Friday, October 24, 2008

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

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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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Tuesday, October 14, 2008

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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Wednesday, October 1, 2008

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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Saturday, September 20, 2008

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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Thursday, September 11, 2008

RayFire Tool plugin for 3ds MAX 9, 2008 and 2009

RayFire for 3ds MAX 9, 2008 and 2009

RayFire Tool gives you the ability to shoot, destroy, demolish, wreck, break down, wreak havoc, blow up, burst, detonate, explode and do other similar things you have always dreamed of to do in Max.

Warning : Only via www.MirVadim.com you can buy RayFire Tool LEGALLY.

RayFire Tool 1.4 ( 32bit ) feature list:

NVidia PhysX Rigid Body support via RayFire user interface.
NVidia PhysX Force Influence support for Wind, RFBomb, PBomb, Gravity, Drag.
Demolition. Fast and easy way for smashing and falling objects.
Fragmentation. Allows you to fragment geometry objects.
Explosion. Allows you to realistically explode objects.
Reactor Rigid Body support via RayFire user interface.
Reactor Hit, Displace, and Holes Impact dformations for shooting.
Instant Action. Allows you to shoot and explode without gun, manually defining all impact spots on impact object.
Various effects for shooting, such as Impact flash, Muzzle Flash, Particle Debris, Geometry Debris, Fragmented Debris from Holes, Smoke, Sparks, Blood, Decals, Bullets and any Custom objects which you can define by yourself.
Interactive Layer Manager. Allows you to interactively change properties in the already created effects, select, hide\unhide, freeze\unfreeze and delete any created layer or effect.
Multiple animated Impact objects. Also you can use skinned, pointcached or deformed in any other ways objects.
Automatic update system.

Download

IMPORTANT: RayFire Tool 1.4 Installation.

Changelog

RayFire Tool main features

NVidia PhysX Rigid Body support via RayFire user interface. Create dynamic simulations with THOUSANDS of objects. Supports Wind, PBombs, Gravity, and Drag space warps as additional influence forces. Ability to trigger simulation using mouse cursor by pulling or tipping over objects.
Time Scale Interactive animatable Time Scale property for PhysX dynamic simulation.
Demolition. Fast and easy way for smashing and crushing objects. It shatters objects that fall or get hit by fallen objects using fragmentation and create dynamic simulation.
Explosions. Multiple bombs support. New RF_Bomb object allows You to set up a lot of bombs with different explosion options. Also available four new explosion directions: Spherical, Cylindrical, Planar, and Cone.
Draw fragment mode. Fragment objects drawing strokes on screen in all supported views.