3D Studio Max Users' Journal
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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
3D Studio Max Users' LiveJournal:
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| Monday, September 15th, 2008 | 3:49 pm
[nnnslogan]
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Sculpting with 3D Coat  | 3:49 pm
[nnnslogan]
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3D Coat - fractals and volumetric textures  | 10:22 am
[nnnslogan]
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| 6:52 am
[nnnslogan]
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3D Coat Key Features & Benefits of 3D-Coat Advantages of 3D-Coat:
Painting textures and sculpting. It combines painting layered textures and sculpting in one easy to use interface.
3D Layers. Every layer consists of a colour, specular, transparency and displacement channel.
Compatibility. Full compatibility with Light Wave 3D, Modo through .lwo format, with Maya, 3ds Max, Carrara through .fbx (import) and .obj format.
3D mouse support. 3D-Coat supports 3D SpaceNavigator of 3DCONNEXION. Navigation became more handy and intuitive. Click on one of the 3D mouse button switch it into the parameter's change mode. Now you do not need to use keyboard in order to change radius or depth of the pen. As the 3D mouse has 6 degrees of freedom it is possible to change 6 parameters simultaneously – radius,depth, transperancy, focal shift, specular and pen's turn.
Easy to use. 3D-Coat has easy and intuitive interface. Every control has a diplayed detailed hint, so you can master 3D-Coat very quickly. With it you can paint a 3D-Model as easy as in a 2D-editor.
Copy/Paste. You can transform parts of the texture, copy/paste, draw with curves, or splines.
Paint tracks and stitches. It has a simple to use method to paint tracks and stitches.
Connection with Adobe Photoshop. It can work in a deep connection with Adobe Photoshop (R) or any 2D-editor that can edit PSD files.
Adaptive subdivision. The main difference between 3D-Coat and other sculpting software is its adaptive subdivision algorithm. Usually sculpting programs divide every edge in 2 parts, so it is very difficult to work with long polygons. 3D-Coat however subdivides every edge in the source mesh depending on its length. So long polygons may be subdivided in a proportion of for example 9:147. You can change mesh resolution multiple times (like other software usually does), but also ina percentage, for example 50%. You paint in 3D-Coat on the vertices, but the adaptive subdivision makes the subdivided mesh very uniform. It is preferable that the mesh has no overlapping UVs, but 3d brush can generate its own UVs if neccesary.
The usual workflow in 3D-Coat is:
- You load a mesh of 1-100 k polygons with rough details modelled. You can additionally import a displacement texture with smaller details drawn in.
- 3D-Coat subdivides it up to a selected level (0.3-16 millions of polygons). Every polygon is subdivided separately denpending on its proportions. At any time you can change the mesh resolution (see Commands->Change mesh resolution). Subdivision can be based not only on multiple times as in other sculpting software but also on a percentage. It is better to increase (not decrease) the resolution during the edit process, as this is more predictable.
- Paint displacement/color/transparency/specular per new vertex.
- Export normal map/displacement/color/transparency/specular textures. Displacement is exported using the difference of a vertex's position and its position on Layer 0.
The technology of 3D-Coat.
