Hey everyone,

This week is it!  The first VRay video tutorial ever!  I’ve had enough time to fool around with this renderer to start putting together some thoughts and videos.  So far I’m very impressed with how easy it is to get some great effects (almost like Vue Infinite).  This Monday Movie will show you how shockingly easy it is to get some nice outdoor lighting in a warehouse model I made for the next few videos.  Next week we’ll look at indoor lighting using the area lights, and then we’ll move on to materials.

A few things I’m a little disappointed with in VRay but I’m going to hold off judgement until I’m really certain I have a feel for the product.  As it stands, though, I wouldn’t pay $1,000 USD for it.  At least not until Chaos Group decides to respond to my e-mail.  ;)

Hey everyone,

Sorry for the delay this week- I’m in the process of moving to San Francisco.  Should be smoother now that I’m getting an extension from my landlord until the 1st, but I still gotta find a place to live.

Anyway, this week I’m quickly showing you how we used to create Sun & Sky before we had Sun & Sky in 3dsMax.  mental ray wasn’t well integrated until maybe Max 8 or 9 so this was a staple of solid rendering technique back in the day.  You’ll find it to be a quick and easy way to get reasonable “outdoor” render effects without much overhead.

Found one today.  ^_^

Hey Everyone,

This week we’ll be looking at how you can create an X-Ray render effect in 3dsMax.  It’s remarkably easy to do with materials and you can do it in most renderers pretty quickly.  I know I still owe you another video, but be patient.  There’s a lot in the works!

Just wanted to let everyone know that I updated my Eden Hotel images post.  Turns out the script I ran left behind about half the images I wanted to put up, so the collection is even larger than what you saw before.

P.S. Sorry about the recent downtime.  My host is having some trouble keeping the site up.  We’re running PHP on windows hosting on a shared server, and that stacks up all kinds of complications.  I’ll probably migrate this thing early next week so that’ll clear up a lot of issues (and maybe even speed things up a bit).  Also, I know I owe you another Monday Movie- I’ll try to hammer out that extra one as soon as I have extra time!