Well, those of you who have been paying attention to our release schedule for 2008 will notice that we have missed our planned release date for Dynamite VSP 3.6 by a few days. We were hoping to have this online by Monday of this week, but - well it’s slipped a little!

I’m happy to confirm that you won’t need to wait too much longer - it will appear here for download in the next few days. We just want to make sure that the release is right before we launch it - and so far we are VERY happy with what we have achieved.

Civil 3D users will be particularly happy, and our new mental ray based rendering workflow is producing amazing results.

One of our aims with Dynamite VSP has always been to make 3ds Max as accessible as possible to people who do not have the time to learn the product in full. One of the ways in which we achieve this is to automate the assignment of materials, but with this release we wanted to re-focus our attention on the realism of those materials.

This means that we have put a lot of work into redesigning the standard Dynamite VSP material libraries, which has in turn meant (finally) adopting mental ray as the standard renderer in Dynamite VSP.

The results are stunning, and just as easy to achieve as the application of our old textures.

So - here is a teaser for those of you who are patiently waiting for DVSP 3.6, and interested to see what can be achieved very easily in this new release.

http://www.3am-solutions.co.uk/community/gallery/category/C7/

Thanks for your patience!

hmmm…water looks awesome especially with MR daylight system   good job…also new asphalt and kerb texture is very nice….and cars..shiny and paint job reflects surrounding world ...again good job ....mental ray as standard renderer in that case is obvious choice

PS
rendered in less than one minute…and hardware used to achive this was…render farm or quad core or dual core

The reflection on those cars is absolutely stunning! Really good.
For me as a Civil user I’m really curious about the new possibility to import not-corridor feature lines.
That’s going to be fun!

Material finishes look awesome and rendering times seem small for the quality of rendered output !! Dynamite just seems to get better and better at every release

Can’t wait to start using this release….......

Cheers Mark

Thanks guys.

Mark Parkinson - 21 August 2008 07:18 AM

Dynamite just seems to get better and better at every release

...and to be fair - so does 3ds Max. What you can’t see from those images is that the Mental Ray based water material that you see there is animated for you automatically.

Those “waterworld” images were produced in the space of just a few minutes using:

- an (almost) straight line for the centreline of the bridge (!)

- a swept object style applied to the straight line for the bridge (a slightly modified version of one of the styles that ships with DVSP).

- an object placement style for the vehicles, and street furniture.

- 2 DVSP road markings and 2 DVSP Rail Objects applied manually from DVSP Explorer.

- a huge circle, with a material modifier applied (matID=20), and “DynamiteSurfaces” material manually applied to form the ocean.

- MR Daylight System (now the standard in DVSP, so three mouse clicks and you’re done). All associated parameters for final gather, sun, sky and environment map can be controlled entirely from DVSP Explorer.

Oh - and then I hit the RENDER button.  ;-)

Bruce Harfield - 21 August 2008 08:49 AM

Thanks guys.

...and to be fair - so does 3ds Max. What you can’t see from those images is that the Mental Ray based water material that you see there is animated for you automatically…

sounds too good to be true ...now we are waiting for automatically animated trees and grass and some weather effects like rain, snow etc

So, with this ‘alignment aware’ texture mapping, I’m assuming this is a Civil3D thing only and not something that can be done with MX?  Any samples from an MX project?  Keen to see how the stuff renders (like kerbs - looks cool with the Civil3D data) with a gazillion triangles.

Peter Cook - 26 August 2008 01:05 AM

So, with this ‘alignment aware’ texture mapping, I’m assuming this is a Civil3D thing only and not something that can be done with MX?  Any samples from an MX project?  Keen to see how the stuff renders (like kerbs - looks cool with the Civil3D data) with a gazillion triangles.

That’s correct. The problem with triangulation from MX is that it’s just triangles - so within a triangulation string there is no understanding of the direction of features represented within the surface.

The situation in Civil 3D is entirely different. We delve right in to the Civil 3D object database and read the contents of a corridor object directly - we then build our own intelligent mesh from that information.

A corridor in Civil 3D is basically a combined alignment, 3d strings, the interface to existing ground. contours, triangulation, and sections all rolled into a single intelligent object definition.  This makes it easy (did I say easy? That’s a relative term…) to extract information that allows us to apply alignment based texture mapping to the mesh that we pull into DVSP. That texture mapping is independent for each component in the corridor too - so you can repeat a texture every 1.0m on the kerb, every 10.0m on the carriageway, 5.0m on the footpath, etc.

In addition, once this mesh is in DVSP you can isolate part of the mesh that was generated from one of those original components in Civil 3D (a kerb for instance), and rescale the texture coordinates along or across the alignment.

If you’ve come from the world of MX, this functionality is a huge step forward.

Bruce Harfield - 26 August 2008 07:55 AM

This makes it easy (did I say easy? That’s a relative term…) to extract information that allows us to apply alignment based texture mapping to the mesh that we pull into DVSP.

Relatively in the form of Relativity, E=MC^2.

Bruce Harfield - 26 August 2008 07:55 AM

The situation in Civil 3D is entirely different. We delve right in to the Civil 3D object database and read the contents of a corridor object directly - we then build our own intelligent mesh from that information.

...

If you’ve come from the world of MX, this functionality is a huge step forward.

Gee.  That is quite neat.

Looks good hey.  I just wish our guys would let me have 09 licencing so I can get this version up and running