3D-Coat generates a normal map "on the fly" to display fine details. It displays a base mesh of 40-100 K polygons but the normalmap makes it look like 1-16 million polygons. You can edit textures up to 4096x4096. |
| | Tuesday, September 9th, 2008 | 12:51 am
[manbitesgod]
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Man BItes God Music Video Competition Australian band, Man Bites God are bribing aspiring film makers with a chance to win AU$500 by making a music video featuring a Man Bites God song of their choice. “A number of fans have made their own music videos for the band over the last few years and we wanted to recognise their efforts with a competition”, explains the band’s drummer and professional video director Chris Tomkins. “We’re not expecting anything amazingly polished for the $500 prize, we just want to see what great ideas are out there.” The competition runs until November and is a simple as choosing a Man Bites God song, making a video and uploading to Man Bites God’s YouTube channel in order to be judged in November. The band are looking for anything from surreal to literal, live-action, machinema, animation or some other technique that hasn’t been invented yet. Details of the competition are available on the band's website http://www.manbitesgod.com or by watching the video on their youtube channel http://www.youtube.com/manbitesgod. | | Tuesday, August 19th, 2008 | 11:25 am
[nnnslogan]
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PIXIE <tr><td> 
Open Source RenderMan
</td></tr><tr><td height="300" valign="top" background="v2.png"> Pixie is an open source RenderMan renderer for generating photorealistic images. You can compile Pixie on Windows (using Visual Studio 2005), Linux and on OSX (using XCode or unix style configure script).Features- Object instancing / delayed primitives
- Displacements
- Programmable shading (using RenderMan Shading Language)
- High quality texture/shadow/environment mapping
- High dynamic range input/output
- Scalable, multi-resolution raytracing using ray differentials
- Pixie now has a new raytracing engine that automatically tesselates surfaces on the fly to a desired accuracy determined using the ray differentials. This means rays tracing blurry reflections or computing global illumination are faster to trace and sharp reflections and shadows are more accurate. Pixie also contains a memory manager that keeps the memory that is used to keep these tesselations around under control. Similar to texture caching, Pixie will maintain a set of active surfaces and only those surfaces will consume raytracing memory.
- Motion blur
- Depth of field
- Level of detail (LOD)
- Reyes style rendering (very fast)
- Occlusion culling
- Network parallel rendering
- DSO shaders
- Global illumination
- Pixie supports global illumination thru photon mapping and irradiance caching -- The same machinery described in the latest RenderMan interface.
- Automatically raytraced smooth reflections / shadows
- Caching/baking computation with LOD (bake3d / texture3d)
- Using this functionality, you can save any value you compute in a shader to a file that you can later re-use. This allows you to perform expensive shading computations at a lower resolution and re-use these computations in the beauty passes. This functionality will also enable exporting shading data from Pixie into your own applications.
- Scalable, multi-threaded rendering
- Pixie rendering core has been first completely reorganized/optimized and then multi-threaded. We are very proud of this change. You will see significant speed improvements over the Pixie v1.
- Arbirtaty output values
- Pixie can save arbitrary variables (built in ones such as N, P as well as arbitrary, user defined variables) just like rgb values into images. Using this machinery, you can generate multiple outputs from a single pass and combine them as a post process.
- 64 bit compatibility
- Inline archives
- Conditional execution
- Named resources
The RenderMan (R) Interface Procedures and RIB Protocol are: Copyright 1988, 1989, Pixar. </td></tr> | | Saturday, August 9th, 2008 | 6:53 pm
[videodrone5000]
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| 3:03 am
[nnnslogan]
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| | Friday, August 1st, 2008 | 9:01 pm
[nnnslogan]
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Splines and patches are powerful, elegant, and wonderful!
For those who fear splines and patches, try these few simple steps to play with them and see what they can do. This mini-tutorial should whet your appetite for more. I used Max 9 for this. Your version may vary.
1. Create panel - Shapes button - Circle
Make a circle in the Top viewport.
Make a second circle, either by using the Select and Move tool and Shift-dragging the first circle up, or just make another and move it above the first. Scale the upper circle down so it's a little smaller than the first.
(You should already know how to use the select and move tools, two beginngers essentials. Know how to use axis constraints!)
2. Modify panel
Select one of the circles, then right-click to convert it to an editable spline. In the rollout, go to the Geometry section and click on Attach, then attach the other circle. Click it again to turn off Attach.
3. Hit the 1 on the keyboard to enter into vertex sub-object mode.
Select and move one of the upper circle's vertices and move it inward. Notice the little green tangent handles.
