Hey everyone,

Hope you all are having a great holiday and a happy new year. I’ll be on vacation until Jan 11th so I may not be able to respond to comments or e-mails as much. On the bright side, I’m queuing up some Monday Movies for uninterrupted website service.

Remember to hug your family and tell them you love them! ^_^

Best wishes,
–Alejo “Mr. Bluesummers” Grigera

Hey everyone,

Just wanted to let you know that some changes are afoot.  In the short-term, I’m encoding the latest Monday Movie now, so I should have it up by 8pm Pacific Time (~5AM Paris).  I have to go to work, that’s why there’s such a long delay.

Now the bad news is that I’m going to be deleting my YouTube account, and all the movies inside.  It’s going to be a big shift, but it’s important because I need to redo a lot of the videos in there.  The good news is that after all this is done, I’ll be going back through all the videos and

• Re-encoding them to maximize quality (if the original footage exists),
• Re-uploading them with robust, consistent metadata, and
• Uploading them in multiple places, and broadcasting the posts to different communities.

Anyway, just a heads up.  I don’t want anyone to worry when all the videos disappear for a while.  I’ll try to keep the downtime to a minimum by getting all the uploadable videos ready ahead of time.

I know this is old, but it’s still a great demo. I’ll keep my ear to the ground for any other developments.

Hey all,

I’ll have this week’s Monday Movie up shortly.  I just wanted to make a quick post with this link.  Turns out nVidia’s RealityServer is slated to handle the 3d rendering server-side and then pipe the result to devices that lack the power to do it locally like mobile devices or netbooks.

This has huge implications for mobile and web-based gaming.  Take a look at the whole article here.

RealityServer is Nvidia’s attempt to bring 3D to any computing platform that supports a browser or standard Web services calls, including netbooks and smartphones.

By moving the CPU-crushing rendering requirements of creating high-resolution images and animations off of the client and onto a back-end computer, Nvidia hopes to bring complex graphics applications like fluid dynamics, architectural design, real-time product styling and design, 3D video games, to computing platforms that don’t have the processing power to run them locally.

This technique is a favorite of mine for its simplicity and effectiveness at creating a convincing water surface.  Remember, though, that you won’t be able to see below the surface because the material setup in 3dsMax is opaque.  At least it’s fast to render!

mental ray Water Surface

This tutorial will guide you to achieving a fairly realistic open water effect which can even be animated, using the ‘Ocean’ shader from the Lume Library.

This is one of the more interesting tire tutorials I’ve found. While it’s not the easiest or the clearest, I really liked the outcome and unusual application of the FFD modifier. I’d call this an intermediate/advanced tutorial so if you’re still a little hazy on certain aspects of modeling you might shy away from this one.

Pretty interesting results from this one.

You can start the treading from box modelling or splines. I personally use splines for 90% of my work, but if using splines then you will need to tidy up the model to clean up the geometry…

I know I’ve already covered this topic to the point of making you physically sick, but Luciano Iurino does a fine job describing the technique as well.  In this video tutorial, he talks about how to create circular holes in a 3d mesh using a few different techniques.  As always, 3dsMax gives you 10 ways to do just about anything!

Circular Holes

This tutorial shows how a perfectly circular hole can be cut into a mesh using the Editable Poly tools alone. It demonstrates a quick, clean and effective way of creating holes that avoids the often messy results caused by Boolean operations.