Merry Christmas and Happy New Years !!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Years !! Best wishes to you & your family throughout 2009 from 3dsmax-expert.blogspot.com : )

This video from http://www.madcrew.se/christmas

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Digimation.QuickDirt.1.5.3

QuickDirt is a powerful, yet easy to use dirt and aging application tool for 3ds Max. It exists as a combination Object Modifier and Map type that are used in concert. Its primary use is for adding dirt, rust, mud and other topology dependent texturing effects to mesh objects. The plug-in, as the name implies, works in (near) real time and offers interactive viewport feedback on the placement of the weathering. Besides its speed, another advantage of QuickDirt is that you can define different settings for different parts of the object, allowing you to control the final look.




More info : http://www.digimation.com/home/Software.aspx?sm=qd

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Gugila GroundWiz v1.50 for 3DSMax 7-2009

GroundWiz is a plug-in for 3ds Max/VIZ for making nature scenes with ease and precision.

GroundWiz Terrain Map, easy to use yet powerful procedural 3d terrain map for 3ds Max/VIZ, will bring you much power and control for generating realistic terrain textures. Furthermore, GroundWiz Planter, a mass placement and instancing tool, handles millions of objects in 3ds Max/VIZ. It will help you merge vegetation, rocks and other nature elements and quickly create realistic interactive scenes of nature/landscape. GroundWiz Variation Map will help you quickly add color variations to materials when creating big scenes with many objects like forests.



What GroundWiz does...

What GroundWiz Terrain Map, GroundWiz Planter, and GroundWiz Variation Map do is to facilitate your full use of 3ds Max/VIZ in creating natural 3d environments. It is completely integrated with 3ds Max/VIZ. It will give you control, power and flexibility to create and modify nature/landscape, using your own customized terrains and objects like trees, rocks, grass, houses or whatever objects you wish to use.


GroundWiz will help you create a realistic looking terrain texture on the terrain you create or the one imported into 3ds Max/VIZ from real life via GroundWiz importer. On that terrain, GroundWiz Planter will help you create a nature scene while GroundWiz Variation Map will help you quickly add color variations to the nature scenes.



You can download GroundWiz Lite free version and more infomation here

http://www.gugila.com/products.html

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" Bipede Jump " Tutorial Part 2

The second part of the greate tutorial from Lukasz Kubinski show us how to animate biped jump you'll enjoy with this tutorial .

Biped jump animation videotutorial part 2 from Lukasz Kubinski on Vimeo


Part 1



The author of this video is Luke KUBIŃSKI, www.dashdot.pl

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LipService plugin.

LipService is a powerful multi-resolution subdivision surface sculpting and animation system built into a single 3DSMax object modifier.
LipService's sculpting tools are comparable to ZBrush and Mudbox. Its animation tools extend this multi-resultion editing philosophy through to motion.
LipService makes facial animation fast, simple, and gives the artist full WSIWYG control over the whole process.

LipService is a powerful extension to 3DSMax, not an external window, but an object space modifier. The artist keeps their favorite hotkeys, preferences, and menu paradigm. If the artist knows Max, they will immediately be able to use the tool without even cracking a manual. If they're used to sculpting with ZBrush or Mudbox already, they will find the sculpting tools and workflow familiar.

You can Download. 45 Day Trial and more info here : http://www.lbrush.com/

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Itoo Forest Pack Pro v3.0 for 3DSMax

Forest Pack is a package of plugins for 3D Studio Max and 3D Studio Viz, designed to give a complete solution for creation of vast surfaces of trees and plants. There are other plugins that allow you to create beautiful trees (with thousands of faces), but only Forest enables you to create a complete forest with thousands of trees using only a fraction of the resources.


Some of its features:

• Forest is a parametric and animatable object, optimized for speed. It can create more than 500,000 trees per second, modify any parameter and rebuild them in real-time.
  
  
• Trees are created from an editable geometry list, that may contain textured planar objects or custom meshes.
  
  
• Forest uses splines to define the areas to plant the trees. You can use multiple splines to define areas of inclusion and exclusion.
  
  
• The distribution of trees is managed with bitmaps. You can create custom distribution patterns, from lines or very regular groups to fully random surfaces. The plugin includes some sample distribution maps but it will also accept user created maps.
  
  
• Forest can be linked to a camera, so that all billboard trees will be facing perpendicular to the camera. This solves the problem of seeing planar objects from different angles when the camera moves past them.
  
  
• To minimize resource utilization, tree distribution can be restricted to the camera's field of view. This enables the user to create a fly by of a forest of virtually millions of trees, without wasting scene resources on trees that are out outside the edge of the frame.
  
  
• Automatic distribution of trees over any surface (irregular terrains, etc.)
  
  
• You can limit the elements in a surface by ranges of altitude and slope.
  
  
• Random transformation of position, rotation and scale.
  
  
• Custom level-of-detail allows for faster redraw in the viewports. You can set different levels for viewports and render.
  
  
• You can use the XShadow plugin for opacity mapped shadow casting on tree objects. Forest supports raytraced shadows as well.
  
