(Re)Making a Waterbox

Written December 28th, 2009
Categories: Effects, Modeling, Rendering / Compositing, Videos
5 comments

Hey everyone!

I’m on vacation right now, but I’ve queued up this Monday Movie so that you can start your new year right!  This week I’m showing you how to create a water box in 3dsMax using the mental ray renderer.  For those of you who don’t know it, a water box is a great way to practice your rendering technique and for learning how the different settings work in mental ray.

Happy Holidays

Written December 25th, 2009
Categories: Blog
2 comments

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

Boolean Splines

Written December 22nd, 2009
Categories: Modeling, Videos
4 comments

Hey everyone,

This week I’m showing you a fast and lightweight technique for creating boolean objects with splines.  There’s actually a reasonably robust boolean system within the spline object type in 3d Studio Max that allows you to create mathematically accurate spline shapes.  In our case, we’ll be using it to model a service panel like on a space ship.

mental ray Matte/Shadow

Written December 15th, 2009
Categories: Materials / Shaders, Videos
4 comments

Hey everyone,

Sorry for the delay.  This week’s video tutorial is part 2 from last week where we talked about the matte/shadow material type in the scanline renderer.  This week, we’re looking at how you can use matte/shadow materials in the mental ray renderer and we’ll use a quick-and-dirty camera matching technique along with it.

Scanline Matte/Shadow

Written December 7th, 2009
Categories: Materials / Shaders, Videos
1 Comment »

Hey everyone,

I know I’ve already covered this a little bit in a previous video tutorial, but I wanted to give it a little more air time for comprehensive coverage.  This week I’m showing you how to use the Matte/Shadow material in the scanline renderer for product shots.  We’ll be keeping things simple, and I’ll show you a trick for getting sweet semi-transparent reflections.

Gamma Control Setup

Written December 2nd, 2009
Categories: Rendering / Compositing, Videos
4 comments

Hey everyone,

Got another video tutorial for you! This week we’re looking at how to setup and use gamma controls in 3dsMax. Being able to control the gamma of your renders means having another powerful angle for adjusting the “curves” of your final 3d renders.

Quick Anouncement

Written December 1st, 2009
Categories: Blog
4 comments

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.

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