This week’s Monday Movie shows you how to bake an ambient occlusion map for an object in 3dsMax. It’s actually a much easier process than you’d think. Here, I’ll show you how to use the Render-to-Texture tool with mental ray’s Ambient Occlusion pass. The resultant image can be used to either visualize your object in the viewport, or as part of your texturing process!
Gun Modeling Timelapse Video
This is a great modeling lesson!
I wasn’t planning to make a post today, but this caught my eye and you simply must check it out. Jeremy Wynn has made a timelapse modeling video of a gun he’s working on, and it’s exceptionally good. It’s rather fast, so you have to try to keep up, but you get a great feeling for the flow he uses in 3dsMax, and the kind of tools that are most often use!
Enjoy!
Piston Rigging
Hey everyone!
This week’s Monday Movie is about how you can use the LookAt constraint and the Path constraint to make objects follow each other in a “piston” like fashion. This is useful for mechanical rigs like hydraulics or characters. You can use this technique, and others like it, to create 3d characters that have their subtle animations (like moving parts) delegated away to constraints so that you can focus on the more important keyframes like positions!
Hoses
Welcome to another Monday Movie! We’ll be talking about how you can use the “Hose” extended primitive to speed up creating common hose-like objects in 3dsMax. The fact is that most people either don’t know this tool exists, don’t know how to use it, or think it’s not very useful. I disagree with this last group of people; the hose object is both quick and extensible making it a handy little trick in your 3d arsenal. In 3dsMax, you’ll find that it can do a lot of what a spline could do except faster.
Glare Effects
Written February 23rd, 2009
Categories: Effects, Lighting, Rendering / Compositing, Videos
6 comments
Categories: Effects, Lighting, Rendering / Compositing, Videos
6 comments
This week’s Monday Movie is about how you can create a light glare effect in your renders both in Photoshop and using mental ray’s “Glare” shader. I wasn’t sure I’d have this tutorial out in time, but it actually came together pretty well!
The glare effect in 3dsMax is basically the process of looking for super-bright pixels in the rendering and blurring them on their own layer. You can do this in Photoshop after the render, but it doesn’t take into account the brightness of the pixels (i.e. white and ‘light-emitting are identical). Thus, by generating a glare layer, you have a lot of control over how your final render looks in 3dsMax. If you’re working on photo-real work like architectural visualization or product rendering, this is exactly the kind of technique you need in your repertoire!
Also, I’m afraid I haven’t made enough progress on my side project to fully unveil it. However, I’m looking to create a tutorial collection website that will be the largest, most searchable 3dsMax tutorial database out there! How do I plan to do this? Well, you’ll find out! But the good news is that it’ll have minimal advertisements, ratings, and tons of healthy learning opportunities. More to follow as it happens.
Grill Mesh Made Easy
This week’s Monday Movie is a little shorter. I’m working on a big project that you’re going to love, so in the meantime I’ve gone a little quiet.
This week we’re looking at a quick, cheap technique for creating grille meshes. Opacity mapping is a pretty ordinary technique that can do some extraordinary things for distant objects. If I were to model all these tiny holes, you can be sure it’ll make my render times tank!
Depth of Field
This week we’re covering Depth of Field in 3dsMax for both the scanline and mental ray renderers. It’s more of a patch to the Depth of Field Primer I wrote, since it seems like a lot of viewers were coming to the page looking for a “how-to” rather than a “why”. Thus, we’ll cover exactly how to create and control the depth of field effect.
On another note, it seems like everyone on the planet has heard the song above but me. Ignoring the cheesy ’80s undertones, “Puttin’ on the Ritz” is practically my theme song! It’s based on a really old tune (c1920?), and takes on a deep, cryptic interpretation that makes it so solid. It doesn’t get much better than that. If you really listen closely, you can pick up that vintage edge- who’s Gary Cooper?
mental ray Displacement Quality
Written February 4th, 2009
Categories: Materials / Shaders, Rendering / Compositing, Videos
7 comments
Categories: Materials / Shaders, Rendering / Compositing, Videos
7 comments
In this Monday Movie I show you how to tweak mental ray displacement settings in 3dsMax. Learn how to speed up your renders by approximating displacement more roughly, or really juice your displacement maps by getting sub-pixel displacement!
