jackbird

This entire industry is built on experienced practicitioners paying the help they got along the way forward. I understand your need to pay your bandwidth bill, Jeff, but I choose to interpret the adblockerblocker you recently added to the site as a message that contributions of the content that drive the page views that run up your bandwidth bill are simply not valued. No, I am not disabling my adblocker for your site. I am hitting F12, hiding that obnoxious page-covering element, and changing my cgarchitect usage to just reading threads related to problems I'm having. And I'm probably not going to be able to follow the rest of this discussion, since I had to do that to even post this message, and it's a pain. Whatever you're paying those Admiral people that make your adblockerblocker, it's too costly.

Off-topic - are you the one using Gravity Sketch? If so, how do you like it? The subscription price is a bit steep for a tool without a clear immediate use case, but it looks like a tool that would be great o have in the office for conceptual sketching.

Rebus Farm will run a CRC check on your textures/proxies, and re-use identical assets on subsequent render jobs, so that should save a bunch of bandwidth. If you run a small single frame while still in production but once most of those assets are locked down, then they'll be there ready to go when you render for real. Also, a word of warning - scene states are fantastic, but when Scene States break they break your whole file; and they're fragile (adding/deleting layers can do it). Make scene state-less backups of your file. If you're using V-Ray, an alternate workflow to scene states that can work in your situation is to save out everything in your scene as a few .VRSCENE files, then have each "scene state" as a max file containing only the camera, lights, and .VRSCENE references. Then you still have 20 Max files to render, but they're >5MB each.

I'm guessing it's an exposure control or tonemapping problem. The procedures for both of those changed quite a bit IIRC. If you pop open the exposure control in the VRay framebuffer, do you see anything if you slide the exposure slider back and forth?

I didn't see that in testing. Can you post a scene?

This will randomize the material IDs on whatever shapes you currently have selected. Change the number in the first line of the script to set the number of material IDs. This will work only on Editable Spline objects (not Lines or any other shapes). highestMatID = 3 --change to set nmumber of random Material IDs to use myShapes = for obj in selection where classof obj == SplineShape collect obj for sh in myShapes do ( for sp in 1 to (numsplines sh) do ( for sg in 1 to (numsegments sh sp) do ( setMaterialID sh sp sg (random 1 highestMatID) )--end segment )--end spline )--end shape

Doesn't Viz 208 include mental ray? The UI is a little jankier, and you'll spend more energy fighting with GI settings than you would with a more current raytracing renderer, but you can use that to make perfectly credible work. Jennifer Connor's mental ray book is from around that time iirc, and is a great resource.

My experience with The Grove has been that it's dog slow, but lovely.

Anyone here tried Gravity Sketch? It's billed as a VR 3D modeling tool with features one would actually need for accuracy (as opposed to Medium), like snaps and control handles. Would be interested in the thoughts of anyone who's used it.

This should work for most cases. Select the objects you want to assign random object IDs to and run the script. It will fail if the objects in your groups have children of their own; let me know if this is the case. You can adjust the number at the beginning of the script to set how many random object IDs it uses. numObjectIDs = 10 --change this number to set maximum random object ID objectScope = selection as array myGroups = for obj in objectScope where ((superclassof obj ==helpers) and (isGroupHead obj)) collect obj mySingletons = for obj in objectScope where (((superclassof obj == geometryClass) or (superclassof obj == shape)) and (not isGroupMember obj)) collect obj for obj in mySingletons do obj.gbufferchannel = (random 1 numObjectIDs) for obj in myGroups do ( groupID = random 1 numObjectIDs obj.gbufferChannel = groupID for subObj in obj.children do subObj.gbufferchannel = groupID )

If you match the spline vertex counts, you could do this as a Loft object or with the Crosssection and Surface modifiers. EPoly > Bridge with multiple segments might work too.

I love GrowFX, but it is definitely its own entire program and the UI is fairly opaque. It offers a wonderful combination of fully procedural generation with explicit control where you want it. i've done it to make things as detailed as a shrub climbing all over a gate, with one specific hero branch's path defined by a spline, or a gas pump made of intertwined vines with solar panel leaves, and as quick and procedural as burning off several variations of canned indoor plants as VRay proxies to fill out indoor planters. If you like creating intricate procedural shader networks, keying numbers off other numbers to get interesting results, then it's likely to be your jam. e-on's Plant Factory takes a similar, but way more graphical, approach; but limits what you can make more strictly and costs a lot more.

I would recommend the third-party software Deadline over Backburner for just about anybody these days. It's affordable now for small shops with their usage-based licensing, or $50/rendernode/year if you're running the farm full-tilt-boogie. Its best feature is the lack of a central Manager machine as a single point of failure. Jobs are queued and checked out through a specially-constructed file share that you can even install on a NAS. Also, unlike Backburner it is both bulletproof and highly flexible. It also has tools for remote administration and wake-on-lan that blow anything Backburner can do out of the water.

Yes, that's the difference between ADV and RT. The non-RT version has broader support for features that don't have CUDA implementations. Hybrid CPU/GPU RT rendering is a fairly recent (3.5? 3.6?) addition to RT.

select all chairs, and type in the maxscript listener: for obj in selection do obj.gender = (random 0 1) and hit numpad enter.