Heading off to SIGGRAPH 2010

A quick note: Heading off to SIGGRAPH right... now.

Those who want to follow me do it most easily on twitter, and I may post some neat stuff on QiK once in a while:

twitter.com/MasterZap

facebook.com/MasterZap

qik.com/MasterZap

Enjoy

/Z

MRY201 mental ray FXPHD course to be RE-RUN for July 2010 term

For those of you who missed my FXPHD course back in January, fear not, because it is being run AGAIN this upcoming July term!







Scroll down to my previous postings about the course for more info! Now, this is a re-run, so it is the same classes as before (with some minor updates and corrections, especially to Class #1), but I will still be available in the FXPHD forum for the new students to ask their questions!

For more info about the course click here or just go to www.fxphd.com

For now, though, I'm off on some vacation, coming back in time for SIGGRAPH 2010 in Los Angeles! More about that in a later post!

/Z

MetaSL in 3ds Max 2011 - demo

After posting my last post, I've gotten a lot of questions around the MetaSL implementation in 3ds Max 2011 and the Mental Mill SE 1.1 beta. Well... to demonstrate this, I've made a little video presentation (actually a shortened version of what I showed at the EUE event mentioned two posts back).

So click here to check out the video, it's 15 minutes of me rambling....




The presentation shows my MetaSL "eye" shader (to be posted soon) run in mental mill, mental ray, 3ds Max viewport, and the Quicksilver renderer.

Enjoy! :)

/Z

mental mill 1.1 Standard Edition public beta 2

Notice: There is a new public beta of mental mill 1.1 Standard Edition

One particular neat feature with this beta is an exporter I built for it that exports MetaSL shaders to 3ds Max 2011 directly from inside the mill.

The workflow is basically this:

• Build your shader tree in mental mill
• Select the root node
• Go to File->Export
• Choose the "Autodesk 3ds Max 2011 (Slate Extension)" exporter
• (First time only: Select your 3ds max installation directory)
• Hit "Export" button.
• Start Max

Now you will see the shader in the Slate material editor "MetaSL" category.
These shaders now...

• ...work in the 3ds Max viewport
• ...render in mental ray
• ...render in Quicksilver
• ...and any other MetaSL compatible renderer!

And the coolest part is that it works even with your own custom made MetaSL shaders, in all above renderers! This is different than the MetaSL support in Max 2010 that was locked to the shader set shipping with it. Not so in Max 2011, you can build your own shaders. They compile automatically in the back and "just work". Even raytracing calls in the shaders get converted to the automatically generate cube reflection maps for Quicksliver, which is quite neat :)

Expect lots and lots of posts on this topic coming soon - for those that are curious about this workflow and want to see it up close, and see me debug some shaders live, pop up in Utrecht, Netherlands, next week (June 3-4, 2010) at www.EndUserEvent.com (see previous post)

Known Issues:

• There are some known issues with the Lookup_Texture_2d node not showing in the viewport with gamma correction enabled, but I hear this should be fixed in a 3ds Max service pack (hopefully). It still works in mental ray / Quicksilver.
• If Texture2d inputs exist inside a phenomena in your mill graph but are not exposed to the interface of the Phoneomenon, they will not get properly filled in when loaded into 3ds Max. To fix this, simply expose the "Texture2d" to the interface of the Phenomenon.

Find the download for mental mill 1.1 Standard Edition here

Have fun!

/Z

End User Event, Jun 3-4 2010, Utrecht / Netherlands

A heads up:

On June 3/4, my good friend Joep van der Steen, author of "rendering with mental ray & 3ds Max" will be - again - hold the "End User Event".

Imagine it as a very tiny and very European and very personal mini-version of Siggraph. There are two days filled with lectures and talks and mingling, and, yeah... it's held in a bar. :) (Well, a bar with conference rooms on the sides)

Sign up now if you want to join in on the fun. I'll be speaking there about MetaSL in 3ds Max 2011 and some other mental-ray-y things.... see you there.

www.EndUserEvent.com

/Z

FXPHD, closed, done, complete, over. PHEW

Well, that was an interesting ride of 10 weeks of doing FXPHD. And while I really enjoyed doing it, well, it was quite a lot of work (since I'm such a nerdy perfectionist and want to embellish everything to the border of insanity) so I won't be doing it again any time soon....

I have not heard if the FXPHD guys plan to re-run the course, at least it is not being re-run immediately for the current April term starting up in the next few weeks. And of course, if/when it is re-run, it's the same classes run again, so all I have to do then is to hang around in the forums for questions, which is much easier....

It was quite fun to see the progress of the students and I saw quite a few nice renders done by them. I think I made several people see the light of linear rendering... :)



I'll let you guys know when more similar stuff happens. Next up is EUE (more in a future post)

Also, expect some trickle-down effect for the blog. I created some nifty Phenomena for the FXPhd course that I will post here after some polish.... stay tuned!

/Z

mental ray in Round 6

Check out this awesome short film by Snowball Studios called "Round 6". You may think it is a game cinematic, but it's actually a short film intentionally made in the style of a game cinematic:

Round 6 from Snowball Studios on Vimeo.

This is, of course, mental ray in all it's glory, and what I found most interesting about this is that they have a very cool production blog over at http://round6construction.blogspot.com/ where you can read many more details of the project.

Great work guys!

/Z