Mr Materials Blog

For some odd reason there seems to be a cloud of mystery around rendering architectural interiors that are illuminated solely by man-made light sources.  I see questions like this posted on forums: "There are many tutorials for interior renderings but they all are daylight scenes.  That doesn't help me if I want to render my scene at night without the sun shining directly into my model."

I frequently receive questions about issues with mental ray displaced grass methods.  In this blog entry I will discuss the most commonly asked questions and offer some insight on displaced grass in 3ds Max & mental ray.

Ever wanted decent shadows from your image based lighting scenes (HDR)?  Well, it's possible if you use Irradiance Particles in 3ds Max/Design 2009.  Read further to find more information & files.

In case you haven't noticed, there's some fairly extensive .mat collections for the ProMaterials available in 3ds Max 2009. I've noticed some of the .PNG texture maps used in these collections act "weird" in 3ds Max 2009 in terms of gamma. I'll show the issue & explain further below.

Here is a quick video to help all those who requested help on getting started. If video does not play on your system you may use the download ling below the media player to obatain the video.

I wanted to take a few minutes to explain the current gamma setup of the 3ds Max matlab scenes, and what to do if your output doesn't look similar to the default render that comes with the scenes.

After the new implementation of Importons and Irradiance Particles on the Mental Ray 3.6 release, artists have new tools available to help them achieving the results they're looking for.

Autodesk's 3D Studio Max 2009 and 3D Studio Max Design 2009 users, have access to these new features, thanks to the ctrl.ghost shader, written and shared by Maximilian Tarpini on this thread at CGTalk, where you'll get an explanation about this subject. You have on the shared file, instructions about the correct installation of this shader. You can also see instructions on how to use it in your scene at Jeff Patton's blog.

In order to show some of the new features and how they interect with each other, we are making several tests to illustrate the visual impact of this interaction along with rendering times.

I've been working on some new scenes for use in my mental ray training classes. Thought I'd give a sneak peak at one of these scenes in it's current WIP state:
Download Animation

Maybe it's just me, but it seems there's a movement towards low contrast, no burnt/overbright areas in renders these days. I know I've been guilty of it to some extent. Why? Well I think LWF has a lot to do with it.

For the longest time a lot of us created images with incorrect gamma settings. We often had too much contrast in our renders. Then this "LWF Revolution" came around and now IMHO the pendulum has swung the opposite direction. Now it's far more common to have little to no contrast in our renders.

Now that I have some newer PC's here, I wanted to run some animation tests to 'break them in' if you will. I started things off simple with a car paint animation. The Audi model was provided by someone else (thanks).