4. Under Geometry, tick the box next to Connect, then click on the Refine button.
Click once on an upper circle vertex, then on the equivalent bottom circle vertex, then right-click. You'll see a line appear. This is the process of refinement that will construct a spline cage for you. If it asks, tell it to connect only and not to ask again.
Note that if you miss your target vertex it will create a new one! If this proves problematic, right-click 3D Snap Toggle and tick the box next to Vertex. This will assure that if you're within range of a vertex and click it will hit the target.
Repeat this process twice more to complete the cage, so you have two circles and four lines between them. You need to click Refine each time. When I have to do a lot of these I like to set a custom key config for it.
5. Modifier list - Surface
If the resulting surface is black, tick the box next to Flip Normals so the sides are facing outward.
I set my steps to 8 initially, but for the sake of example, click on the up/down gadget next to Steps in the Surface properties and drag up and down and look at the object in the perspective view as the polygonal complexity increases and decreases. I ended up with 16 for a nice, smooth shape.
Adjust the angle in the Perspective viewport so you can see it. Right-click on Perspective and choose Edged Faces. You can see the splines of the cage clearly.
6. Modifier list - Edit Patch
Notice that in the Patch properties you can still adjust the polygonal complexity of the Surface by increasing and decreasing the View Steps and Render Steps.
Tick the box next to Show Interior Edges to see what the polygonal form looks like. Untick it again to just see the splines.
7. Key 1 to select Vertex sub-object mode. Try moving the vertices around a little to see how the shape deforms.
Key 5 to see the tangent handles.
Drag the tangent handles in and out, left and right, up and down to deform the shape of the patch surface.
Tick the Show Interior Edges Box again to see the results in more detail.
Untick it again. Right-click Perspective in the viewport and turn off Edged Faces again, then turn it back on. This is how you see the results of what you're doing. Rotate the Perspective view frequently to see different angles on the object.
Adjust the tangent handles and vertices until you have a fairly complex shape.
8. Key 3 to enter into Patch sub-object mode.
In either the Front or Side viewport, select all the side patches, but not the top or bottom.
Under Geometry click Subdivide. Then click an empty area to de-select the patches.
Turn Edged Faces on, and turn off Show Interior Edges. Notice that there are new lines horizontally dividing your patch object.
9. Go into vertex sub-object mode, then select a vertex and right-click.
Choose Reset Tangents and see how it changes the shape.
Notice that the subdivision also created some lines that lack adjoining vertices on the top and bottom. Can't see it? Turn the View Steps to zero.
See the open seams? If not, choose Select Open Edges.
You can't subdivide part of a surface without leaving out important places to put new vertices.
Undo the Subdivision, then use Ctrl-A to select All patches, and Subdivide again.
10. Miscellaneous - Patch Smooth
This will probably make something ugly, but you should see what it does. After that you will probably want to Undo it.
11. Go to Editable Spline at the bottom of the stack. It's still the same original cage there. Click on the Show End Result toggle. Then you can see the familiar orange cage effect like working with NURMS subdivisions in polygonal "box modeling" methods.
Turn it off again.
12. Go back up the stack to Edit Patch.
Key 3 to enter into Patch sub-object mode.
Select one patch, then click Bevel and click and drag just like you would with a polygon bevel.
Select the end patch and rotate it in plane with the object to see how smoothly the extrusion deforms.
13. Key 1 and grab a vertex, then push it in to make a pit in your object.
14. Key 5 to go into Tangent Handle sub-object mode, and select the four handles around the vertex you just pushed in. Then use the Scale tool to uniformly scale their positions. Use the Select and Move tool to reposition them further.
15, Key 1 and select several of your vertices, then right-click and choose Coplanar.