  
• You can also use Forest as a generic and enhanced scatter (no trees after all). Visit the image gallery for some samples.
  
  
• The plugins included in Forest Pack are: Forest, XShadow, Forest Tools and Forest Material
  

More info : http://www.itoosoft.com

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" Bipede Jump " Tutorial Part 1

I' ve found this video on www.vimeo.com from Lukasz Kubinski he show us how to
animate " Bipede Jump " .created a nearly 2-hour video tutorial consisting of three parts.
In this video he use the polish language however you can understand it.



The first part shows the basic animation of biped running.

ANIMATION TUTORIAL PART1 from Lukasz Kubinski on Vimeo.




Part 2



The author of this video is Luke KUBIŃSKI, www.dashdot.pl

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3DCreative Issue 40 is out now!

135 page magazine includes interviews with Alex Oliver and Sebastien Sonet, and for all you who are following Rafael Ghencev's ZBrush Character Creation tutorials series, this month you won’t be disappointed as he creates an 'Extreme Pierced & Tattooed guy - plus much, much more.



More info : http://www.3dcreativemag.com/

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New! Illustrate v.5.5 for 3ds max 2009

Illustrate! is a non-photorealistic renderer. It allows you to render your 3D scene in a variety of artistic styles. The most common is the cel or toon style where the objects are rendered with a single or limited number of colors and the edges are drawn with a line. This version of Illustrate! is particularly adept at this style of rendering. It includes a lot of advanced features for creating film resolution cel renderings.


Illustrate! also renders illustrations. Most commonly these are technical illustrations with hidden-lines eliminated. Illustrate! supports a huge variety of line styles so you can create complex illustrations.



One amazing feature of Illustrate! is its ability to render these styles out to vector artwork. It currently supports Shockwave Flash, Adobe Illustrator, and Autocad DXF output. This allows you render your 3D scenes for displaying on the Internet or for inclusion with other vector graphics.


More info :

http://www.davidgould.com/Illustrate/index.html

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New Ice Age 3 Trailer

Watch new Ice Age 3 Trailer!



Watch Here!!!

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Mechanical Robot Blueprint

Mechanical robot blueprint with all four large accurate views with supporting ref pics, well worth the download

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Brazil v1 for max 9 ,2008

Brazil r/s is an advanced, fully-integrated rendering suite for Discreet's top-selling animation software 3ds max and Autodesk VIZ, Autodesk's visualization solution. Brazil r/s Brazil r/s is designed by and for production professionals as a powerful, flexible and affordable high-end commercial solution for film, broadcast and cross-visualization applications. It offers uncompromising image quality and addresses the need for the natural, streamlined workflow that CG artists demand.

"Brazil Version 1.0 delivers on our commitment to empower artists with a meticulously engineered and mature rendering architecture that is capable of the highest quality imagery and performance," said Scott Kirvan, CEO of SplutterFish





More info : www.splutterfish.com

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Making of The Hole part 3

9. Apply these parameters to the spline to obtain tubular:


10. Scale out these splines to make it out of the greeble and obtain this:
11. Now you can create other buildings like this:
12. Deactivate the modifier and go back to editable Poly => polygon level. Select these polys and detach them as clone "scatter_base":
13. Select the building done in 11. and select scatter in Compound Object.
14. Set these parameters in scatter:
By playing with all those stuff you reach these kind of modeling:

part 1 | part 2 | part 3

Copyright © Jean-Francois Liesenborghs
Source : http://www.3dimensions.us
----------------------------------

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Making of The Hole part 2

4. Apply the greeble modifier with these parameters:


5. Apply again the greeble modifier with these parameters => It s Magic ;-) :
6. You obtain this, it is a little bit confusing like this:
7. With some ligthing with shadows you have this:
8. To break the monotony of greeble you can add some tubular. You go back on the editPoly level and select these edges. Than convert it to spline.

part 1 | part 2 | part 3

Copyright © Jean-Francois Liesenborghs
Source : http://www.3dimensions.us

------------------------------------

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Making of The Hole part 1

In this tutorial we use the free plugin Greeble

1. Create a sphere with enough segments. Convert sphere to editPoly and keep only the top of it. Extrude the poly at the top to obtain this :

2. Select these polygons

3. Extrude these polygons

part 1 | part 2 | part 3

Copyright © Jean-Francois Liesenborghs
Source : http://www.3dimensions.us

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How was made Iron Man.

Watch small video clip how was made Iron Man.


http://www.theembassyvfx.com/

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Ambient Occlusion with Alpha part 2

Now comes the real part. After adding this new map (ambient\reflective occlusion) to an empty slot, add this map to the self illumination slot to both the leaf materials (or any material having alpha in scene), make sure to use instance while dragging & dropping onto the slot .Turn off the color map and change the color slot color of diffuse to pure white.


Now add a new mental ray material to an empty slot with ambient\reflective occlusion map added to its surface slot (use instance) as shown below.


This new mental ray material with ambient\reflective occlusion map needs to be applied on to any other object in scene which is not using any opacity map. Once this is done, hit render now your render should look something like this as shown below.


