Wolf

Saw this video about consumerism on youtube this morning, blew me away. not sure how he makes them, made me think about how we are so wasteful.

i have just been contracted by a 3d firm that has a lot of staff coming and going. Training new staff is time consuming and not always is there someone there to teach the ins and outs of delivering a job. especially if it is a complex project requiring animation and lifestyle dvd deliverables. key staff come and go and take their knowledge with them, so the company suffers from varying quality and the time it takes to deliver the project based on the experience of the current staff. They see great potential in having an intranet that goes through all the processes required to start and finish any project, as any member of the staff that needs to work on something they are untrained in can jump on the intranet, read what they dont know and work on that part of the project without screwing it up or taking too long to do it by experimenting. they have commissioned me to write more than 30 intranet tutorials, although costly at first, they see the return in time saved later down the track. when i first came to the company and sat with a few people to see how they worked and what problems they encountered, i noticed that everyone had strength and weaknesses in different areas, and if anyone was away or left the company it would leave a huge hole in that part of the pipeline. as the rest of the staff struggled to work on what they had limited knowledge about. another thing i noticed is that everyone tackled their projects differently, some had issues rendering some had long lighting calculations some had scenes that were unworkable due to too many polys in the viewport and others spend a long time working on textures that in the end took too long to render. The intranet will put everone on the same page and make sure that projects get delivered with the quality the company has had in the past and delivered ontime as there are no knowledge gaps in the staff. i have spend a month with these guys and i can safely say that the time they take to deliver a project has been halved.

In the little time that i have had the website up, i have had enough sales to let me quit my dayjob and work on V2 fulltime. A big thankyou to every one who has bought Halcyon, and i am looking forward to seeing the projects you are creating with it. I promised myself that when i had enough to cover me for a few months of work, i would reduce the price of Halcyon. Therefore i am now offering Halcyon for only $150 I will start a users gallery soon, so if you would like me to put your projects up please send me an email with some images. thankyou again for your support

I have now got a demo up if you would like to give it a try you can download it here. http://www.lightcraftresearch.com

a few test that i have done lately, getting some very high res textures into the engine, here is a 8192x8192 landscape. Also a house im working on, the lightmaps were rendered quite low for testing purposes, texturing is next up. Oluv... as you can see i am getting artifacts when i do a low res bake (-5 -3 imap) only way to get that looking clean is to crank it right up and let it render for a few hours. maybe it will be the same for the engine you use? My main target group for this engine will be Architects and visualizers, who will want to see what the lighting is doing in their project and study it in realtime. I do not expect to make photorealistic scenes that rival prerendered with it, but as a nice flyaround tool that a client can easily take control of and get a feel for their building. The control is super smooth with easing in movement and camera look, its quite cinematic compared to the sharp control of fps games. Clausbang... Im not sure of the current crop of real time tools out there, the screens i have seen look quite game like. im not sure if it is easy to implement texture baking easily, for this engine all you have to do is make sure the object your baking has the word LightMap in its name. thats it. once you have imported it into the engine, it converts everything. to texture maps and lightmaps. It can handle textures up to 8192 pixels for landscapes and aerial photography, has an option for flat reflections such as pool water. Level of detail because you are loading the scene into your video cards RAM, providing it fits you will get 75fps easily, if it doesnt it has to swap textures from memory reducing your frame rate down to about 30 with LOD in theory so long as you only have high res textures close up, there is only the limit of your main memory for scenes. 32 bit alpha channels for plants etc. Instance rendering, Proxy support, animated textures and lightmaps. and stereo polarised projection. more detailed news of some of these things soon, as i have a dayjob unfortunately. so only have the wee hours of the night to work. cheers for the interest

heres a scene im working on. Texture crawl is notorious in rt engines, especially with high res maps, theres a 2k map on this model so i tried using lower level of detail maps for further away objects, it worked quite well, and would be the optimal way to do this, but in the end i found that using the graphics cards anisotropic filtering looks pretty good at a slight cost to fps.

Ease of use was my main interest, having played with a few realtime tools and game engines, i didnt want it to be complicated to get the model into the engine, or to have to learn an editor. The process is to bake the lightmaps, name your objects based on how you want them to be shown in the engine, and then export to the viewer. I have also included a special naming convention for Level of Detail to make larger scenes.

Being an old Lightscape fan, i missed the realtime viewing of Architectural models, so i have been working on an engine that takes baked Gi models made in max and lets you fly around in realtime. I used Vray which took a few hours to render the lightmaps, getting some nice results, around 60 fps on a geforce 6 with 8x aa and 8x filtering. screenshots below, will post a demo soon. Model is of a synagogue that Louis Kahn never got around to building

really? toms hardware are dodgy? hmmm didnt know they seemed proffessional in their reviews whats a good hardware site you recommend greg? doimus... outfitting our studio with lcd's was a good move i believe. no radiation, no flicker and headaches (which i was always getting with dual crt's) sooo much deskspace and it looks very sexy. clients go nuts over our setup. downside....colours arent accurate...changes depending on where you look from. upside on that is when the client says "make it lighter" we can now tell him to just move his head just kidding...a good crt around can be helpful for colour accurate projects

lcds look like crap in anything but their native resolution of 1280x1024 but dont worry about the odd aspect ratio a circle still looks round in max. make sure your lcd is 16 ms as their are lots around that are 25 and more all wireframes ghost really bad at 25ms when zooming or panning. we have a dual 17 inch at 16 ms and a dual 19 inch at 25 ms i would rather work on the 17 and have a smaller size than the ghosting. tomshardware.com has a recent comparison of 16 ms 19 inch so go and check them out first.

the only way we have been able to control the colour bleed, is to apply a white material to the offending object, render the irradiance map, save it, load it, apply the material back to the objects and then render. i know its jumping through hoops, but its the best way ive found so far. Saturation control has been asked for months now, not sure why it hasnt been updated yet.

this is what you need http://www.acmebrick.com/md/index.htm

2 possible reasons for your problems... 1. Vray is up to version 1.09.03.i i presume your problems are because of a very old version. ( go to the vray customer download area and get the latest build. 2. you may be using the cracked version, but of course your not stupid enough to come here with pirated software, disregard the Warning on your left when you were posting. and have just forgotten to update your paid for software since 1.08 got released a year ago

our render times average 15 mins per frame with some projects double that. the problem isnt the ram, but how many lights your computer has to calculate, so i dont believe a ram upgrade would give you a significant enough boost in speed. Things to try: 1.Give each light attenuation, so it doesnt has to calculate each light past where it ought to cast shadows. 2.If your project isnt too complex, you could try and bake the lighting into texture maps, with max 5's render to texture.