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We will use a Turbosmooth modofier on the plane, but to controll the way of smoothingwe have to chamfer a few edges before.

Now we are able to use the turbosmooth with 2 Iterations.

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Place the Text Object in child position under Extrude Nurbs:

Select the Text object;Look at the image below, and set the settings you want:

I took Arial Black, and 300 m Height

Select the Extrude Nurbs Object;Set the size of the text you want:

I used 100 m

Now go to the Caps section, and set what type of caps you want, I took Fillet Cap on both:

Next important parameter is Fresnel IOR. Withthis parameter we can control relfectionstrenght. If value is close to 1 0 reflections willbe slightly visible while at 100 material willbehave like a perfcet mirror. Examplerenderings ( material roughness is set to 0 )

Material roughness is very important thing to understand. Roughnessset to 0 means that all light will bounce off the object, like from aperfect polished surface. When roughness is set to 100, material willbe so rough that all light will be scattered on its surface, causing allreflections to disappear. Perfectly diffusing Surface like this is called alambertian surface.

For shiny plastics, metals and polished surfaces, roughness parametershould usually vary from 0 - 20, For hard ground, concrete,stonewalls, hard rubber, values should be higher something like 50 - 90would fit well.

You should remember that black color = rougness set to 0 and whitecolor = rougness set to 100, Let's put map in a roughness slot to getthis idea.

Transmittance has two modes: Dielectric transmittance and Ghost glass.Ghost glass renders faster since it has attached simple refraction mode. It issuitable for windows and flat geometry glass objects.We can control transmittance color, absorbtion and dispersion.

Absorbtion defines how far light can go through object. Here is a glassmaterial ( roughness 0, IOR 1.51 ) showing how absorption parameteraffects its brightness. Keep in mind that absorption value is given incentimeters, so making all your object in a proper scale is very important.

If material has dielectric transmittance, an IOR parameter will also controlthe refraction of light. Each material has it's own index of refraction. To makeyour shader more realistic always check if your IOR value is correct.Here is a list of most common materials

http://www.ps.missouri.edu/rickspage/refract/refraction.html

Dispersion effect looks very cool and it is essential when you're makeingsomething like jewelry, but remenber you should expect very long renderingtimes. If you don't really have to achieve this effect in your scene and youdon't own fast processor, rather try to avoid it.

Sub surface scattering has two modes - Isotropic scattering suitable for thickobjects and single-sheet scattering great for curtains, leafs, paper, and otherobjects with small thickness.We can choose sub surface color, Absorption and Density.Absorption parameter works the same as in transmittance properties. Itcontrols how deep light can get through object untill it bounce. Whenabsorption value is very low, light will bounce of very soon and amount of subsurfae color tint will be huge.

Here are sample renderings with different absorption values. ( diffuse color =grey; sub surface color = green )

Here are sample renderings with different density values. Absorptionparameter is set to 5 cm.

2. OBJECT TRANSMITTANCE

3. SUB SURFACE SCATTERING

With single sheet scattering mode, light gets tinted by the transmittance color immediately as it crosses the object. Amount of SSS is controlled by the roughness of thematerial. Here is a rendering of chiense lamp made of paper showing how does single sheet scattering work. A light emitter was placed inside lamp to make this efectvisible.

6. Zoom in on the tip of the finger in the frontview, and draw 4 curves. The left and rightcurves should represent the edges of the fingernail.

7. Use "Proj" (or Curve>FromSurfaces>Projection) and select the 4 curves,and press enter. Then select the finger object andpress enter.

8. Select the finger, and "ghost" it, using theGhost icon in the Layer toolbox.

9. In the right or perspective windows, you cannow see that there are 3 sets of curves. The setof curves you drew is in the center, and there arecurves projected onto the front and back of thefinger. (The front window doesn't show you this,because they are all lined up with eachotheralong the depth (Y) axis.)

10. The only curves you need are the onesprojected onto the back (fingernail) side of thefinger. Select and delete the other two sets.

