This Monday Movie is a good one, though it’s kind of a loosy-goosy topic so if I sound lost it’s because some things are hard to describe. Here we’re talking about the old-school way of lighting; omni lights and careful rendertime management. By using ambient-only omni lights and careful light projection, you can achieve results similar to what advanced automatic solutions could provide but at a fraction of the computational difficulty.

Bringing the render time down below 20 seconds per frame is critical in making an animation for a client or for yourself. No sense spending an entire weekend to render something that a little care and technique could have confined to a 3-hour stint. Enjoy this brief overview of how you can trim those minutes down to seconds.

I wanted to link to this tutorial because it’s one of my favorites. This was written by a forum member named “Freespace”, and it’s really super for making landscape material. It makes use of the falloff material (which is useful to know about), and it’s faster and easier than using landscape(lume) in mental ray. In summary, if you take a falloff material with a curve that’s a skewed quadratic shape, you get some really remarkable results.

Click here to read it!

This week’s got a really exciting topic; the Sunlight System in 3d Studio Max’s mental ray. The system is easy enough that you can throw it up in a scene in a matter of seconds, but powerful enough to make just about anything look fantastic. The color, the intensities, and the sheer crispness of the render will make you go gaga over it too.

In this video I show you how to navigate some of the basics of using the sunlight system, followed by how you can use sunlight to illuminate interior scenes. I’m sorry if it seems like I’m going too fast; there’s just so much to cover! If you have any questions, feel free to post a comment and I’ll do my best to answer!

Ah, I love tutorials.

This is a great one that I used back when I was teaching 3dsMax. It guides you through creating the texture, opacity map, and simple geometry for a pretty convincing low-poly plant. The step-by-step detail holds you through to the end, and I think this is a skill that every modeler and designer should have. Nothing tips off a viewer that an image is fake quite like bad plants!

Click here to read more…

Hey everyone,

So this is a blog in addition to being a repository of awesome scripts and tutorials. As a blog post, I wanted to share a cool video my girlfriend sent me earlier today. Someone made a little stop-motion video about megaman, and it’s pretty nice. Take a break from work and enjoy a little retro gaming, revisited. Careful, it’s a little loud by default.