2018-06-20

Creating Leaves and Grass with V-ray in 3ds Max

Here's another post I wrote on creating and controlling leaves and grass with V-ray for 3ds Max.  It can be found on Chaos Groups website.


Happy rendering!

2018-04-24

Creating Rugs with V-Ray

I know things have been slower on this site. For years I would post only on this site, but these days it's very difficult to post anything in one location. Nevertheless, I recently posted an article which can be found on Chaos Groups website on various was to create rugs in 3dsmax using V-ray.


Happy Rendering!

2018-01-25

VrayEnvironmentFog

It's been a while since I've posted here. No I have not fallen off the face of the earth, just busy with projects, so I figured I'd post a link to my latest post on TILTPIXEL. Even though VrayEnvironmentFog is nothing new, it's still important to know how to tackle these effects and come to aesthetic solutions that are effective for your renderings. In this post I go through my thought process in breaking down the steps to something that I was visually pleased with.


As usual, happy rendering!

2015-05-26

V-ray Spotlights

My new post on how to creating spotlights using a regular v-ray light: click here


2015-02-25

Revit to 3dsmax Workflow

Just wanted to let you know that I will still be posting, but more often in my new location at tiltpixel.com.  My latest post is my process in getting revit to 3dsmax, what works and what doesn't.



Check it out: http://tiltpixel.com/?p=795

Talk to you there!

2015-02-02

AU Presentations are now live

AU 2014 last year was another great event, and it was great to see so many friends again from our small 3D community.  Also, thanks to all those that attended my class at last years AU.  It was a jam-packed room, and I'm really grateful for the attendance as well as all the positive feedback I received from the attendees.  I felt a bit scatter-brained during the presentation, as the projector did not like my laptop, so I had to use another machine.  It turned out fine though....and thank you to the person that let me use their laptop in a pinch.  If you couldn't make it to AU last year or my class, here is a recording of my presentation.



Also here are the documents related to the presentation:
Handout.pdf 
Presentation.pdf

2015-01-16

Welcome 2015!


Welcome 2015!  It's been a while since I've posted here.  I've been quite busy working, and at Tiltpixel we've been working on a gamut of amazing renderings.  One of them being 5th & West in Austin, TX.  I thought I'd highlight a few images we've done for this project.


More to come soon!




2014-11-18

Fix those blank .max icons!

I don't know why but every time I install a new version of 3dsmax, my .max files go blank, and it's just simply annoying.  I hadn't found a good way to fix this without really messing things up until now.  FileTypesMan easilly fixes this, and now that I can see my max files in windows, it makes getting things done much easier.

Run FileTypesMan, and simply find the .max extension, and double click on it.  Under Default Icon click the "..." button, then choose "Browse..."

Locate the 3dsmax Icons folder (for 2015, it's C:\Program Files\Autodesk\3ds Max 2015\Icons), and choose "file_3dsmax_max.ico".  Hit Ok, Ok, Boom!

You can download it below, and when I update my 3dsmax again, I'll be coming back here to download this handy file :)


Download: https://filetypesman.en.softonic.com/

2014-06-06

Viewport Tricks



I often find that I can't always see the material I'm trying to tweak in my viewport. Several materials that are particularly difficult to see clearly in the viewport are Vray's LightMaterial and Refractive Materials.

If my VrayLightMaterial is controlled by a texture map, it becomes really hard to tweak the UV's in the viewport because the map is displayed as white. For refractive objects, (when using v-ray), if they are 100% refractive, then they disappear completey from the viewport, and are really hard to locate in your viewport shaded mode. Sure you can turn on "Edged Faces", but this doesn't still solve the issue of glass panes that have 6 faces, as they are very hard to see in wire frame.  To make my life a little easier, and keep me from steering blind in the viewport, a trick I do is to use the Shell material for the above examples.


For the VrayLightMaterial, Place an instance of your VrayLightMaterial into the Original Material slot of the Shell Material. Then under the Baked Material slot, you can put another material in there that has an instance of your texture map that's driving the VrayLight Material. It can be a Standard, A&D, or Vray Material...it doesn't matter because it's just for the viewport.



For the glass material, I basically do the same thing, but on the standard material, I can tweak the opacity and color to represent something similar to the renderable material.





Now the viewport makes much more sense, and easier to work and edit. I can actually see the glass, and even represents the right color. Now I can also see the texture map on my light balls and edit the UV's as I please.

2013-12-21

Merry Christmas!....and snow


It has been a while since I've posted, but things have been busy.  However with the season, I thought it appropriate to make a posting on how to manually paint snow into your 3d scenes.  I can't take credit for this trick as I learned this from Fred Ruff at Bent Image Lab, and my posting of this here is more for me and just documenting the process down so I remember it.





This basically begins by creating a BlobMesh.  This is the object that will build up the snow, and what's interesting about this one is that it creates an organic object that sticks within a certain proximity.









So click anywhere to create the BlobMesh object, and adjust the size and coarseness of the mesh so that it looks similar to the snow that we'll be painting in.  You can come back to adjust the scale, tension, etc. later.








Next, you will want to create an editable poly, off to the side of your scene.  This is the object that will drive the creation of the BlobMesh.







Now, go back and select the BlobMesh, and under Blob Objects choose the Pick button and select the editable poly.  In my case it was a box that I added an editable poly modifier to it.



Once you choose the box, you will see it listed in the Blob Objects list.  You will also notice that any vertices in the editable poly are now represented with the BlobMesh.  Basically you're creating the blob from the vertices of this object.






Now if you go back and select your poly and go to the sub-vertex mode, choose the create button to add vertices.  Now when you click in your scene it will add more BlobMesh geometry and now you can simply paint to create this object.  Because it is a blobmesh, if you create vertices that are close together, the blobmesh will form one object...very similar in appearance to snow.







Now you can go to town and add as many verts as you want.  It may help by turning on snapping and choosing snap to faces to add verts onto objects other than the Z,0 plane.

One thing to note, is you don't want to move your editable poly as this will move the blobmesh object as well.  You can either lock the position of the editable poly, or you can freeze it.

Happy Painting & Merry Christmas!