11. Loft together the 4 curves to make yourfingernail. (Turn off the "closed" check-box.)

12. If you want, you can show points and editthe shape of the fingernail.

13. Move the construction curves into theconstruction curves layer.

Continued >>>

Copyright © 1999-2000 by Jeremy Birn, all rights reserved.

From the Creating Panel, select Geometry and choose Particle Systems. On object type choose PArray. Then drag anywhere on the screen to create a PArray Icon. Size of the icon doesnt matter, aslong as you see it then it would be fine. Or go to Tab Menu, choose Create then browsing down, choose Particles, there you can find also PArray

4. To model the water source.

Go to Creating Panel then Standard Prim tives and on Object Type rollout choose box. On your top viewport, create a box about the width of the main rocks say lenght=8m, width=0.1, depth=0.2m.Pos tioned it on top of the main rock or where the waterfalls be located. Named it as source box. See figure below

5. Linking the source box to the particles.

Select PArray Icon, go to modify, under Basic Parameters go down on Object Base Emitter and press the box Pick Object then select the source box. Now click anywhere on the screen to turn off theselection

'3D Studio Max'

"Fireworks" by Mikhail Gladtchenko

Email: mike_g@3d-warriors.com --- Web: http://www.3d-warriors.com

Last Part!

Step 21

< Copy following parameters.

Step 22

Into Diffuse Color add Particle Age texture changeparameters to a following.

Step 23

Now make an Instance from Diffuse Color to Self -Illumination. >

Step 24

Opacity map should be "Mask" and inside of that under"Mask:" Put a Particle Age map. Here are the setting

that you should have for it.

Step 25

< Now go Up a level in Material editor, go to OpacityMask, and where it says "Map:" Add another Maskthere. In side of that Mask Set "Map:" to Gradient withthe following settings.

Step 26

Now go up a level in that Mask and where is says"Mask:" put another grading up there, here are the

setting for it. >

If you are stuck here is the full material layout, try tomatch it.

Step 27

Done with texture #1, now duplicate the texture #1 andchange in Diffuse Color: Particle Age texture colors to

these.

Step 28

< Go back to Particle View, Add Material Dynamic to Event 02, use 1sttexture that we made here.

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Step 29

And also Add Material Dynamic to Event 04, use 2nd texture that we madehere. >

Step 3.

Let's do a test to see what a FG render looks like set to default. First, open up the Render Globals box either from Window >

Rendering Editors > Render Globals or just click the in the upper right corner of Maya. Scroll down until you are in the MentalRay menu. Change the quality to Production, click Final Gather, and set the Final Gather Rays to 500. (Note: It will change the qualityback to read custom, don't worry.)

Since the background color is black, nothing will show up when rendered. A black environment produces no FG light at all. To fix this,go to "View > Camera Attribute Editor" in the perspective menu.

4. In AfterEffects, you will need to create a new solid. Go to the Layer Menu and choose New Solid. Adialog box will pop up asking you to specify the size and color. Set the size to 640 x 480 pixels and thecolor to black. Click the OK button. The solid will appear over the water layer in the comp window.

5. Click the title bar of the comp window to bring it to the front. Select PASTE from the EDIT menu. Thiswill paste our text object from Illustrator onto the solid as a mask object. In the Time Layout, click thetriangle to the left of the Solid 1 Layer. This will expand to show the attributes of the layer. Open theMask attribute to see the masks for this object (there should be several). Make sure that the Invert boxto the right of the top mask is checked.

6. Next, double-click the Solid 1 Layer to open it in the editing window. You can see and manipulate itemson this layer, including the mask we just pasted. Select the text object (drag around the item). Move it tothe upper left quarter of the layer. Close the window.

7. In the composition window, move the word "water" until it is centered in the window.

8. Move the Time Marker to 3 seconds. Collapse the Mask attribute and open the Transform one for theSolid 1 layer. Find the Position item. Click the stopwatch icon to the left of the item. A keyframe will beinserted at the 3-second mark.

