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.

This is a detailed dive into some basics of Glass material and the Dielectric shader in mental ray.  Worth a look when you’re in the mood for a lecture.

Glass Physics_Phen in 3dsMax

For readers “too used” to using raytrace glass this tutorial will seem quite alien in the beginning, and the methodology of modeling the objects utilizing these two materials will definitely appear even more alien. Both the Dielectric Material Shader and the Glass (Physics_Phen) are closely related to each other, though technically the glass ((physics_phen) also known as mental ray glass) is not a shader.

This was one of my favorite tutorials that I’d give to students learning how to model.  It’s a fairly basic plant modeling tutorial that goes into detail for both Photoshop and 3dsMax.  You can really get a lot of mileage out of this workflow because it can be used to create a wide variety of plants.

Modeling Low-Poly Foliage

We are going to create this orchid thingy. So take a good look at it, because we need to store its form and colors into our brain.  Now start a new photoshop image and add a green background. You should always choose the dominant colour as your background color…

Modeling a 3d Toaster in 3dsMax

I found my old toaster tutorial on 3dTotal and figured I’d give it a link.  It’s a very slow paced beginner’s modeling tutorial.  Great for people just starting out with 3d Studio Max.

I actually remember when I was starting out with 3DSMax and I realized there aren’t enough tutorials out there that really walk you through every click, movement, and heartbeat of production.  That’s why I decided to model a toaster and document every process along the way.  With any luck, if you follow this tutorial, you should end up with something that looks like my toaster here.

P.S. I’ll be going through various 3d tutorial libraries I know and cataloging the good ones here.  It’s a good thing to do because a) people don’t find the good tutorials if I don’t post them, and b) I’ve always wanted a place that I can go to find my favorite tutorials.  I figured maybe you’d appreciate it too.  :)