3ds max 2015 new rendering features

So people have been wondering WHAT THE HECK I've been up to the last year, since I've been qute... silent....

The short story is... this:


The main work that was done was to turn mental ray into an ActiveShade renderer, i.e. that you can work with interactively. Also, for the already ActiveShade-capable renderer iRay, we improved the responsivness of a lot of the updates (no longer waits for mouse-up to apply changes).

Be aware that not every scene edit is supported in ActiveShade, but a lot more than what was supported before now works much more streamlined. In 2014, running iRay ActiveShade was a bit of a pain. Now, in 2015, running both mr and iRay ActiveShade should be a much more pleasant experience where you can actually get real lighting- and shading work done.

About the other features mentioned in the video - I will post more about those as time permits, but the short story is that we enabled iRay string options, and made iRay LPE's (Light Path Expressions) into render elements, which can be quite powerful!

More details later....

UPDATE: There is one minor ERROR in the above video, though. As a matter of fact iRay does not have a "Shadow" pass. iRay LPE's are about light, and shadows are the absence of light. Only oldschool "non-physical" renderers saw shadows as a "thing" that you can output separately. What you do in iRay is instead to separate different types of lights. You can get a similar amount of control (in a more physically correct way) by balancing lights. But there is no "shadow" element. As a matter of fact, anyone who took my mry201 mental ray FXPhd course know, that "Shadow" passes are evil, bad, and never actually work anyway (with the exception of shadow passes for the background for compositing, of course)

/Z

Launching the 2014 product line...

In case you missed it, tonight is a "launch event" for the 2014 products from Autodesk Media and Entertainment, which includes some work I've done. I will be blogging more in detail later about what we added. 

Here is the launch site:

http://area.autodesk.com/2014unfold/

You can also find the list of new features for 3ds Max. This is a very simplified list, though, and misses a LOT of stuff, like:

• Unified Sampling
• Image Based Lighting
• iRay 3.1
• Automatic Gamma Correction
• And more...

It also skips a lot of the "Small Annoying Things" we've fixed in the last year (where in our team alone nearly a 100 'tiny little things' and bugs and whatnot have been slain. Like for example:

• "Zoom about Mouse" is now the default - and works!
• mental ray thread priority no longer hangs your computer!
• New exception handling causes error handling to be much more robust
• Bugfixes. Bugfixes! BUGFIXES!!
• Etc. etc. etc.

Did we get to all I'd wanted to fix? For sure not. Max is a big product, and things like killing every bug related to gamma correction... well... that takes time :)

I'll blog on these things as we move forward. For now, have a fun Easter and enjoy the new release.

/Z

Welcome to EUE 2011

As several years previously, I will be presenting at the EUE (= "End User Event") 2011 in Utrecht, Netherlands.

The event is June 30:th/July 1:st, and it is held in the Florin, a nice old building that used to be a bank, but now is a pub..... with adjoined conference rooms.



Think of the event as the worlds smallest SIGGRAPH - only with the commercial glitz shaved off, and held in a pub. And if you walk outside, you are not run over by yellow cabs, but by blonde students on bicycles. Seriously, you almost need a bicycle helmet to walk the streets here. :)

Check out the www.EndUserEvent.com site for more details; there is even a Youtube behind-the-scenes channel where you can see the organizers setting up the event, which I found neat.

This year I will be talking about light, the perception thereof, and how to translate that knowledge to what you do in CG.

But I'm not the only one rambling, other speakers include:

• Jeff Mottle (CG Architect)
  
• Wayne Robson (y'know mudbox guy)
  
• Rune Spaans (about his work on Troll Hunter)
  
• Jamie Gwilliam (Autodesk)
  
• Neil Hazzard (Autodesk)
  
• Shane Griffith (Autodesk, will be holding an NDA session on future dev. of 3ds Max)
  
• Ted Boardman (often mistaken for a member of ZZ top)
  
• Johan Boekhoven
  
• Eric de Broche
  
• Yoni Cohen
  
• Borislab "Bobo" Petrov
  
• Hristo Velev
  
• ...and many more, see here
  

While waiting, what about the trailer for Troll Hunter that Rune worked on? Think of it as "Cloverfield goes to Norway. With Trolls". :)
See you in Utrecht!

/Z

Render Optimizer script for max 2012

I discussed progressive sampling in the previous post. Thorsten Hartmann and Artur Leão has collaborated on an "Über-script" for handling a ton of stuff. Torsten calls his variant "Render Optimizer" and can be found on this link:

http://www.infinity-vision.de/blog/render_optimizer

The Render Optimizer does a lot more than just turn on unified sampling, and Thorsten has several tutorial on the various subcomponents.





If you are overwhelmed by the number of tabs on Thorstens version, Artur also independently has a slightly different version on his site, called "mr Options Manager", which you can find here:

http://dimensao3.com/al/





I will be updating this post w. some tricks-and-tips myself shortly.
For now, Enjoy Thorsten and Arturs cool work!

/Z