9. Move the Time Marker to 0. Drag the layer in the Comp window so that the text is just off to theupper left of the visible area. This will set another keyframe at 0. Save again.

We will now begin to extend our base plane, moving the4 first vertices to some correct position, then extrudingand adding new vertices. First move (G key) the first fourvertices (they are already selected) to a good position,for example a corner (first image). Next, deselect the 4vertices (A key) and select only two, that we will extrude(second image):

Now the trick is to analyze your plan, and look at where you will need divisions. We will extrude (E key, then onlyedges) our vertices several times, so we create vertical lines where we will need them. Don't forget you can forcethe extrusion to go horizontal or vertical pressing X or Y key while extruding.

You should see now why we didn't extrude the whole length in only one big extrusion; we needed vertical divisionsso we can extrude the balcony above. Of course, it would have been possible to extrude once, and then divide(CTRL+R) the face several times, we would have got exactly the same result. In Blender, as in any good program,there are always several ways to obtain the same result.In case you begin to get confused with keyboard shortcuts, Blender has a quite impressive toolbox, which isaccessed by pressing the SPACE bar, or keeping any mouse button pressed for a coulpe of seconds. All actionsthat we are performing in ths tutorial can be accessed via this toolbox. I recommend you to have a look at all thatlies there. There is also a hotkeys reference chart. Very likely you have noticed our building is perfectly symetrical. This is quite common in architecture, a bad andold habit that comes from antiquity and that architects use a lot, because it is easier and they are lazy ( thoughthey may tell you any kind of other reasons). Well, for us it will be easier.

We will simply add a mirror modifier to our plan, and everything we'll do on the left side will be also done on theright side. We can do it anytime, but let's do it now, so we have the pleasure of seeing our work growing atdouble-speed... Switch your buttons window to Editing (F9 key) and locate the Modifiers tab. Then, add a mirrormodifier:

If you switch back to solid mode (Z Key) now, you'll see that the work we have already done has been mirrored,around the original center of our object, the one it had at creation time, that is, the place where the cursor waswhen we created the plane. By luck, it is exactly where we want it.

Let's continue, and fill the rest of our plan the same way: select 2 (or more) vertices, extrude, stopping at everychange in the geometry...

The first pass Is only a diffuse pass, 2nd is Ambient occlusion, 3rd is a composition of AOand diffuse pass,done in .

A short experiment:

Below is a scene rendered in . It has 3 objects andplane, all of which have been shaded with Ambient Occlusion. There are no lights in thescene. You can see that the strength of AO is highly dependent on the distance of theobject from the plane. Also careful observation shows that the pots are castingocclusion on each other.

3ds max AO test

Studying some of the shader parameters:

Now I would take a simple scene. I have rendered it in 3ds max, but you may use any3d software package that has Mental Ray.

fbe University of New South Wales Sydney Australia UNSWFaculty of the Built Environment search

FBE AutoCAD Page

This tutorial has been prepared for students studying:

ARCH7221 Computer Modelling and Rendering, andARCH5222 Computer Applications 1,

at the School of Architecture, University of New South Wales, Australia.

IntroductionThroughout these tutorials I'll put

commentary and hints in the leftcolumn (as well as most of the

images).

This first tutorial will take you through the basics of creating avery simple drawing using the Solid Modelling tools ofAutoCAD R13 for Windows, it should require 30 minutes to 1hour to complete. Please read carefully through the text ofthis document(!), I am liable to put important bits ofinformation at the end of paragraphs, to see if you are payingattention! Once you've logged on, start AutoCAD (select Start- Programs - CAD Applications - AutoCAD R13).

Move your mouse cursor (slowly) along the toolbar icons(AutoCAD will display a "bubble" with the command name),to get a feel for the commands there. Note that if you drag oneof the floating toolbars to the top of the window, the toolbarbecomes integrated into the top toolbars!

