mrProxy Grass
I've seen some stunning examples of rendered grass created with Vray using grass meshes as proxy objects and then scattering those grass proxy objects around. I tried a similar setup with mental ray and thought I'd share my findings.
Blog
Displacement and broken edges
I was working on a project where I needed to use some displacement maps on a material. So, I was setting up the material in the matlab for use in my scene when I noticed the tearing edge effect my material was having on the test object.
Volume Caustic Sample Scenes
While working on some content that required me to search through my scene archives I ran across some of my volume caustic scenes. Figured it might be useful to someone out there so I knocked the dust off the scenes and figured I'd share a few of them for deconstructing purposes.
Training events & User Group meetings
There are a few events coming up that I wanted to mention because there's some great mental ray training to be had at both events. One event is EUE (End User Event) in Utrecht, The Netherlands and the other event is a Northern Illinois AAUGA event.
2009 Sample Scenes
First blog post of 2009! Figured I'd start this year by looking back and sharing some sample files like I used to do "back in the day". These aren't anything really special, just some files that might be useful for deconstructing or whatever.
Arch-vis interior tips, and Vue7 hits the streets!
HFor 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."
Grass Displacement FAQ
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.
Irradiance Particles, HDRs and you
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.
ProMaterials and .png 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.