16. Right-click with the same vertices selected and choose Reset Tangents.
The flexibility and power of splines and patches should be obvious now. I hope you got something out of this little introduction. | | Thursday, July 24th, 2008 | 12:15 am
[nnnslogan]
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3D Woman I made a low poly woman (sans head) this week. I'm planning to make both realistic and anime style heads, and I'm going to customize to make various characters.   | | Saturday, July 19th, 2008 | 5:30 pm
[nnnslogan]
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| 5:17 pm
[nnnslogan]
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| 5:12 pm
[nnnslogan]
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| | Tuesday, July 15th, 2008 | 4:16 pm
[nnnslogan]
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ScriptSpot 
ScriptSpot is a diverse online community of artists and developers coming together to share and discover scripts for 3ds max and SketchUp. Our users come from a variety of fields - from Visual F/X to Game Developers, Architects or even hobbyists. Come discover. Share. Blog. Comment. ScriptSpot is powered by you.
http://www.scriptspot.com/
| 3:18 pm
[nnnslogan]
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3D Studio Max Tab Bar For those who miss the tab bar from the old Max user interface, there is a solution! Download it here, then load it in the Customize menu. Try it! It's cool!  | | Saturday, July 12th, 2008 | 10:35 pm
[nnnslogan]
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Maya for Maxers, Max for Mayans
In learning Maya I've noticed that the tools are almost identical between Max and Maya. They're just in different places in the interface, and have different names, but otherwise almost the same. As an experiment I made the Maya toolbox in Max, and I made the Max menu bar in Maya. It wasn't hard to do. Both are very customizable.
In doing Maya tutorials I feel like they needlessly go over the basics of how a 3DCG app works, which I already know. There need to be tutorial series for people going from one app to another, like "Max for Maya Users" and "Maya for Max Users". It would save time and be a lot less boring.
I also think a lot of the stuff being built in tutorials in general is ugly. Almost nobody makes something really cool in tutorials. I admit that's entirely subjective, but a lot of this stuff bores the crap out of me. I guess that's not fair. This stuff is more cool than the things they put in tutorials ten years ago. It's just not my cup of tea. | | Friday, July 11th, 2008 | 6:01 pm
[nnnslogan]
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PolySpeed 
Polyspeed Overview
PolySpeed is designed to vastly improve performance and modelling speed for larger objects. Whether you are modelling characters, industrial objects, landscapes or architectural scenes PolySpeed will give your creations a screaming speed boost.
Performance - TurboSmooth is 100 times FASTER. It's possible to model 3 iterations on 2.000.000 poly objects completely fluidly!
- 40 times faster Editable_Poly objects. Work on 1.000.000 objects (it's much faster than max9)
- 40 times faster Deform Painting, UVW Unwrap, Symmetry, Noise and other modifiers
- Faster Viewports
Modeling - Harden Tools for making sharp details on smooth objects, creases in faces, sharp corners on engines and cars
- Quick Shell that creates thick wires or thickness around selections, good for clothing or armor
- Tools like Cylinder that creates sharp cylinders and Hole that cut sharp holes with thickness
- A large array of selection and modeling tools
- Apperance settings that lets you use wireframe, transparency, colors, checker materials etc and also to isolate everything outside the area you are working on
Workflow - "Clever" tools that work all work in vertex, edge and face mode
- Automatic zooming in/out while modeling (can be turned off)
- Pick feature that lets you jump between objects instantly
- Improved workflow for symmetry, viewports, editable_poly with shortcuts etc
- Customizable Interface with skins, formations and beginner/advanced settings
- Compatible with users who don't have PolySpeed
http://www.polyspeed3d.com/?site=overview | 9:34 am
[nnnslogan]