Create a BoxSelect: Tools - Toolbars - Solids, the solids toolbar will be

displayed, move it up towards the top of the "window".

Note that the first icon (the box) has a small arrow in the

Select: View - Tiled Viewports - 2 Viewports; and then type v(to have the "screen" split vertically into two views). Thenmove your mouse cursor into the right-hand viewport andclick, this will make that viewport the "active viewport".

Select: View - 3D Viewports Presets - NE isometric. The rightviewport should change into an isometric view of yourobjects. If you want to, select some of the other preset viewsto view your objects.

When you’re finished looking at the preset views, select: View- 3D Viewpoint - Tripod.

AutoCAD will display a dynamic 3D axis and the doublecircle. Note the cross in the circles - that represents your"position"; the inner circle represents the "equator" of anarbitrary sphere. By moving the cross into the "NE" quadrantinside the inner circle, you are specifying you want to viewthe objects from the north-east, from above the horizon. Movethe cross around and watch the 3D axis change until youunderstand what’s happening, then select a viewpoint andclick the left mouse button.

"Shade" the ViewUse the "3D axis and Tripod" (explained above) to get a viewlooking at your objects from just above the "horizon" (theinner circle). When you’re satisfied with the view, type"shade". This command will produce a shaded view of yourobjects! If the drawing area is white then your objects shouldbe black with white lines defining edges (and facets); if thedrawing area is black, your objects will be white . . .

The "type" of shade produced can to altered by issuing the"shadedge" command and (the valid values are 0, 1, 2 and 3);after resetting the "shadedge", re-issue the "shade" command.

Remember to save your drawing and exit AutoCAD, beforeyou log-out.

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Solid Works 41 Trainings / 6 Partner

toCAD

AutoCAD Tips & TutorialsCarve a solid with a surface

One of the exciting new features of AutoCAD 2007 was to allow you to use theSLICE command to carve a solid with a surface. Previously, SLICE was limited toplanes. Because you can create such interesting surfaces, you can now carve outsolids to make solids that appear molded.

Follow these steps:

Create the solid. Here, I started with a simple BOX.1.

Create the surface. I suggest creating a different layer with a contrastingcolor for the surface. I started with an arc. Then I moved it into place andused the EXTRUDE command. While extruding, I simply dragged it so that itcleared the top of the box.

2.

Feel free to add other surfaces if you need them. I added two more surfaces.3.

Start the SLICE command. It's on the extended section of the 3D Makecontrol panel of the Dashboard so you have to click the double-down arrowsto find its icon. Or just type it in.

4.

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Step 5 - Clck on the smaller plane (the one you made in step 4), andload up the materials tab. Clck "Add New", and change your settings tothe ones ind cated in the image oppos te.

Step 6 - Now go to top view (num pad "7") and add a "UV Sphere". This will be our object reflected in the mirror plane (unless, of course,you have a better object to reflect). Clck "OK" for the resultingobject-creat on menus - we don't need to set those values at themoment. Press "tab" and "g" and move the sphere down to pull tapart from the mirror plane.

Step 7 - Now, if you are sure you've done everything correctly in thesteps above, you can press 'F12' on your keyboard to render yourscene and admire your handiwork.

Note: Please remember that its a hard learning curve with Blender.Don't expect to get perfect results first time, and feel free to messwith all the settings to learn how things work.

Conclusion - And here is our final result! It looks a l ttle starkbecause, apart from the mirror, it has no textures or complex lighting. You might want to attempt curved mirrors, double reflections, etc. Thisis something I will leave in your capable hands.

Check out the other Borust tutorials and Blender org for more info,inspirat on, and help with the program. Good luck!

- T

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--- Site Resources ---Total Tutorials: 210Total Downloads: 406Linkbase Links: 255

Particle systems:

Particle systems are great for Creating a bunch of detailed individual dust particles. The more particles youadd the slower your render and the more memory you'll use. Particles are great for foreground dust details.Basic Particle Systems:

Add an object as your emitter (plane/cube etc..)

