Wednesday, March 26, 2008

3ds max rendering tip part II

I normally do not post twice in one day, but I'm on a roll. If you can't tell i'm doing a lot of 3D work lately. In Max 9 there are two new rendering features, SCENE STATES and BATCH RENDER. These are priceless rendering tools. Scene States allow you to store versions of your scene similar to Adobe PhotoShop's Layer Comps tool. In the old days, to render passes for compositing you had to save matte shadow materials in different files and set up a net render in Backburner to batch everything. Now you can save states in one Max scene. The new Batch Render tool allows you to render multiple "views" and tell Max which Scene State, Camera and Render Preset you want to use. Very powerful! But there's one problem, on the batch render interface there is no Pause button or check box to "Skip rendered frames". What you need to do is save a RENDER PRESET with "Skip frames" checked and tell the Batch Render to use it. Now you can stop it and start it with ease.

3ds max rendering tip part I

This will sound like a goofy tip, but it can be helpful to anyone who uses 3ds Max. Once you start rendering in Max and you want to minimize the interface while it renders (if clients come in and you don't want them to see your screen), you can hit the WINDOWS button + D to show the desktop. Everything at this point is minimized. Most times when you want to check your render progress, Max will not come back up when you select it in the windows toolbar. So RIGHT CLICK and select task manager; select 3ds Max from the application list and select SWITCH TO. It restores.

Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Thursday, March 20, 2008

Where Do We Go Now?


While my student were working on their projects last night, I started demonstrating the process of Blocking animation to establish timing and Polishing to enhance the motion. Anyway, I wanted to work on Follow Through. This has some personal humor built in. We talked this morning about making a series based on this animation. We'll see :)

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Fire Hydrant Monster




[ Acrylic on Canvas ]

Yesterday I was inspired to paint. I credit my wife who recently asked if I was going to paint the canvases sitting around my office. So I decided to paint something for a friend of mine. I hope he likes it! DOGS BEWARE!

Tuesday, March 4, 2008

"as far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a ninja"

I recently downloaded an XBOX Live Arcade demo called N+. The game is a 2D platformer that puts you in the shoes of a ninja with some serious hops that searches for gold and keys to glowing door. Originally build as a flash game, N+ has landed major cross platform deals starting with the XBOX Live Arcade version and development for both the Nintendo DS and the PSP. Once I played the demo, I had to buy the full version. Growing up, my friend Mike Murphy had a Commodore 64 (yes, with 5 1/2" floppy discs) and we loved a game called jumpman.

Jumpman was a Donkey Kong knockoff game and it had simple, addicting gameplay. Fast forward a few years and Nintendo kills the C64 and Jumpman can't match the style and appeal of Mario... the rest is history. Fast forward 25 years and we have N+, similar to jumpman, but a ninja. N+ sports an amazing physics engine, mad style and addicting (jumpman-like) gameplay.

You can waste valuable studio time and download the flash version HERE or give the demo a spin on XBOX live.