Arnold 5 - 3ds Max 2018 - good bye mental ray - hello Arnold!!

Hello everybody :)

As those of you who has downloaded 3ds max 2018, you've noticed two things: mental ray is gone, and in its place, you find Arnold 5 !

Going forward, anyone wanting to continue using mental ray, should talk to NVidia, who will be releasing it directly to users. It will not be available through Autodesk any more.

Arnold in Max

The last year for me has been busy as hell, but insanely fun!! We've done the impossible, and integrated a renderer fully in one year!

So when you do get 3ds max 2018 you will find Arnold 5 inside it - in the form of the MAXtoA plugin. The one that ships with max is build 712.

If you instead go to http://solidangle.com/arnold/download/#3dsmax

...you will find a much newer version. (Yes, even same day as 3ds max 2018 was released with MAXtoA built in, we released a new MAXtoA that was 100 builds newer...  :)

Yes, that's how we roll. Release newer stuff same day!

Arnold 5 is an amazing piece of technology, and working with it has been a complete joy. It's a giant step up from the old Arnold 4 both in features and technology, but more importantly in "cleanliness" of the API and its internal concepts.

The addition of "closures" is a complete godsend. This relegates the work of rendering to the renderer, as it should be. No longer are material shaders little dumb raytracers that count lights and shoot reflection rays. A material shader returns mix of BxDF closures, and the renderer itself takes care of doing "the right thing" with them.

That allows seamless mixing of materials including the AOVs (which are actually light path expressions), as well as mixing C++ based shaders with OSL shaders however one wants.

I am extremely happy to be working with Arnold and the Solid Angle team, and it's a fantastic piece of technology. Arnold 5 is a pure joy to code for, and Solid Angles willingess to simply remove and delete old stuff is very uplifting (but scary too :) )

I hope you guys will enjoy playing with Arnold 5 in 3ds max.

I will probably start a new blog for Arnold related rendering stuff going forward, coz posting it on a half-dead blog called "mental ray tips" seems.... well..... not exactly fitting.


Enjoy playing with it!


Render on!


/Z

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

Movies using mia_material / Arch&Design ?

Hello!

I'm compiling a list of movies that use the mia_material shader (known as "Arch&Design" if you are a 3ds Max user). I need this to present in front of the Sci/Tech Oscars committee on September 19th 2013... so quick answers are better then slow ones :)

 Did you work on a feature film?

Let me know in the comment field, or drop me an email, tweet me a DM @MasterZap or... whatever.

 Thanks!

 /Z

Get the Balance Right: mental ray thread priority in 3ds max 2014

Hello World!

As promised (but later than I promised), some news about the new 3ds Max 2014 release that may not be immediately obvious.

 One thing we changed in 3ds max 2014 was the thread priority of the mental ray render threads - they now default to "Below Normal", and when rendering in the background (i.e. via Backburner), one notch lower than that.

 Most people praise this, and say things like "Woohoo, I can finally read my email while rendering" or "When we use the sales departmens machines as render slaves, they don't even know we are doing it any more, mouhahaha, hahaha, ha ha ha haaaaaaaaaaaaaa"

However, once or twice someone says things like "Hey, my 3d screen saver on my render slave took all the CPU and now my render is still at 1% a week later, you suck!!"

So the question is - can this behaviour be changed?

YES IT CAN.

In your 3ds max directorys subdirectory "plugcfg_ln" you will find a file called "mentalray_cpu.ini", which is fairly self-explanatory, but reads something akin to this:

;
; - mentalray_cpu.ini
;
; Sets thread priority and thread count for mental ray renderer.
; Meaning of Thread Priority numbers are
;    0 == Normal
;   -1 == Below Normal
;   -2 == Lowest
; Meaning of Thread Count numbers are
;    0 == Use as many threads as there are cores
;    N == Use N threads
;   -N == Use as many threads as there are cores, minus N
;
[Threads]
;
; Settings for normal / interactive renders in the UI
;
;   Thread priority (defaults to -1 = "Below Normal")
RenderThreadPriority=-1
;   Thread count  (defaults to 0 = use all cores)
RenderThreadCount=0
;
; Settings for backburner / network renders
;
;   Thread priority (defaults to -2 = "Lowest")
BgRenderThreadPriority=-2
;   Thread count  (defaults to 0 = use all cores)
BgRenderThreadCount=0

As you can see, we can set both thread count and thread priority by fiddling with this file. [Note: this file is read at Startup, so any changing of it needs you to restart your Max!]