Goto Animation Buttons(F7): Select New Effect.

Change Build to Particles.

The Settings The Results

Things to try:

Try making a few small particle systems (low number of particles) that use dupverts with differentobjects on each particle system. (This would be good for say snowflakes.)Try different shaped emitters. (You may notice certain patterns of particle emission to get around thisselect the emitter and in the edit menu(f9) click the hash button after you have selected all verts)Try making a couple of emitters emitting particles in opposing directions.Play with the halo settings in the materials.

More info can be found:

http://www.linuxgraphic.org/section3d/blender/pages/didacticiels/animation_effects/didac3-ang.htmlhttp://www.ingiebee.com/tutorials/Blender%20tutorial%20Particles.htmhttp://www.sweddesign.nu/vickan/nebula/nebula1.htmlhttp://home.concepts.nl/~wizzbit/fire/fpart1.htmlhttp://www.digitalproducer.com/pages/torpedo_tutorial_for_blender.htm

If you have Automatic Redraw enabled, Soft IK will slowly return the knee to the proper position but not fast enough forrecording an animation. So what's the answer? Well I found it right in the Mocca manual on page 12; the Strength settingfor the Rest Rotation. It says in the manual that the Rest Position and Rest Rotation strengths work against the Goal andUp Vector strengths and the chain will try to resolve itself between the two forces. For example:

Select the Left Thigh's Soft IK tag and go to the Rest page in the Attributes Manager and set the rotation strength to 40%.Now, with Automatic Redraw and Soft IK enabled, move the Left Foot Controller back and then hit undo. This time the kneesnaps right back where it belongs.

Another problem I noticed was that the shin bone keeps rotating around it's Z axis when you play an animation over andover until the polygon mesh is twisted beyond recognition. Here again the Rest Rotation Strength (for the shin bone) solvesthe problem.

Also, another problem is that the Knee Goals are in front of the character and a child of the Pelvis bone so that if you lift thefoot and rotate it to the side, the knee wants to point forward and down like this:

If you take a look at your own leg, you'll notice that you can only rotate your foot a few degrees before your knee starts tofollow your foot. Most people can comfortably rotate their feet at least 150 degrees from each other, but not without theirknees following behind their feet.

Still, yet another problem is that when you rotate the Foot Controller forward and backward the toes and heel still gothrough the floor even though the Foot Controller has a Clamp expression on it.

Here are the Opaque Blue material settings. [Let's talk navigation (green boxes) for a second: ]

The button window has three layers: mode, type and panel. This image shows the Material mode (first sphere icon in the header) and Material typin the header) panels. I call these the Mat:Mat panels. The actual panels are the third layer. (The panels are also multi-layer: some buttons act diremini-menus with more options or selections.)

In the Links and Pipelines panel we navigate to the Opaque Blue material using Link to Object. If you have several materials you pick the one you triangle button (green arrow) which brings up a selection menu (including Add New, just in case you wondered where that button was hiding.) Thealso be used to change the name of the material, in this case from “Material” (Blender's default name for a material) to Opaque Blue.

A few words on the Material:

Opaque Blue is straightforward: the only change is to the Color. To set the color, press the Colbutton (this is the default, you may not have to actually press it) and move the RGB (Red/Green/Blue) sliders. If you prefer to work with Hue/Saturapress the HSV button at the bottom of this panel (next to the RGB button.) Or you can click on the rectangle next to the Col button to get a color serectangle is filled with the selected color. Spec and Mir work the same way, if you decide to use them.

Back to setting up a Bump Map:

Bump maps are textures. We add a texture to the Opaque Blue material by pressing the Add New button in the Texture panel.

This is a snapshot of he project.

I placed the pcloud objects from the camera in a triangular distribution because the afterburn renderer is very processorintensive and I wanted to place only the minimum possible particles in the scene. So, I placed them in the range of thecamera.

