below the video, you’ll find excerpts from each software’s manuals explaining their anti-aliasing methods.
Mray vs Vray prt. 1 Anti-Aliasing from chad smashley on Vimeo.
VRAY DMC ANTI-ALIASING EXPLAINED
Monte Carlo (MC) sampling is a method for evaluating “blurry” values (anitaliasing, depth of field, indirect illumination, area lights, glossy reflections/refractions, translucency, motion blur etc). V-Ray uses a variant of Monte Carlo sampling called deterministic Monte Carlo (DMC). The difference between pure Monte Carlo sampling and deterministic Monte Carlo is that the first uses pseudo-random numbers which are different for each and every evaluation (and so re-rendering a single image will always produce slightly different results in the noise), while deterministic Monte Carlo uses a pre-defined set of samples (possibly optimized to reduce the noise), which allows re-rendering an image to always produce the exact same result. By default, the deterministic Monte Carlo method used by V-Ray is a modficiation of Schlick sampling, introduced by Christophe Schlick in 1991 (see the References section below).
Note that there exists a sub-set of DMC sampling called quasi Monte Carlo (QMC) sampling, in which the samples are obtained from sequences of numbers, called low-discrepancy sequences, which have special numeric properties. V-Ray, however, does not use this technique.
Instead of having separate sampling methods for each of the blurry values, V-Ray has a single unified framework that determines how many and what exactly samples to be taken for a particular value, depending on the context in which that value is required. This framework is called the “DMC sampler”.
The actual number of samples for any blurry value is determined based on three factors:
* The subdivs value supplied by the user for a particular blurry effect. This is multiplied by the Global subdivs multiplier (see below).
* The importance of the value (for example, dark glossy reflections can do with fewer samples than bright ones, since the effect of the reflection on the final result is smaller; distant area lights require fewer samples than closer ones etc). Basing the number of samples allocated for a value on importance is called importance sampling.
* The variance (think “noise”) of the samples taken for a particular value - if the samples are not very different from each other, then the value can do with fewer samples; if the samples are very different, then a larger number of them will be necessary to get a good result. This basically works by looking at the samples as they are computed one by one and deciding, after each new sample, if more samples are required. This technique is called early termination or adaptive sampling.
MENTAL RAY SPATIAL CONTRAST ANTI-ALIASING EXPLAINED
Spatial Contrast group
This control sets the contrast value used as thresholds to control sampling. Spatial contrast applies to each still image.
If neighboring samples in a frame differ by more than this color, the mental ray renderer does recursive supersampling (that is, more than one sample per pixel), up to the depth specified by the Maximum samples per pixel value. Increasing the Spatial Contrast values decreases the amount of sampling done, and can speed the rendering of a scene at the cost of image quality.
R, G, BSpecify the threshold values for the red, green, and blue components of samples. These values are normalized, and range from 0.0 to 1.0, where 0.0 indicates the color component is fully unsaturated (black, or 0 in eight-bit encoding) and 1.0 indicates the color component is fully saturated (white, or 255 in eight-bit encoding). Default=(0.05, 0.05, 0.05).
ASpecifies the threshold value for the alpha component of samples. This value is normalized, and ranges from 0.0 (fully transparent, or 0 in eight-bit encoding) to 1.0 (fully opaque, or 255 in eight-bit encoding). Default=0.05.
[color swatch]Click to display a Color Selector to let you specify the R, G, and B threshold values interactively.
This entry was written by , posted on April 6, 2009 at 7:58 pm, filed under Uncategorized. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
So here is my linear workflow for Mental Ray. Keep in mind that the workflow for Maya-Mental Ray is almost exactly the same. It is my hope that a future Max framebuffer will have a srgb LUT so the gamma utility is not needed.
Mental Ray Linear Workflow from chad smashley on Vimeo.
This entry was written by , posted on April 3, 2009 at 3:47 pm, filed under Uncategorized. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
So here is my first screen capture video. It explains my linear workflow for Vray. I apologize if my energy level is not to your liking (my daughter was asleep in the next room). Next time I’ll sham-wow it up.
vray linear workflow from chad smashley on Vimeo.
This entry was written by , posted on April 2, 2009 at 9:47 pm, filed under Uncategorized and tagged gamma, linear, vray. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.