For thread priority we use the same parametrs as Windows does, where 0 is "same/Normal", -1 is "Below normal" and -2 is "Low". I advice you not to try a positive value, or you may not actually be able to move your mouse until the render completes....

For thread count, I made it such that if the value is zero, it does what it always did in the past - use all the cores.

However, if the value is positive, it will launch that number of threads - completely ignorind the number of cores on your machine. You can set it to 4 on an 8-core or 8 on a 4-core, doesn't matter, it's up to you - there may in some cases even be a benifit in using more threads than actual cores, but your mileage may vary.

Finally, if you set a negative value, it will take that many threads less than the available number of cores. This is really intended for the use case of using the accounting departments machines stealthily as render slaves.... leave them some CPU to do their spreadsheets on!


I hope this helps keeping your priorities straight!


/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

So, Zap, what have you been up to lately?

Here's one answer to that question:

Enjoy.

Yes, this blog will see more activity soon.....

/Z

This is the 100:th post...

...and it's only appropriate that it is about the fact that I've been hired by Autodesk.

Yes, you've seen Ken spill the beans over on CGTalk. It is true. Autodesk has hired me to handle rendering and funky stuff like that. Pixels. Whatnot. Friday sept 30:th is my last day at mental images/NVidia (which I end by doing the meet-and-greet-3d event in Berlin, see previous post), and Monday October 3:rd my first day at at Autodesk... this time around (I used to work for Autodesk in the past, doing mechanical design software).

This all started around some discussion between my good friends Neil Hazzard, Shane Griffith and myself back at EUE (all good friends which will now be my actual colleagues). It was thrown out as an idea, we pondered the thought, thought it made sense, and I talked to my managers at mental images/NVidia, and everybody thought it made a lot of sense.

Integration of mental ray and iray into Autodesk products have always been.. problematic. Integration work was done by Autodesk, but there was never a dedicated person with enough precise know-how of the nitty-gritty details to handle it (or sometimes simply not enough priority put on it). Well...... now I will be working there. 'nuff said :)

I think this will be interesting, and I've been "Shader Wizard" for mental images (now "NVidia ARC" - "Advanced Rendering Center") for 7+ years now, perhaps it's time to move forward to New Challenges. Todays physical rendering doesn't really require "shaders" in the same way it did in the past anyway..... 'tis all BSDF's and physics and shiny stuff :)

It's not like I'm moving far anyway. I will probably be in all the same meeting, just on the other "side"....

I think this will be really interesting, and the future is Bright (about 95000 cd/m^2 to be exact). Lets go there together.

With Sunglasses.

Also, as I type this I am finalizing some Really Cool Sh%t. Stay tuned - as always :)

/Z

Appearing at Meet and Greet 3D

On Sepmber 30:th 2011 I will be speaking at the Meet and Greet 3D event in Berlin.

I will do a small sit-down session about Linear Workflow at 2 PM, and a big-hall presentation about the physics of light at 11.50AM. <=== UPDATED TIME!!!

Venue info etc. available at www.MeetAndGreet3D.com

Location:

• Forum Adlershof, Rudower Chaussee 17, 12489 Berlin

See you all there. :)

/Z

User Survey (and a chance to Win a Quadro 6000!)

Just a quick note; We are currently running a user survey, and anyone who fills this in can win a NVIDIA Quadro 6000 graphics card!

It's a survey about how you use mental ray, and we want to gauge how it is being used across all possible industries. Appreciate your answers!

So please take the survey by clicking right here!

/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

2012 and Unified Sampling

Hello World!

The new 2012 versions of the Autodesk products Max/Maya/Softimage are upon us, and they are loaded up with mental ray 3.9.

One of the cool new features in 3.9, which doesn't seem to be exposed in some of the products, is "unified sampling".

The new "Unified Sampling" is a new way to choose which and how many samples (i.e. "rays") are shot into a given pixel, and what position in space AND TIME those rays have.