The camera is moving forward, so I also had to put a lot of pcloud objects along the camera path and beyond. (seeimage).

Here you can see the size of the particles in the viewport.

It's important to create more pclouds below the main ones, made them thick, and generate enough particles inside them,because to achieve a continous cloud, there should be no gaps.In the scene, I placed 36 pcloud objects with 20 to 400 particles inside each one. This can be a little tedious, so activatingthe afterburn "show in viewport" icon can be very useful.

The average size of the pcloud object was 800x250x25.

Here is the rendered image.

I have only one direct light from the left.Is a white light with multiplier 1.0 and very broad beam, so it can cover the whole scene.It's important to set the shadow type to afterburn raytraced to get accurate shadows.Also, the scene have some afterburn volume fog [ also in the environment dialog ] to achive some "depth".

Here is the post processed image.

I tweaked the colors, softened the shadows, etc.

I hope this tutorial was useful. I focused on showing the techniques. I din't want to show how to copy the scene, but how you can make similar ones.

dpf@wonderslime.com

Launch Photoshop and choose File > Scripts > Load Files into Stack, if you are using CS3Extended. Select the component files you rendered in 3ds Max and click OK to stack the imagesas layers in one document. Do not use the create smart object option in the script. If you're usinganother version of Photoshop, open all images and drag each image with the Move tool, one at atime into one document. Hold down the Shift key while moving layers between documents to keepthe layers aligned.

You'll notice that the Shadow layer is completely black. It is a special render element and must becomposited manually. Delete the Shadow layer and open Shadow.tif in its own window. Switch tothe Channels dock and observe that it has an Alpha 1 channel that actually reveals the shadows.This channel must be converted into a layer in order to composite it into the larger project. Selectthe Alpha 1 channel, then the Select All command, and Copy to the clipboard.

Switch back to the Layers dock and create a new layer. Paste the selection from the clipboard.The shadows appear white on a black background. Invert the image by pressing Ctrl+I (Mac:Command+I). Now the shadows are more properly black on a white background. Press V (Movetool), hold down Shift, and drag this layer into your project document. Rename the layer Shadow.

The Z Depth layer has the opposite problem as compared to the Shadow layer. In order to use ZDepth as a depth map for the Lens Blur filter, it must be a channel instead of a layer. Target the ZDepth layer, Select All, and Copy to the clipboard. Switch to the Channels dock, create a Newchannel, and Paste from the clipboard. Switch back to the Layers dock and Delete the Z Depthlayer.

Compositing is really more of an art than a science. Photoshop compositing involves playing withblend modes, layer opacities, layer order, layer masks, adjustment layers and clipping masks—allthe while evaluating the composite with an aesthetic eye. Once you get up to speed withPhotoshop, these skills will be second nature. The following image shows what I ended up with inthe Layers and Channels docks.

Test render

Modifier stack with Garment Maker modifier applied to the Editable Spline object Flag

The resulting Flag object is now a 3D mesh.

This turns the 2D spline into a 3D mesh that you can use as cloth.

The corners of the new mesh get "rounded" because the flag spline was not set up correctly.

Delete the Garment Maker modifier.

The spline object reverts to its original status.

Access the Vertex sub-object level and then select all four vertices of the spline (press Ctrl+A).

On the Geometry rollout, click Break.

3. Name the collision volumes. Note: Maya names objects in a special way. If you look in the outliner or the hypergraph (places where items arecommonly renamed), the mesh would seem to be called "human_wishbone_house."

This is not the case however. Maya names its initial node of the object (the transform node) with the name you give it. It then looks at the shape node (ormesh node) and appends "shape." So the actual name of the mesh becomes "human_wishbone_houseshape." You can see this in the channels box:

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3D Nuts! Tutorials - Creating gold, silver, and copper materials

In this tutorial you will learn how to create gold, silver, and copper material. Key terms includereflection, specular, index of refraction, fresnel, and fall-off. This tutorial is aimed at bothbeginners and professionals. Although this tutorial is based on 3D Studio Max, the same settings(such as the RGB color values) apply to many other 3D products.