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Cuneyt Ozdas (the name is Turkish) plugins http://www.cuneytozdas.com/software/3dsmax/Awesome 3D Studio Max plugins. | | [?] [max1] [max2] [max3] [max4] [max5] [max6] [max7] [max8] [max9] [max2008] [max2009] |  | | Brazil r/s is a modern rendering system that Steve Blackmon and Scott Kirvan started developing while working as the R&D team of Blur studios. These two genius guys are also the coders of MAX's built-in raytrace engine (code name RayFx) which ships with Max since 1998. I've joined them in October 2001 (mid-beta stage) and still working on Brazil r/s core coding with these two great guys with the support of a great team. Visit Splutterfish homepage for more details (Image by Andre Richard) |
| | [?] [max1] [max2] [max3] [max4] [max5] [max6] [max7] [max8] [max9] [max2008] [max2009] |  | | QuickDirt is a very fast weathering/aging tool that I've developed in 1999. It supports MAX 2.x, 3.x, 4.x, 5.x, 6.x, 7.x and corresponding Viz versions. It works on any mesh geometry and interactively computes placement of dirty/clean materials depending on the shape of the object. It's possible to place 3 different dirt layers on top of each other with completely different settings. QuickDirt comes with numerous tools which lets you change the complex material trees with just one click, export the calculated dirt mask to a bitmap or even to a data file to be read by game engines. QuickDirt has many parameters to tweak the look and placement of aging effect. (Image by Kursad Karatas) |
| | [?] [max1] [max2] [max3] [max4] [max5] [max6] [max7] [max8] [max9-32] [max9-64] [max2008-32] [max2008-64] [max2009-32] [max2009-64] |  | | ColorCorrect is a 3DS Max texture plug-in which alters the colors of any (bitmap or procedural) texture so that you can fine tune the colors or create a variation of it. It eliminates going back and forth between Photoshop and max and also lets artists to use the same map in different parts of the scene to reduces memory consumption. To give you full control all the parameters are mappable. I was inspired by CC tool of discreet's Flint software (at that time 3ds max was not a Discreet product). (Image by Dan Burke from Warcraft III trailer) |
HDRI Input/Output | | [?] [max1] [max2] [max3] [max4] [max5] [max6*] [max7*] [max8*] [max9*] [max9*] [max2008*] [max2009*] |  | | I've developed this HDRI bitmap I/O plug-in in 2001for Splutterfish who distributes it free of charge. It's main purpose was to unleash high dynamic image power of Brazil r/s but we preferred to keep it independent from Brazil and make it public. Because at that time 3ds max didn't have native support for hdr image file format which becomes very popular day by day. Splutterfish offers it to any max user free of charge as a gift. With 3ds max 6 and above this plugin comes as a standard plugin. So you don't need to download it for 3ds max6 and above, it's already there. |
| 9:23 am
[nnnslogan]
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Other artists to talk to... I don't know if any of the rest of you are on instant messenger (AIM, Yahoo, MSN, Google, Myspace) much, but I'm on all the time, and I'm always modeling or texturing or studying 3DCG, and I'd like to be able to talk to other people who do the same things I do so we can share information, tips, etc. or just to chat on the side to relieve boredom. If anyone is interested, either respond here or you can send me a private message with your IM name. Maybe if everyone who responds (if any) has the same messenger client we can start a channel or "chat room" for 3D artists. Let me know. Right now I'm trying to get the UVW mapping worked out on a model I've been working on. Here's a snapshot of my progress with the modeling from low poly to high using Mudbox on what was essentially a stick figure I made in Max:  With a little luck he'll end up being Mr. Fantastic, Reed Richards from the Fantastic Four comic books (not the movie version), intended to go with my model of the Thing:   Yeah, I loved the FF growing up, so it's a fun fan art project for me. If it works, I'll do Sue and Johnny next, and maybe Doctor Doom. :) I'm already thinking I should have started with a lot more detail in the head than the rest of the body. I may detach the head and put it on a lower poly version of the body. The high poly version is starting to bog down my machine, and I just upgraded. It may be time for yet another upgrade, like a nice new Nvidia card. | | Tuesday, July 8th, 2008 | 10:45 pm
[nnnslogan]
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Free 3D Studio Max Plugins If you're looking for free 3D Studio Max plugins (like many of us have in the past) you've probably been to this web site. Maybe you forgot about it. Maybe you're new to Max and didn't know it existed. Check it out.
http://www.maxplugins.de/
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