This becomes very significant as we discuss motion blur.

For anyone who have read the Samples Tips page over at lamrug.org knows that mental ray normally shoots rays roughly in a grid (but with jittering, so it is not exactly a grid) which it subdivides adaptively as needed, and for motion blur, mental ray actually (in the default raytracing case) shoots multiple rays into the same spatial position, but with different temporal positions (effectively rendering the subpixel sample at more than one position in time).




An image from LAmrUG.org


Now, Unified sampling unifies (hence the name) spatial and temporal sampling. Each ray has it's own space AND time sample. And not only that, the convergence of both is adaptive, so you simply set a lower limit on the amount of rays (say, 1) and an upper limit (say, 100) and simply turn a quality knob. This tries to adaptively resolve any noise from any source, be it soft shadows, glossy reflections, or motion blur with the SAME oversampling scheme.

Sounds nice, eh? So it's a pity it wasn't included in the 3ds Max UI, isn't it?

Luckily, the FEATURE is still there, and can be reached via Scripting.

In the Beta team, a set of people generated scripts to solve this issue (there are even several), and here are a few places you can download such scripts:

Arthur Leão and Duncan Howdin cowrote this script (pictured above) which you can download from Arthur's site
at http://dimensao3.com/al/ (file itself here)

It allows you to set the parameters and by doing this improve render times with motion blur and quality of quasi-random effects such as soft shadows and glossy reflecitons more easily than in the past.

These scripts utilize the MaxScript exposure of mental ray "string options". A problem with the string option MaxScript feature is that it the state of string options is NOT saved with the .max file. However, Arthur has solved this isse with a callback in the script ... or somesuch magic, I suck at MaxScript myself... ;)

Thorsten Hartmann (Infinity Vision) wrote another version which he has posted at http://www.infinity-vision.de/blog/unified_sampling which also contains some information and test renders.

Enjoy Unification day!

/Z

MetaSL.org - MetaSL Tutorial and Reference Book/Website

Hello everybody!

Today we release MetaSL.org which is a companion website to the work-in-progress book about MetaSL programming by Andy Kopra and Lutz Kettner.


This site/book is a walkthrough of the concepts behind MetaSL and will show you how to write shaders in the MetaSL language.

Now, let it be clear that this is intended as a living "work in progress site", so these are the initial chapters of the book, available online.

I quote from the page: "Chapters of the MetaSL book will be posted on the website in both HTML and PDF formats as they are written. The structure and contents of earlier chapters may change as required by the development of later chapters. The reference pages, based as they are on the MetaSL specification, will not change between MetaSL specification versions, though improvements may be made in the way the content is hyperlinked and cross-referenced."

What is available so far is the first four chapters explaining topics such as basic language concept and layout, and some of the most basic shading- and raytracing concepts.





The book also has an accompanying forum on the mental images website, where questions and feedback can be posted. You will get an unprecedented front-row seat to the evolution of this book. Enjoy the ride!

/Z

Issue in mia_envblur in 3ds Max

An issue has been found in the "mia_envblur" shader as it is integrated into 3ds Max. (Read more about mia_envblur here)



Autodesk has added a Phenomenon wrapping the shader, and it was just discovered there is a typo in the Phenomenon declaration, that causes one of the parameters to not actually function. The blur still works - but only with a fixed level. The checkbox for inheriting the blur from the Arch&Design material is non-functional!

You can easily fix this yourself by opening a file named "architectural_max.mi" which in the path: <3dsmax>\mentalimages\shaders_standard\mentalray\include.

Opening the file you can search for a line which reads like this:

"mia_material_blur" = interface "not m.mia_material_blur",

Edit this line to read:

"mia_material_blur" = interface "m.mia_material_blur",

...i.e. removing the "not ".

Now, all parameters of your environment blur (including inheriting blur from the Arch&Design material) should work!

Also, some people report issues with flickering in the reflections. This can be caused by two things:

• Too low resolution in the Envblur shader. The "resolution" value need to be high enough to resolve details in the original environment map.
  
• Intermittent interaction with the "blur" feature in 3ds max "Bitmap" shader. Turn down the blur in the Bitmap shader (in the "Coordinates" rollout) to lowest possible, which should resolve the problem.
  

