Brian Smith

Adaptive amount controls the % of adaptiveness for settings where adaptiveness is possible. At 0.0, the noise threshold is ignored and all adaptive settings become fully brute force. At 1.0 all adaptive settings become 100% adaptive. The higher the value, the more the algorithms become truncated...the lower the value the longer they are allowed to compute a better solution. You should always set it to 1.0 unless you know that the noise you see somewhere can only be reduced by reducing this value...which tends to be the case with certain areas of vray like HDRIs, and possibly VRayDirt (which I haven't personally noticed). Reduce to something like .9 or .85 in these situations. All other times, leave it at 1.0 to give vray the opportunity to be more efficient than brute force.

might i suggest the free 1-hour vray video i recorded last year while visiting the Chaos Group building in Bulgaria. it's advanced but covers everything you need to know about critical settings like these. you could stop and play it over if it's a little fast for you. http://www.thecgschool.com/free-resources/

don't forget that the final renderings you are comparing may not be 100% a result of vray or mr. there could be, and probably more often than not is, significant post work performed outside either renderer. i personally believe that they are both equal in terms of what can be made. speed, ease of use, and community/vendor support still seems to be in vray's corner imo.

The distribution rights to the book was purchased by Focal Press and can be purchased now only through their channels. Here is a link to the book on Amazon. From what I understand, it starts shipping today for the very first time. The book was updated for Max 2012 btw. http://www.amazon.com/3ds-Max-Design-Architectural-Visualization/dp/0240821076/ref=sr_1_10?ie=UTF8&qid=1319812668&sr=8-10

Hi Brodie, Sorry about not replying earlier. Although we have many contracted employees, 3DATS is mostly a family business and the emails are all handled by family members. The past 7 days have been really tough as my daughter nearly died last week and just returned yesterday from a 5 day stay in a hospital. Emails have basically shut down this week as a result. She's fine now and we're getting back to normal finally. If you would like a copy of the Int/Adv book, we have about 6 extras stored away in our shipping facility. We could sell one if you like. If you are interested, please send a payment of $79.95 to PayPal address books@3dats.com. This is the price we were charging until we sold out a few months ago. We'll waive shipping. Once you make a payment, please email larry.smith@3dats.com and let him know that you've made a payment. It's not the normal way we do things, but since we don't sell that book anymore, it will have to do. Thanks.

Hi Richard, There is no such book. Our Intermediate to Advanced book covers just about everything you need to know about modeling buildings and there really isn't anything that I can think of that our books don't cover regarding the production process. As for the non-modern nature of One Project, we could have used the exact same tools and features to produce a building of any kind. We just used this project because it allows us to demonstrate more artistic styles and difficult procedures that clients have come to expect in the boring visualization project.

those images shouldn't take more than 5-10 mins on a decent machine at around 1500 pixels. if you are getting 2 hours, you should do a lot of optimizing

You have some settings that I think are unnecessarily high. The one i would change the most is the Adapt amount. A value of 0.6 is really low and makes adaptive settings less adaptive. If you went to the extreme and took it to 0.0, then every adaptive settings would basically become brute force and your Noise threshold would be rendered meaningless. I suggest using 1.0 and drop down to say 0.85 only when noise develops that you can't remove otherwise. HDRIs are an example of when you would want/need to drop this down...but definitely not to what you have now. Your Adapt DMC Max value is way high for your needs...although with a Color thresh value of 0.005, anything over 6 or 7 is probably ignored. You'd have to drop it to 0.003 or 0.002 to actually make it use that Max value. Regardless, try 2 of Min and 5 for Max with 0.005 for Clr thresh. Increase to 3/6 and 0.003 if and only if there is a noticeable benefit. As for the irradiance map, i'd keep it simple and use a high preset, and use 20-30 for HSph subdivs and 50-100 for Interp samples. Since reflected surfaces are handled by the primary bounce engine, the light cache means nothing. I'm also wondering if you have put a little blurriness on the mirror and if your subdivs value for the material is excessively high. If so, use a value around 20-30. Regardless, there's no reason you should be getting a 10x increase in render times regardless of how high your sampling is on the mirror. hope that helps.

as they say, ignorance is bliss.

On May 20th, I carried several copies of 3ds Max 2011 - One Project from Start to Finish to the top of Quandary Peak in Colorado (14,025 feet) to help raise funds for disabled veterans. These books were signed by the 5 wounded vets that I climbed with as well as Erik Weinhenmayer (only blind person to ever climb Mount Everest) and Jordan Romero (youngest person to ever climb Mount Everest), and myself. I have two extra copies of this book. If you would like one of these special editions, simply make a $75 donation to No Barriers USA and post a copy of your receipt here. The 1st two to make a donation will receive one of these special books and loads of good feelings. Donations are 100% tax deductable. Also, check out an interesting article about the climb here.

well it was and wasn't. we (3dats) sat down with them and laid out exactly what we wanted covered, they wrote the book in Russian, our own in-house Russian artist translated it into English, we did extensive editing ourselves and filled in a lot of holes. and we chose vray because it has far more users, period.

i didn't see this til today. i've been in the military for 21 years and have thousands of pics. what exactly are you looking for. if i don't have it, i'm sure i can get it.

I don't use mental ray, so thanks for the info...good to know.

hi Sharyn, Sorry for the late reply but i didn't personally see this until now. If you post a question on this forum, please send us a link afterwards so we know. If you did already, my apologies, as i didn't see it. You can do the same thing in mental ray using the Displace modifier and placing the map in the Map channel of the modifier, but you have to subdivide the object immensely beforehand. With VRay, you can displace a single polygon into billions of polygons but in mental ray you have to have all of the polygons in place before hand. This makes creating grass like this impractical in most cases because it places too much of a burden on your machine. With VRay, the displacement is handled dynamically, meaning rendered one bucket at a time, and therefore, won't crash your computer. This is another reason why we had to use vray. I hope that helps.