J.R.

I agree, something looks wrong in your rendering. Check and verify that you use explicitly Vray materials for all your objects. Using standard rhino matrial gets wrong especially with indirect lighting. Do you use Matrial by layer? To be sure I would use the option Matrial by plugin, alternatively assign selected Vraymaterial from matrialeditor directly to selected objects. If You use physical workflow, covono is right everything must be physically correct. An expected value for shutterspeed would be 4 or 8 (1/4 sec, 1/8 sec). Lights: Sun is completely horizontal: check properties->modify->sun position turn to some angle or turn off manual to set by location. If you use lightportals, it is like an arealight in front of the window which gets its illumination from the environment. make sure in your physical workflow you use the skylight texture in the environment GI and Background slot. select your sun as sunlight source otherwise the default rhino light might be used what you dont want. Turn down shadow subdivs to 8 or 4 for your previews. 60 is even for final render pretty much. what are the omni lights for? turn them off if you dont need them.

Your client needs IGES for Rapidprototyping or something similar? The Problem is that you have a Meshgeometry which is not supported by IGES. If You need IGES You will have to convert the Mesh to Nurbs. Depending on the Meshsize ist can be a very timeconsuming Process because Your Meshfaces turn into Nurbspatches. They will need more RAM too. Check with Your Client if he can read STL too (Its often used for 3D-Printing and works with Mesh) Convert Mesh to Nurbs The Max-way: -Rightclick Convert to Editable Patch -Rightclick Convert to NURBS Export as IGES The Rhino-way: -Import OBJ or 3DS Mesh -Type _MeshToNURB (only works for Meshes with less then 20,000 Faces) -Clean up with _Join _MergeAllFaces (evtl. Timeconsuming) _ShrinkTrimmedSrfToEdge Save as IGES Cheers J.R.

Try exporting Geometry as OBJ-Format. You can even keep simple Materialsettings and Layers. In most cases it gets even Texturemapping right. If You get Problems with messed up Normals try the simpler 3DS Format. If You have Meshes in Max it makes no sense exporting as IGES. Use IGES for NURBS not for Meshes. For Linework You can try DWG also.

Thanks. Really High Quality materials. I like the open source idea behind it...

if you imported the geometry from another software it might well be that the polygons are exploded. just weld all the vertices with a very small factor, and smooth should work.

Its hard to categorize. It looks like a kind of designed lifstyle magazine. On the link http://www.bob-magazine.com/cms/index.php?idcat=36 they try to explain who they are in english : "Who is Bob? An Interview (engl.)"

I would suggest using a mentalray-material with the glow(lume)-shader in combination with the glareshader in the render-output-slot. finalgather has to be turned on so the objects in the close surrounding will be affected by the gloweffect.

i know exactly how you feel. leaving in the evening the office, setting the FG-solution to high quality and discovering the other morning everything crashed due to memory issues. The problem was that I just had the wrong settings for FG because I didnt understand what it does or how you can use it effectively. there are a lot philosophys out there how to set up FG which are not quite correct I think. There is a free tutorial on evermotion (sponza atrium I think which renders in 20 min) You can bring down the render time to 30 sec maintaining the same quality. maybe you post your settings and an image and we can help you.

Another very professional and expensive program would be Photomodeler Pro 5.2 . http://www.photomodeler.com/ Thats why I didnt suggested it in first place. But I remember that there was a photomodeler light edition once which was discontinued from the original vendor. But I just discoverd that it is still available as freeware on different sites like http://www.soft-ware.net/multimedia/grafik/3d/p00715.asp

just to put it right: XEONs are 64 bit too. at least the ones I have (2 x 3,4 GHZ). I discovered it when I installed Linux on my System... But I dont know, if 3Dsmax and MR can make a use of it...

I dont know any mac-software but a rather easy to use software for autocad is Photoplan. http://kubit.de/english/index.htm It can rectify imported images with different approaches, stitch images together and with autocad you can draw dimensions and measure areas.

If you still cant get rid of these light leeks at the ceiling, try turning finalgather falloff completely off when using GI. 10 inches radius is too small anyway for collecting FG-points IMO. I would rather use a radius big enough to capture the illumination of one room.

I normally use a cylinder which has a light-texturemap on the cap. The cylinder sticks out a little bit. So I can reposition them or hide them if I like. That works best if the recessed lights are even with the ceiling and not rendered as close-ups. lighing either with glow-glare shaders or just photoshop.

I just had a call with the Information that the new edition of the book "Rendering with Mental Ray" is finally out. I am going to pick up my copy this afternoon . I ordered mine over Springer which leeds to http://www.minerva.at/minerva.py?Page=0 Cheers Jan-Ruben

I got an email this morning, that the book will be out NEXT Week!! I hope thats true. As I live in Vienna where it is being produced I might be the first to get it Cheers