/Z

I thought this was funny....

I normally don't use mentalraytips.com to post "funny" things, but I had to make an exception for this, because, well... you'll see.

When I received this little video, it literally made my day. It's the "Behind The Scenes" video for Freddie Wong's "Epic VFX Time". Freddie does little funny visual effects experiments and tutorials on his youtube channel - well worth a watch.

However, when this came across my screen, well, I couldn't help but laugh:

I've been mentioned in VFX behind-the-scenes documentaries before - but never like this.

Thanks guys. :)

However, I'd like to massively correct that I am not "the guy who programs mental ray", I am *a* guy who programs mental ray *shaders*. That's different. We are a whole team behind the software, not just me...

But still - thanks!

/Z

The Great Directory Migration - putting stuff in 3ds max 2011 (and newer)

I apologize that this blog post is way overdue.

What's this about?

All over the net (including this blog) you can find instructions in how to add various shaders to 3ds Max, by putting files in certain directories in the 3ds max directory structure, namely a "mentalray" directory (with various subdirectories) under your main 3ds max directory.

Nowdays, there are two things to watch out for:

GOTCHA #1: 64/32 Bitness

First is 32 vs 64 bit. In windows, programs on a 32 bit machine live under a directory that (on an english speaking computer) is called "C:\Program Files\" 

This is also true for 64 bit programs on a 64 bit computer.

However, for 32 bit programs on a 64 bit computer the directory is called "C:\Program Files (x86)\" which may throw you off.

GOTCHA #2: 3ds Max 2011 (and newer)

When Autodesk introduced the MetaSL framework in 3ds Max 2011 (which means that shaders are not necessarily mental ray shaders per se) having a subdirectory to your max directory called "mentalray" doesn't really make sense any more. But since these both are mental images technologies, having a directory called "mentalimages" does make sense.

The change was made such that instead of a single "mentalray" directory under which the three categories of shaders (standard, autoload and 3rdparty), there is now instead a "mentalimages" directory. The three categories exist under this directory, similar to before.

However, under those three directories, the distinction between "mentalray" and "MetaSL" shaders has been added.

Under those you find various other subdirectories - which under the "mentalray" subdirectory hence includes the good old friends the "include" and "shaders" directories.

Example:

To add an .mi file like for example the skinplus.mi (a mental ray "include" file) shader to be automatically loaded on startup, you want it in the "include" directory under the "autoload" category.

In 3ds Max 2010 (or older) this would have been:

• C:\Program Files\Autodesk\3ds Max 2010\mentalray\shaders_autoload\include

In 3ds Max 2011 (and newer) this would instead be

• C:\Program Files\Autodesk\3ds Max 2011\mentalimages\shaders_autoload\mentalray\include

Basically, the translation would be that

• C:\Program Files\Autodesk\3ds Max 2010\mentalray\shaders_<category>\<dirname>

becomes

• C:\Program Files\Autodesk\3ds Max 2011\mentalimages\shaders_<category>\mentalray\<dirname>

I hope this helps installing various shaders and other goodies in 3ds Max 2011 and beyond.

/Z

The Re-run-run-run, the Re-run-run (FXPhd class on again!)

For those of you who missed my FXPHD course the other two times it was run... HERE SHE IS AGAIN!







More info in the posts below. Again - this is a re-run, so it is the exact same classes as before... but I will be available in the FXPHD forum for students to ask crazy questions.

See you on FXPHD!

/Z

mental ray for C4D users!

Aloha folks, long time no post.

Sorry, Zap's been busy with .... stuff.

Also, some other guys than me have been busy and created this neat plugin for using mental ray AND iRay from within Cinema 4D:



It fully supports not only all the standard C4D materials, but also custom shaders in MetaSL, so this is some kick-butt powerful stuff!

Check out the website for more information, coz I must admit I am not an expert on C4D at all, and was not directly involved in this project, so I can't really answer much questions about it, sorry :)

But hey, C4D users - enjoy!

/Z

More about MetaSL in 3ds Max 2011

Aloha again!

