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Showing posts from August, 2009

Autograss

Autograss is a new plugin for 3ds max and V-Ray that creates photorealistic grass. It looks pretty sweet to me, especially the feature that allows you to manage the RAM usage of your PC. A quote from the Autograss website : " Autograss uses Happy Digital's advanced memory management system. That means Autograss uses only a fixed amount of RAM no matter how much grass is in the scene, whether it's a one-acre lawn or an entire golf course. No crashes, no nonsense. And it's fully multi-threaded, so all your cores are driven to their full potential." Sounds good! LOL@"Happy" Digital :) There are builds for 3ds Max / 3ds Max Design 2008, 2009, and 2010 in 32-bit and 64-bit

Secret menu in After Affects...

Ever had an Adobe After Effects render that just wont render because it keeps crashing? I had one recently, and I found this video tutorial on CreativeCow that solved my problem - tutorial Essentially what you do is hold down the SHIFT key, while going to Edit>Preferences>Click on any preference....and the secret menu appears! There is then a menu that enables you to purge the RAM cache. However, be warned that this will slow the render down. A slow render is bettwer than no render though! Luckily the tutorial's author Aharon has another trick that can speed renders up. (I will be going into hospital for a while, so this will probably be my last post for the next week...take care)

3D car modelling tutorial (nurms)

If you are interested in learning how to model a car in 3D, (and which 3D artist isn't?), follow the link to a good tutorial by wide3d.no It doesn't show you how to make the entire Nissan GT-R (R34), but it does give you a very good description of the techniques used. Once you understand the techniques, you should be able to finish the car on your own.

Structure Synth V1.0

Structure Synth V1.0 has been released. I have to be honest, I'm not exactly sure what this is - from the Structure Synth website: "Structure Synth is a cross-platform application for generating 3D structures by specifying a design grammar. Even simple systems may generate surprising and complex structures." Whatever that is, it sounds pretty rad, so I'm going to download it and play with it this afternoon. Get it for free here: download (versions available for Windows Xp/Vista, Linux and Mac OS 10.5)

Video tutorial on making frosted glass with V-Ray

Here is a simple video tutorial that I made on making frosted glass with V-Ray and Autodesk 3ds Max. Please note that there are many ways to make frosted glass (sometimes called sandblasted glass), with V-Ray, and this is just one of them! Video tutorial on making frosted glass with V-Ray from JG3D on Vimeo .

Exploding glass tutorial with Thinking Particles and 3ds Max

cg.tutsplus.com has an awesome tutorial on how to create an exploding glass in 3D. Click here to go to the tutorial. This is what you will make in the tutorial:

Autodesk 3ds Max Design 2010 Service Pack 1

Autodesk has released Service Pack 1 for 3ds Max Design 2010, which you can download here: SP1 It includes a number of fixes that are meant improve overall speed and stability. For me personally, I think the most important one is the Bitmap Pager fix, because there was an issue with this when using bitmaps larger than 1000px x 1000px in size, which is something I quite often need to do.

FinalRender R3 by Cebas is released

FinalRender R3 is a rendering system for Autodesk 3DS Max, that features Raytracing, Global Illumination, fR-Scatter objects (a kind of proxy system especially useful for things like plants and trees), Render Elements and a whole lot of other cool stuff. Check it on the Cebas website here: Cebas GmbH