Sorry about the lousy encoding, my computer’s been acting up something fierce these days. This weekend I’ll hopefully get a fresh install going and that’ll give me the edge on next week’s Monday Movie. In the meantime, I hope you enjoyed those steampunk reference images!
Cutting & Dressing Texture Maps
I’m afraid I don’t have a new tutorial for you, so in exchange I’m offering two neat bits. The first is that I’m uploading the Monday Movie a few days early this week, so that you can enjoy it that much sooner. It also shows you that I’ve been working on something so you don’t think I was goofing off- ignoring my promise of a new 3dsMax tutorial.
The other neat thing is that this Monday Movie is special! I’ve added a whole new intro sequence, and the video footage is now in wide-screen. I know it’s a little blurry, but trust me; next week is going to be sharper than your mom’s opinions. Fun!
This week’s Monday movie is about cutting and dressing texture maps by using what your perception of the diffuse map is. I show you a paint-chips texture, and because I know the materials that are present in the image I’m able to pull out a bump map and a glossy/specular map as well!
UVW Channels
Hey Everyone!
I’ve got a new monday movie for you. This week we’re looking at UVW channels and how you can use them to create more than one UV layout for your objects. Why is this important? Well, for one thing, it lets you use different UVW layouts for different maps in your material- allowing you to assign displacement maps after you’ve set up the rest of the material. You could also use this (theoretically) to juice your maps for all their worth in a low-poly situation. You might only need opacity mapping for part of the character, so why not get all 1024×1024 for that spot?
Anyway, in this video we’re looking at the first scenario; applying a displacement map to an object already set up with a material.
Static UVW Mapping
Hey Everyone!
This week’s Monday Movie is on using static UVW mapping in 3dsMax. The modifier stack is a beautiful thing because it allows you to use awesome techniques like this! You can work on the editable poly object at the base of the stack while keeping a UVW map modifier on top. This lets you model without worrying too much about wrecking the mapping. This technique is most useful in low-poly work and simple objects like barrels and butterflies.
Modeling Core – Part 4
Hey Everyone!
This week’s Monday Movie is part 4 of 4. I’m hoping to make one movie each week discussing what I think are the core modeling methods: primitives modeling, Boolean modeling, spline modeling, and poly Modeling. I’m very sorry this movie was delayed; the holidays snuck up on me, and then my display adapter went nuts literally as I was about to upload the video file.
In this video I’m talking about how you can create fully arbitrary meshes using the turbosmooth modifier. Remember that this is just an introduction to a branch of poly modeling, so it shouldn’t be taken as the full enumeration of all possibilities. I go over a few of the most important methods of mesh control; adding edges, chamfering, discontinuous mesh flow, and creasing.
Modeling Core – Part 3
Hey Everyone!
This week’s Monday Movie is part 3 of 4. I’m hoping to make one movie each week discussing what I think are the core modeling methods: primitives modeling, Boolean modeling, spline modeling, and poly Modeling.
In this video I’m talking about how you can create semi-procedural shapes using splines and spline modifiers like Extrude and Lathe. Remember that splines bring us even closer to arbitrary modeling by allowing us to abstract away certain aspects of modeling, while keeping only what’s necessary to be modeled by hand.
Modeling Core – Part 2
Hey Everyone!
This week’s Monday Movie is part 2 of 4. I’m hoping to make one movie each week discussing what I think are the core modeling methods: primitives modeling, Boolean modeling, spline modeling, and poly Modeling.
In this video I’m talking about how you can create elaborate machined parts much faster than poly modeling through the clever use of Boolean operations on primitives. I show you how I can bring together a few dozen basic shapes and create something that might’ve taken three times longer if I had jumped in with an editable poly. Remember to think hard about what you want the final shape to look like, and you can manipulate the Boolean structure to fit that.
Modeling Core – Part 1
This week’s Monday Movie is part 1 of 4. I’m hoping to make one movie each week discussing what I think are the core modeling methods: primitives modeling, Boolean modeling, Spline modeling, and Poly Modeling.
Here I give a quick demonstration on what primitives modeling is, and what kind of thoughts go into modeling in this way. It’s a fluid process based mostly on replicating primitives already in the scene by using Shift + Click or Shift + Drag. By piling up lots of objects, and making heavy use of repetition, you can create intriguing models using only basic shapes.