Mechadus

The easiest way to brighten that up in a hurry would be thru the color mapping rollout. Just adjust the bright/dark multipliers till it looks the way you want. -Nick

Indeed - its not a hardware problem... When DR generates incorrect buckets from a specific machine, its usually because that machine cant load the maps that the primary machine. Make sure both machines can access the folder your image maps and meshes are stored in. -Nick

That is a good tutorial.. I wish unwrapping furniture was always that easy! Thanks for sharing! -Nick

You could always do it the hard way also... Just keyframe one, copy the heck out of it, and offset the keyframes. Some sort of nifty procedural animation technique would be amazing tho. Ill leave that for smarter people than myself! tho! -Nick

NodeJoe is AMAZING! The lack of node-based shading is one of the weakest points of Max IMHO. I bought NodeJoe about 6 months ago, and I could never go back to the standard Max shaders now. Its really amazing for its ability to let you instance image maps, saving your scene a ton of render memory. I say get the Beta, play around with it, and if you like it, totally buy it. Im sure someday Autodesk will buy them out and assimilate the technology (as they seem to enjoy doing these days) if enough users go for it lol -Nick

That works too! My keyboard shortcuts are a bastardized combination of Max, Maya and Lightwave keys... MMmmmm.. Confusion... -Nick

2gb of ram really isnt a lot for that size rendering also... I would not recommend checking 'include maps' when you submit the jobs.. Might eat up too much of your memory. -Nick

There is a really nifty tool called the Selection Floater (in tools --> Selection Floater). It displays all the non-frozen objects in your scene, and it really makes intricate selections easy. -Nick

Totally - Its impossible to work in a large scene with a team of artists without using layers.

Like Elvis said- Its taking so long because your computer has to buffer all the information to render the scene. Some ways to make this a lesser task for you computer would be: -Instance EVERYTHING you can - thats a HUGE time saver -User Proxy geometry wherever possible (trees and plants and cars.....) -If you have an Nvidia Quaddro graphics card, get the MAXtreme drivers!!! -Instance image maps whenever possible (less maps to load = faster load time) -Use small image maps (1024x1024 px is usually more than you need) -Clean geometry - Autocad geometry is very messy... Vray generally doesnt like it much. These things, along with you computers specs, and many other factors will control how fast your scene loads and renders. Sadly, there will also be a bit of a hang on render times, but by making clean scenes, you can really minimize the wait time -Nick

There is a really simple, though tedious solution that many production houses use: Render your particles in scan line, and your background animation in Vray. There are TONS of effects that Vray isnt very good at rendering (because they were all designed to work with Max's pathetic scan-line renderer. I render most of my animations in Vray, but when there is an effect I need (lens flare, animated clouds, PARTICLES, etc) I use the scan-line renderer, render as a .tga or .rla sequence, and merge it back with my animation in After effects. Its more work, but usually worth it in the end. -Nick

I generally use splines with either the Sweep modifier, or the Loft object type to do my mouldings. I agree that retracing everything is a good idea also. Nearly every single time Ive tried to use non-max geometry either the poly count goes thru the roof, or I wind up with some random error that leaves me wishing I had just rebuilt everything using MAXs tools. -Nick

Ive been having a similar problem with pavers at certain angles. I recently found that using a Normal Bump in addition to a regular bump map makes a big difference (provided your pavers are slightly glossy anyway). Here is a link to a handy photoshop normal map filter: http://developer.nvidia.com/object/photoshop_dds_plugins.html -Nick

Have you guys tried the Maxtreme drivers for your Nvidia graphics cards? Its a custom driver set that is designed specifically to improve MAX's "performance" on Nvidia cards. We use it here in the office, and I generally notice about a 25% - 40% increase in overall viewport performance. The ability to switch viewport texture resolution without restarting is handy too. Here is a link to the downloads.. http://www.nvidia.com/object/maxtreme_archive.html -Nick

Indeed, Affect Shadows, and Visible to GI (in the Vray object properties) should be unchecked to allow glass to let as much light thru as possible. (Unchecking visible to GI will disable Caustics btw) -Nick