At first instance the scene would look very noisy that’s because the sample rate under ambient\reflective occlusion map is default to 16, change this value to 128 which would make your scene less noisy as shown below.

The whole ideology for me showing this tutorial was imaging you has a huge scene with some 100s of materials applied to the objects & out of which 20 materials are applied to the plants or trees or any other object that has opacity to this. Using this method u can simply apply one ambient\reflective occlusion map to all the materials having opacity & make a new mental ray material for the rest of the object not having any sort of opacity. In one of my personal scene I had a real hard time getting ambient occlusion with alpha, using all the different plug-ins gave me lots of problems. But in the end I found this procedure to be very stable even in the bigger scenes without any errors or crashes .I hope it would be a great help to you guys also in making your scenes.

You can always reach me at charan [at] csgfx.com....

About the Author - I am 3d Modeler and Texture artist. Born and raised in India with Computer Science as my Background. I started 3d modeling in 3ds max in 2001 with strong will and devotion. I completed my Game Design course from Art Institute of Vancouver where I learnt various skills such as sketching, tetxuring, modeling and level designing.

Ambient Occlusion with Alphaby Charanjeev Sawhney Web: www.csgfx.com

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Ambient Occlusion with Alpha part 1

This tutorial is for all my 3d artist friends out there & it’s all about using ambient occlusion in 3ds max with the help of just mental ray. Ambient occlusion is a widely used pass in industry level these days. There are many different ways to do this, but as per my experience with bigger scenes generally people facing lots of problems for eg. Crashing of scenes, alphas not generated properly for plants or any opaque objects or else which plug‐in to use & how? Lately I came across a better & crash proof technique using mental ray. Let’s start with a simple scene of 3ds max. Below I have a simple scene set up with 3 planes & a box.


Let’s say, I have some different materials applied to all the different objects & my planes have two different leaves textures with alpha in the scene as shown below.

Now open the render scene, setup option & change the renderer from default scanline to mental ray renderer. Open the material editor, click on an empty slot. Then click on the Get material & add ambient\reflective occlusion map.


Ambient Occlusion with Alphaby Charanjeev Sawhney Web: www.csgfx.com


Ambient Occlusion with Alpha part 2

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Roof Designer 1.1

What is Batzal Software Roof Designer?

Roof Designer is a new plug-in, currently only for Autodesk 3D Studio Max which helps architecture visualizers to model roofs.
The Work Process

Roof Designer lets the user constrain mesh faces to geometrical planes, making all of the face's vertices reside on one flat surface.
Roof Designer automatically texture the output and can even put mesh tiles, of the user's choice, on it.
This process takes no more than few minutes, a fraction of the time that it takes to get the same results without it.
Evaluation Period

The Roof Designer plug-in gives an evaluation period of 14 days to test its capabilities. although can't be used commercially, the plug-in is fully functional during that time. After 14 days the plug-in will be locked until a License Activation Code will be supplied. The License Activation Code can be purchased in this website.
Support

Roof Designer comes with a documentation file, explaining every control and dialog of it. the documentation file also has a tutorial for getting started. This site has an online troubleshooting forum for peers and development team support. it's also possible to contact the development team through E-mail, check the Contacts section for that...


More info: http://www.batzal.com/index.php

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Service Pack 1 for ThinkingParticles 3.0

Service Pack 1 for ThinkingParticles 3.0

What's New in TP3 SP1?

3ds Max 2009 compatibility

In addition to 3ds max 2009 support, the following improvements have been made in Service Pack 1:

Surface position helper returns UV coordinates for edges and vertices now. Previously when edges or vertices mode was chosen, no UV coordinates were created

Overall stability for x64 systems has been increased as well as several crash situations have been isolated and fixed

Speed increases have been made in various operators and calculations

UV generation for fragments has been added for better fragment mapping

About ThinkingParticles

ThinkingParticles™ 3.0 is the ultimate rule based particle system for 3ds max, offering unparalleled power to the user. ThinkingParticles™ 3.0 is a completely new class of rule-based particle systems for 3ds Max. When this type of particle system is compared to an event-based particle system, (which works on triggers and time dependent events) you'll find many unique advantages within TP3's rule-based logic, which is free from normal time-based constraints and instead applies simple behaviors. These behaviors govern all aspects of a particle’s motion, life, death, and collisions in a true non-linear fashion. We hope you find that by using ThinkingParticles 3, you can create all the incredible effects you were hoping for, but have been limited previously by existing technologies.

Here's How to Get it!

ThinkingParticles SP1 is a free download and can be acquired by registered users at the cebas Shop. If you already have an account you can simply go to the My Account section of the cebas shop and then go to My Downloads to get the update. If you are unable to see the download in your My Downloads section, please contact register@cebas.com and mention that you are not able to see the download in the shop. If you didn’t purchase TP3 directly from the cebas shop, you will need to create an account and then click the Register Me button in the My Downloads section. Within 24 hours, you will have all updates and downloads available to you for all of your cebas products. Please be aware that all fixes are included within this latest version of the software and you do NOT need to install all of the patches in order to become current. Simply installing the new build will give you all of the updates, fixes and enhancements.

For more info: Product homepage

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