Tada! 
The Back Alley
I started this project over a year ago but ran out of time to finish it. However, I found myself with quite a lot of spare time recently – I guess that’s one upside of being unemployed 
One extra fun aspect of this project was to figure out how to use the Cloth Modifier in 3ds Max to place the fabric on the wooden poles. I really like this modifier; very advance yet easy to get started with
I’m currently stuck with my laptop with only 2GB of RAM thus I wasn’t able to render the whole scene in one go, with all the displacement going on. Hence I had to break up the rendering into different passes with each building separated. I then composited it all together using Eyeon Fusion. Blimey, pre-multiplied alpha can be a real bitch! I had to delve deeper into this, and experiment with ways of getting around those ugly dark or white halos. So far I’ve made steps forward but I sense there is much more to discover on this, somewhat, confusing subject – but I’m always keen to learn 
Cheers mates!
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Here are some WIP post:
WIP: The Back Alley – Part 1
WIP: The Back Alley – Part 2
This is cool, you got to see this! The pain of endless render times will soon be history. Companies around the world is working hard to develop the future of rendering. And that is GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) accelerated real-time rendering of ray traced photorealistic renderings! So instead of waiting two hours, you just have to wait two seconds, for a rendered result on your screen. As I mentioned there are quite a few companies working on this kind of technology out there, and here are some of them.
Shaderlight (ArtVPS)
http://www.artvps.com/content/shaderlight/what-is-shaderlight
V-Ray RT (Chaos Group)
http://www.chaosgroup.com/en/2/vrayrt.html
V-Ray has one solution that is already available I think. Check out this presentation from SIGGRAPH 2009; V-Ray RT GPU Rendering Demo
iray (mental images)
http://www.mentalimages.com/products/iray.html
mental images and nVidia joins forces to create a real-time renderer using the mental ray and CUDA (wiki) technology. It will be available in mental ray 3.8 and the current version (3ds max 2010) is 3.7 so perhaps the next release of 3ds max (sometime mid-2010, perhaps) will include the iray renderer, wouldn’t that be awesome! 
RealityServer (mental images & nVidia)
http://www.nvidia.com/object/realityserver.html
This is cool, nVidia is developing a server-side real-time rendering solution for web 3d. It utilizes the iray technology from mental images and renders the scene on a server and the image is then sent to all the client computers, all within just seconds! Check out a video presentation here: http://blogs.nvidia.com/ntersect/2009/12/nvidia-realityserver-30-now-shipping.html
Now wasn’t this really good news!
Cheers mates!
I always wanted to nuke a city… you know, CG wise! So I did a quick test with Particle Flow and Box#2 (PhysX) to figure out a way one could go about achieving such an effect. Anyway, here is a rough render with a simple city built out of lots and lots of boxes; 16,130 to be precise.
My viewport struggled to display all the boxes but PhysX had no problem calculating the physics for me, which was very nice. And I finally figured out how to use motion blur with Particle Flow, that’s been bugging me for quite some time until now.
Next step will be to build some houses and pre-fracture them and then use those instead of boxes, add some particles for dust and debris and of course a huge mushroom cloud…
Cheers!
During the production of Roland Emmerich’s apocalyptic disaster film 2012 Autodesk’s 3ds Max was used extensively to create very impressive visual effects. Here are some screenshots I grabbed from a “Making of” video, were you can see 3ds Max on the artists’ monitors.
3ds Max with a dark UI colour, showing the ruins of Las Vegas in wireframe.
3ds Max on the left monitor.
3ds Max on the left monitor, with some fluid simulation it looks like(?)
3ds Max on the left monitor with black viewport colours.
Check out the video and read the article here: Special Review: 2012 Film. The Making of. HD Video
The company behind the VFX is Uncharted Territory, LLC.
A new plug-in for 3ds Max called volumeBreaker was used to smash buildings and roads to pieces.
volumeBreaker is a volumetric geometry fracturing tool that will instantly create sub-geometry within any mesh - geometry that perfectly fits together and fills any given volume. With volumeBreaker Cebas brings a Hollywood quality destruction tool to 3ds MAX. volumeBreaker was developed in consultation with, and to meet the very exacting demands of, VFX artists working on multi-million dollar movies – because of this, volumeBreaker truly is a production proven tool.
The tool is being developed by cebas VISUAL TECHNOLOGY Inc. and you can read more about it here: http://volumebreaker.com/index.php?pid=product&prd_id=77&feature=912
Now, ain’t that cool?
