Warehouse Depth of Field Demo Scene

Written December 6th, 2010
Categories: Downloads, Models, Scenes
5 comments

You can use this simple 3d Studio Max scene to practice your mental ray rendering with depth of field. There are numbers placed around the scene at escalating distances from the camera. There are numbers at 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, and 64 feet from the camera. Try modifying the camera’s f-stop value and target distance to see what kind of effect the blurring has on the different numbers. The checker pattern on the back wall is exactly 1-foot by 1-foot squares.

This scene was used in my mental ray depth of field quality tutorial.

Enjoy!

Click this link to download the Material-Randomizer-v0.84. To install, just download the zip file and decompress it into your plugins/std folder. You can also run it directly by running it from the Maxscript menu.

Free, High Res Studio HDRI Pack

Written November 11th, 2009
Categories: Downloads, Textures / Materials
21 comments

There’s a free HDRI library out there with lots of high resolution images of studio lighting setups. HDRI images are 32-bit graphics that contain luminance information so it’s basically canned lighting setups! Note that these are huge HDRI images (~1000×5000) so they will bog down your computer. Just take it slow and give your computer time to work through it and things will speed up.

It’s free and it’s a torrent, so you’ll want to get a good torrent client if you don’t already have one. I recommend uTorrent; a small, smart little torrent client with lots of good features.

I’ll be seeding this thing for a few weeks, so you’ll always have a peer, but please help me out and keep seeding. It’s not like you’re going to get in trouble with this one. Learn how to use these images with my HDRI Setup Video Tutorial.

Update

I’ve made a number of changes to this torrent that you should know about.

Now includes lower resolution HDRI images. The originals are too large for ordinary production so you can work with the lower resolution versions first and then swap out for the high resolution versions when you’re ready to take a final render.
Now includes 8-bit versions for the same reason as above.
Now compressed as a self-extracting .exe file. I know this is creepy, but it’s the most efficient way. If it were a .zip file, it’d be almost 50% larger. Please trust me.

If you’re really worried about the EXE or are on a slow connection, You can download the original 230mb file here.

Click this link to download the HDRI Torrent File. It’s a legitimate torrent so you’ll need a torrent client. Alternatively, you can click this link to download the massive file directly, but if at all possible, please try the torrent first.