In my search for gold material and other metals such as silver and copper, I noticed there are a lotof different opinions on how to create them. There is probably some truth in most of them, butsince many of those opinions conflict, they can't all be right. I'm not saying I'm right either, I'mprobably not actually because there is always room for improvement. I've read several boringpapers and done about 40 test renders (that takes about two eternities on my PC) before I gotacceptable results. Let's just say that the examples below work for me and with or without a littletweaking they might work for you too.

If you don't feel like going thru all the steps in this tutorial, you can download a matlib (.mat) filefor 3D Studio Max thru a link at the bottom of this tutorial.

Note: Click on the thumbnail in each step for a larger screenshot that includes the viewports andthe relevant portion of the user interface.

Step 1

Create a new sphere and place it in the center of the Perspective viewportwith Radius 30 and Segments 40 On the Left viewport, move up the sphereas shown in the screenshot.

Open the Material Editor (select from Rendering menu or press M key) andassign the first material to the sphere and rename the material to Gold 24k.

Step 2

In the Material Editor click the Standard button (next to the name Gold 24K)and select Raytrace from the list. Change the Shading type to Blinn.

Step 3

Set the Diffuse color to RGB 70,40,0.

Step 4

Set the Specular color to RGB 255,240,215. Set the Specular Level to 100(for now)* and Glossiness to 65.

*In a completed scene with lighting and other objects in the environmentyou probably want to set the Specular Level to 0 and have an object thatemits light create the specular reflections in the gold object.

Step 5

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Click on the empty square button next to the Reflection color, select Fallofffrom the list and click OK.

Step 6

Set the second color (click the white box) to RGB 255,200,100.

Set the Falloff Type to Fresnel, and set the Index of Refraction value to 15.

Step 7

Press the Background button to display the colored checkerboard and get abetter idea of how it will look in a scene.

Step 8

Now click the Go to Parent button and scroll down to the SuperSamplingsection of the material.

Enable the Enable Sampler option and choose Max 2 5 Star or if you have afast computer choose Hammersley.

Step 9

Next, let's makes some changes to the environment as the gold won't lookgood in just a black environment. It needs something like another object toreflect.

Select Environment from the Rendering menu and set the Background Colorto white. Close the Environment dialog box.

Step 10

Add a ground Plane on the Top viewport with Length: 1000 and Width:1000.

Click here to continue with page 2.

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First, you need to create a new comp, name it as "ribbon_1". We are going to create the first ribbon in it.Set the composition settings as you like. (PAL/NTSC/ETC, I set it as a PAL video format)

Create a solid layer of which the size is 15*10, and convert it into a 3D layer. It might not to be agood idea to create a white solid or a black solid. A colorful solid would be better for the followingsteps. I made a yellow one, and I will call this solid layer "the yellow solid" in the following text.

Create another solid, (I made a black one, because its color doesn't matter) Set the size the sameas the comp's settings. Draw a curve like this with your pen tool. The shape of the curve will decidethe shape of the ribbons, so it could be better to create a smooth curve than a curve with a lot ofsharp angles.

Here is my curve:

Copy the data of mask shape and paste it to the position property of the yellow solid layer. Now,you can see the solid move along the path. The black solid is no longer useful, hide it or just deleteit.

Select the yellow solid, set the auto-orientation property of it by clicking the menu:Layer/transform/auto-orientation (or just push “Ctrl+ Alt +O”), and select the "orient along thepath" option. Then open the layer rotation settings on the timeline, set “X rotation” to 90.

Open the position key frames, select all of them and adjust the positions of them. Let the motion ofthe solid begin from the center of the comp. I meant that the first key frame's position must be(0,0,0)

Animating the Ribbon

Drag the comp "ribbon_1" into it. Convert it into a 3D layer, and don't forget to turn on the collapsetransformation option, which is in your timeline here:

Add Effects/ Time/Echo to this layer. Set the filter like this:

Now a ribbon has been made.

