RobNJ73

I know it worked with 1.5sp5 last time I used it... not sure about 2.0, though. Worse comes to worse, you can always render separately (log in VRay, Fume with MR or even scanline) and comp them together.

Are you using a VRay Physical Camera? If so, it might be the vignetting causing the issues.

The vrayextratex pass does allow you to do it in post... it generates the AO as a separate image sequence from your beauty pass, so you can add it and play around with it in post.

This may or may not be the case here, but I have seen a bug pop up from time to time that would make files balloon in size and become unworkable. It had to do with Max's Motion Mixer filling itself with thousands of tracks. No idea how it happened, but this little script killed it: for i = 1 to theMixer.numMaxMixers() do ( theMixer.removeMaxMixer 1 false 1 ) Hope that helps.

It's been a while since I had to do this, but if memory serves, it was multiple UVW maps, each one assigned a different map channel combined with a multi-subobject material with each material's assigned to a corresponding map channel (that is, material #1's maps were all Channel 1, material #2's maps were all channel 2, etc.. ) Not sure if my memory is faiilng me on this, but I think this is the right direction, even if not the exact solution to what you were asking.

Just a couple of ideas about your questions... (DISCLAIMER: no idea if these are the best ways to do things... just some ways I've found that work either in practice or theory): 1) If you try precalculating your irradiance map/light cache, you might have better luck with the split scan lines. I think the horizontal areas are happening because each machine rendering a strip is doing a separate light calculation, and the differences between them might be the source of the visible strips. 2) The only way I've found for a single frame is to log in remotely to the farm machine doing the rendering. If anyone's got a simpler way, I'd love to learn it. 3) In the "Render Elements" tab of the render setup, if you click on "add", you can select "VRayMtlID" and/or "VRayObjectID" from the list.

http://cg.tutsplus.com/tutorials/chaos-group-vray/compositing-v-ray-render-layers-in-photoshop/ Good, handy reference I stumbled on a while back... hope this is what you were looking for.

Or maybe even build the back of the chair as one solid piece and handle the mesh look of it through opacity maps. Though the effectiveness of that will depend on what kind of role the chair will play in your shot.

Reminds me of a procedural lego material I saw at vray-materials.de... http://www.vray-materials.de/all_materials.php?mat=1745 Not sure if VRay is your engine, though...

Aaaah... gotcha now. Funny, my first impression was that Vista came off the worst of any of the software listed there.

What were the tests comprised of? Render times? Timeline playback in viewport? Direct user manipulation of the viewport? They never specify.

What's so unusual about not being able to open the latest version's files in an older version? Backwards compatibility (opening older files in newer software) is one thing, but forwards compatibility? Granted, it'd be great if Autodesk would allow us to save Design files as Max 9 files, but they seem to be deaf to that plea.

For those times where I need to keep a large modifier stack intact, I like to rename some of the modifiers so I can more easily keep track of which UVW Map modifier does what. Just right click on the modifier in the stack and select "rename". Helps me see at a glance which modifier is doing what when those inevitable last-minute changes come up.

If I had my druthers, I'd even put 'communicating camera angle' before the 3d modeling step. But that's just me... I'll take any shortcut I can get my hands on...

What we sometimes do, and maybe works better in an urban environment, is keep the surrounding environment as a grayscale massing with a grid texture on it that fades into color as we get closer to the subject.