Hey everyone!

This week’s Monday Movie is on VRay displacement and map-based materials. I’ll be talking about how to set up these materials, as well as how to keep them from taking up too much time during rendering.

Later this week I’ll be releasing another Monday Movie for you viewers that are hoping for me to get back to some heavy mental ray concepts. Also, I’m still working on the site redesign. I expect to have it released sometime in April. Some of the expected changes include:

• Transcriptions and auto-translation for every Monday Movie,
• Better, more robust tagging and categories,
• Page-specific formats,
• 720p HD video footage,
• and more!

I’ll keep you posted as it happens!

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.

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.

Hey everyone,

This week is my 52nd Monday Movie!  We’ve done an entire year of bite-sized 3dsMax video tutorials.  How exciting!

In the video below, I’ll show you how to set up a DirectX material in 3dsMax.  This will allow you to get  much more powerful viewport rendering.  Your 3d objects will be able to respond (to some extent) to lighting through the diffuse map, specular map, and normal map!

Important: In order to follow along, you’ll need to download Ben Cloward’s 3-point lighting .FX file!  You want the one without transparency for this example.

Hey everyone,

This week we’re looking at how you can use the default 3dsMax Ink & Paint material to create a simple sketch effect in your renders.  It works best for inorganic scenes like the thumbnail I’ve shown here.  It’s a natural extension of last week’s video where we looked at how you can really juice 3dsMax beyond simply creating scenes and rendering them.