The M25
Today’s theme is dedicated to the place I seem to spend a lot of time - The M25.
The M25 was originally designed in 1975 to be a road, circulating London, but has ended up being London’s largest car-park stretching 117 miles. You’ll be pleased to know I spend a lot of time contemplating why the person in front has decided to turn up their techno music, why they have dropped their cigarette packets on the road and why oh why oh why haven’t we moved for the past four hours? (I even keep a book in the car now!)
Time for a service
Service Pack 1 is here - This latest SP for 3ds Max 2010 and 3ds Max Design 2010 includes nearly 30 fixes for issues with undo, performance, responsiveness, viewports, material workflow, and mental ray® software. Specific areas addressed are Biped, Bitmap Pager, Bitmap Proxies, Containers, Edit Poly, Interoperability, Licensing, Materials, mental ray, Particle Flow, Performance, Photometric Lights, ProOptimizer, Render To Texture (RTT), Rendering, UVW Unwrap, and Viewports.
Click here for 3dsmax 2010 sp1 32-bit
Click here for 3dsmax 2010 sp1 64-bit
Click here for 3dsmax DESIGN 2010 sp1 32-bit
Click here for 3dsmax DESIGN 2010 sp1 64-bit
Click here for the Readme file
Increase your speed
Joep van der Steen and Ted Boardman have just sent a re-write of Joep’s previous mental ray book, Rendering with mental ray & 3ds Max to the Focal Press for publication.
Ted and Joep mention “....The book has all completely new chapters that are designed to ease you into the concepts of making mental ray productive. Setting up a mental ray scene requires a structured approach to set a base global illumination solution on which you can build more complexity efficiently.
This book will help you start off on the right foot and then leads you to more advanced topics and exercises that you can adapt to your specific needs…..”
I strongly recommend reading this book, as the previous versions helped me out in production many times.
Not going anywhere
Did you want to go to Siggraph? Disappointed you missed all the exciting and extremely informative demos? Well then worry no more, you can view all the demos via the wonders and joy that is online streaming, courtesy of the interweb.
Click here for more info.
Boardman Bored-in-traffic-man
The following is a request from Ted Boardman.
“...If you happen to have any old copies of my books would you please contact me with the title of the book and perhaps a scan of the cover so that I can compare it to what I have. I would really like to get the full collection. We can then work out details of price/shipping. Please pass the word that I’m looking and thanks very much. email: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)”
Please help him out. Ted is a great character, and I strongly recommend you take the opportunity to see some of his presentations and talks. You won’t be disappointed.
Jammed full
The well respected 3DATS book for advanced architectural visualisation has been updated with chapters from leading authors in the CG industry. There’s too many high-profile users to list so I recommend you have a look at the weblink and think about adding this to your bookshelf. To view the sample chapters and get more info, click here.
Making roads
Autodesk has been named “Best Tools Provider” at the 2009 Develop Industry Excellence Awards. The award recognizes Autodesk’s commitment to developing innovative technology for the games industry. Autodesk serves the games community with many leading products, which have been used to create numerous hit titles, including “Rock Band 2,” “Prince of Persia” and “FIFA 09.”
“It’s no surprise to us that Autodesk was the winner in its category by a considerable margin,” said Ed Fear, deputy editor of Develop. “Not only does Autodesk continue to engage with the game development community when planning its new features, but its move into the middleware market shows Autodesk’s commitment to the games industry as a valuable and creatively-rich market.”
The Develop awards, now in their seventh year, recognize the best creative, technical and business minds in the U.K. and European game development industry. They are the only peer-voted awards for game developers throughout Europe. This year, about 80 of the world’s top game developers voted for the nominated games and companies.
A full list of winners can be viewed by clicking here.
Inspiring
Alex Roman has produced a stunning ‘teaser’ clip. I recommend you take a look at his work, and the other clips on his list. He is one of the leading figures in 3d architectural animation and continues to impress. Stunning work.
To view the work on Vimeo, click here.
Mud track
Friend and Mudbox guru, Wayne Robson, has kindly made a sneek peek of his latest plugins for Mudbox 2010. This was made especially for this newsletter so feel priviledged and remember to buy Wayne if you ever see him presenting Mudbox.
To download the specially made video for readers of this blog - click here.
To view more info on his free plugins, then click the following links -
1. MudWalker: click here
2. ReLight: click here
Wind-screen saver
There is now a free Autodesk Screensaver. The Screensaver is produced in English and there is no collection of name and e-mail to receive this free screensaver.
How: Go to your local web site (ie wwwautodesk.co.uk or use the below link).. Click on the text for downloading and save the screensaver file to your hard drive. Right click on your desktop and select “properties”. Go to the screensaver tab. Select “Autodesk Screensaver” in the list and hit OK.
Click here to download now
Making Waves
This free plugin for 3ds Max 9 (32-bit and 64-bit) allows users to “....new geometry object which generates a statistically generated ocean wave suface. It allows you to set parameters like wind direction and strength, required detail, ... to control the aperance of the sea surface.
This is basically the same “Tessendorf” method developed for my “H2Ocean” demo but adapted for non real time use. It is also the method used to generate the ocean surface in movies like “Titanic”.
See the included readme.html in the archive for details on how to use and install this plugin. The archive also contains a sample scene….” (Thanks to Paulo Kiefe for the heads up on this.)
I havent had chance to play with this yet, but it looks impressive and full of potential.
Click here to download the Max 9 Version.The 2009+ version is currently under construction.
Speeding video cameras
Peter Taylor has finally let me know what’s been keeping him busy for the past months - a full hdr video camera! the SpheroCam HDRV is capable of outputting footage as a series of EXR files, capturing a range of 20 f-stops. Oh, and the camera is capable of recording five hours of continuous footage. Which is about 24 Terabytes of data to you and me….
The files can be captured at 30 frames per second, at full 1920×1080 HD resolution.
Keep an eye on their website for upcoming details - click here
Thanks to Peter for the pic of his camera at the Siggraph booth. Now can I have one?
Power-ful engine
The guys over at Npower have passed on some links to their other ‘artist of the month’ sections. When next having a nice cuppa and digestive, then take the time to view these insightful interviews and imagery.
Mark Rademaker - click here
Neil Blevins - click here
Jens Mondry - click here
Carlos Fueyo - click here
Likeable road cones
Those that know me will know I’m a big believer in this *FREE* piece of software for viewing videos and doing presentations. This is great the next time you need to do a full screen customer pitch or presentation. They have finally reached version 1 ! (Thanks to Stefan Twigt for letting me know.) It fastly supports all major video and sound file formats, oh and its free, free, free….. (and if your wondering why the road cone icon - it was made by a group of students. Classic.)
To have more of an indepth look - click here.
Support round-up
Objects in viewport are not antialiased - View article…
Prerequisite components fail to install - View article…
Shader errors appear when using the mental ray renderer - View article…
Internal Error 2727 - View article…
You clicked on the “H” key to open the Select from Scene dialog but the dialog does not appear - View article…
You would like to improve rendering performance by disabling the Bitmap Pager - View article…
Assigning random colors to scene objects - View article…
Exit Isolation Mode button is missing - View article…
Object bounding boxes disappear - View article…
As always Happy Max’ing…
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