Sorry for not making a proper "post SIGGRAPH post", but I've been "post SIGGRAPH busy". And as always, me being Busy, means good things for you all.... in the future. :)



I've gotten a ton of questions about MetaSL in 3ds Max, and since the public beta mentioned in a previous post has now been discontinued (you can still use the 30 day trial if you like it will time out approximately the same time that the public beta would have timed out anyway), the interest in "what was the app actually doing and can I do it myself" has increased.

So let me explain the process 3ds Max uses to load/use a MetaSL shader:

Max uses configuration files located in the <3dsmax>\mentalimages\shaders_standard\MetaSL\Config directory to define how it works.


First there is a file in this directory named MaxMetaSLNodeTexmap.tbx. This file contains entries of which MetaSL shaders are shown in the MetaSL section in the Slate material editor.

By default, only a handful of shaders are actually in this file, but anyone can open up this file and add new entries for any of the standard MetaSL shaders that ship with max (and all the shaders in mental mill are included in this set).

So by adding a line like, for example


<palette_item type="node_class" node_class="generator_blend_ramp" image="conversion.bmp"/>


...will make the standard shader generator_blend_ramp visible in your Slate "MetaSL" toolbox! (NOTE: You must add it before the closing "<palette/>" line)



That's fine for "standard" shaders, but what about adding your OWN shader?

Well, when max is looking for a MetaSL shader name (technically, a MetaSL class name), it rummages through the file NodeToMsl_MappingTable.xml in that same directory.

This file contains entries similar to these:


<Item ClassName="Color_contrast" XMSLName="color_balance.xmsl"/>
<Item ClassName="Color_gamma" XMSLName="color_balance.xmsl"/>
<Item ClassName="Color_saturation" XMSLName="color_balance.xmsl"/>


This links a class name ("Color_contrast" for example) to a file that needs to be loaded to define that class name ("color_balance.xmsl" in that case).

If we further look into the file "color_balance.xmsl" (which lives in the <3dsmax>\mentalimages\shaders_standard\MetaSL\XMSL directory), we will find it consists only of this line:


<root>
<metasl_code file_name="color_balance.msl"/>
</root>


What we see is that this file simply loads the "color_balance.msl" file (which lives in the <3dsmax>\mentalimages\shaders_standard\MetaSL\MSL directory). Now this XMSL file could have defined a whole phenomena of it's own (of the desired class name), but in this case it didn't... it simply deffered to say "nah, to find that class, just load this MSL file, it will defined that class".

And if we were to open up "generator_blend_ramp.msl" we will find some shader code that indeed defines this shader.


So, to add our OWN shader, all we need to do are the following steps. Assume we have a simple shader that multiplies two colors, like this:

shader mul2colors {
  input:
    Color A;
    Color B;
  output:
    Color result;

  void main() {
    result = A * B;
  }
};

#1: We our shader code in a file in the <3dsmax>\mentalimages\shaders_standard\MetaSL\MSL directory in a file named multi_two_colors.MSL

#2: Create an XMSL file in the <3dsmax>\mentalimages\shaders_standard\MetaSL\MSL\mult_two_colors.xmsl that simply reffers to the MSL file, using the simple format above, e.g.

<root>
<metasl_code file_name="mult_two_colors.msl"/>
</root>


#3: Add an entry in the <3dsmax>\mentalimages\shaders_standard\MetaSL\Config\NodeToMSL_MappingTable.xml file for the new class, mapping the shader name ("mul2colors") to the .xmsl file name ("mult_two_colors.xmsl")

<Item ClassName="mul2color" XMSLName="mult_two_colors.xmsl"/>


#4: Finally, make it visible by adding it to the 3ds Max MetaSL Slate toolbox by adding a line to the <3dsmax>\mentalimages\shaders_standard\MetaSL\Config\MaxMetaSLNodeTexmap.tbx file (prior to the closing "<palette/>" line:
<palette_item type="node_class" node_class="mul2colors" image="conversion.bmp"/>

Note: The name of the bitmap isn't important since 3ds Max creates it's own bitmaps by actually running the shader w. it's default parameters to generate the toolbox icon.


Hope this makes sense?

ALSO, DO NOT FORGET that my FXPHD class is still running... we're in the week 5 "break week" currently. There is still time to sign up (FXPHD allows signups up until the 8:th class week). So be there, or be hexagonal! ;)


/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