Cheers mates!
Big day today, I’ve just wrote my very first MAXScript ever!
Its function is very straight forward; it allows you to quickly toggle between the standard grey and pitch black colour of all the viewports.
The black viewport makes it easier to see particles when working with Particle Flow and the standard grey is my preferred option when working with other stuff. So this is simply an easy way to toggle back and forth between workflow.
Installation
- Put the file in your 3ds Max Startup Script folder (e.g. “…\3ds max 2010\Scripts\Startup\”
- Start or restart 3ds Max
- Go to Customize -> Customize User Interface…
- In the Category drop-down list select Nanne’s Scripts
- Assign the script to a hotkey, a toolbar, a quad menu or a menu; it’s up to you
- Start toggling!
A special thanks goes to Marco “KIT” Brunetta over at Tech-Artists.org for helping me with some of the code
Anyway, feel free to try it out. You can download it here: ViewportColourSwitch 0.1
Edit:
I’ve just added the script on ScriptSpot.com, so soon I will become famous, hehe Check it out here: http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/nannes-viewportcolourswitch
Cheers mates, and don’t forget to comment!
This is just amazing! Probably the coolest use of particles I’ve ever seen… or something like that. Matthias Müller is the genius behind this and it is absolutely brilliant!
It is done in 3ds Max with Particle Flow and the following plug-ins; FumeFX from SitniSati, Particle Flow Tools: Box #3 Pro by Orbaz and renderd with Krakatoa from Prime Focus.
Check out some other cool stuff Müller has done here:
http://www.vimeo.com/user624589/videos
http://matthiasm.cgsociety.org/gallery/
One day I will be able to create awesome things like this, just you wait and see!
Cheers!
I finally got some time over to pick up where I left of with this piece. So I’ve been working with unwrapping and texturing for now. Texturing is something I really need to improve on. But I found some nice tutorials on the net that should give me some tips and tricks Check out my collection of Photoshop links here.
I also tried out TexTools 2.9 and it’s a really nice tool. It adds a lot of new features for unwrapping in max. They don’t always work or perhaps I just haven’t figured them out yet, but I still like it alot. Try it out, now!
Here’s the new update:
The Back Alley
Comments and critique is always welcomed!
Cheers mates!
This will be a short post, but I’m done with the sculpting in Mudbox. So without further ado here are some screen captures of the different Sculpting Levels.
Xellyr Spider Level 0 (2040 quads)
Xellyr Spider Level 1 (8160 quads)
Xellyr Spider Level 2 (32640 quads)
Xellyr Spider Level 3 (130560 quads)
Xellyr Spider Level 4 (522240 quads)
Xellyr Spider Level 5 (2 088 960 quads)
I got it up to about 2 million quads (4 million triangles) and then my laptop was down on it’s knees Here is a quick test of the generated Normal Map in 3ds max.
Xellyr Spider with Normal Bump
Next step will be to do some texture painting in Mudbox, will be fun to see result of that - stay tuned!
Cheers mates!
I got a sudden urge to do some modelling. So I decided to go for some game creature modelling in 3ds Max and then do some sculpting of details in Mudbox and generate a normal map and also try out texture painting in Mudbox, that’s new to me.
So I decided to go for a giant spider, it is a classical fantasy creature, and I came up with the name Xellyr Spider – just for the heck off it
Here are some images of the low-poly, 3ds Max version. It’s 100% quads made up by 4080 triangles. Not very low-poly so let’s call it a next-gen game creature, or a boss creature
Xellyr Giant Spider - Shaded
Xellyr Giant Spider - Wireframe
So all modelling and unwrapping was done in 3ds Max – got to love pelt mapping Next step will be to put it in the mudbox and sculpt away – it sure will be fun
See you soon for updates, cheers!
I played around with Reactor for breaking stuff. I used ProCutter for the pre-fracturing and it is a really cool tool! I also tested the script Fracture Voronoi and it works very good, but keep the number of pieces down to avoid crashes. However using ProCutter allows for more detail on the new inside geometry, but it is a little more labour behind it. Here is my result, captured directly from the viewport of 3ds max 2010.
Here is the tutorial that got me started; Reactor: Exploding an object part 1. It shows how to use ProCutter and Fracture in Reactor. Have fun and go nuts!
Cheers mates!