Tips:

"Echo time" decides what the ribbon will look like. I suggest that it should be set as a small number,or the ribbon will look broken.

2) First we want to position the buttons at the desired heights and make sure their pivot points are movedto touchthe closest poly edge on the shirt.

(Note: to edit the pivot point's position, select the object you want to adjust,press the insert button on your keyboard, move the pivot to a new location and pressinsert again to go back to your model selection. You can use the Snap to Curve tool tomove the pivot exactly on the edge)

3) Now we need to create the curves on the shirt to be used as paths for the buttons.Select the closets edge to the button you want to add to the shirt.

03. To see the paint more clearly, let’s try viewing it on a transparent background. Select thetop Hibernation_clip_ 01.mov layer and double-hit the P key to open the paint. Change thePaint on Transparent setting to On, and you’ll see the layer and its paint disappear. Switch onthe Transparency Grid button in the Layer panel to check that the paint is not visible.

04. Open the Clone 1 brush and the Stroke Options. In the Clone Source menu, choose thebottom Hibernation_ clip_01.mov layer. You should now see your brushstroke on a transparentbackground. Preview the Paint in the Layer panel – the brushstroke stays still, but its contentsmove. We need to get the clone source following the changing position of the light, so we’ll useMotion Tracking.

05. Right-click the bottom Hibernation_ clip_01.mov layer and choose Track Motion from themenu. The Layer panel will open and a tracker point is added to the footage. Move to thebeginning of the clip and use the Selection Tool to position the Feature Region (the innermostrectangle of the track point) around the light you chose as the source; resize it to fit snuglyaround the light. Make sure you don’t drag the Feature Center crosshair in the middle of theFeature Region.

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Animation

Easy Flash CrossFade EffectBy Adrien-Luc Sanders, About.com

Repeat this on your second layer with the image that you want to fade into, only switch the order: leave the last frame at100% opacity, while setting the first frame at 0% opacity.

Index: Easy Flash CrossFade Effect

Part 11.

Part 22.

Part 33.

Part 44.

Part 55.

Part 66.

Part 77.

Part 88.

Part 99.

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Streaming Media

current DVD burner. Installing the drive is a straightforward process: Simplydisconnect and remove your current DVD drive and install the Blu-rayburner inits place. Since they use the same cables, it isjust a matter of re-connectingthe appropriate cables.

The Panasonic drive is also backwards-compatible with allDVD/CD formats. Itcan burn CD-R/RW, DVD+R/RW, andDVD-R/RW, and dual-layer DVD discs inboth formats aswell as DVD-RAM discs. This drive does it all. Unfortunately,burn speeds for Blu-ray Discs are limited to 1X and 2X. A 25GB disc will takeup to an hour and 45 minutes to burn, but we can expect these times toimprove (just like DVD burn speeds) as drives become faster in the future.

Step 1: Encode Your Premiere Pro ProjectFrom this point, I will walk you step by step through the creationof a Blu-rayDisc using Adobe Premiere CS3, Encore CS3, blank media prices should comedown in a few months, discs are expensive enough right now ($18–$25), soyou don’t want to dispose of too many rough drafts.

To begin, you will need to install the drive in your system. Once the drive isinstalled, and you have restarted your PC, make sure that Windows recognizesthe new hardware and installs the correct driver. You can easily check this byselecting Properties. Click the Hardware tab and view thedevices that arelisted. You should see the Blu-ray burner listed by the manufacturer’s productname. On my system, it is listed as Matsushita BD-MLT SW-558.

Now that we have verified that the drive is installed correctly and is working,go ahead and run Adobe Premiere Pro. Openup one of your HD or HDV projectswith a finished timeline that you are ready to burn to Blu-ray. Insert chaptermarkers using the chapter marker button. These markers will automaticallybebrought into Encore when you encode the video.

Once you are ready to export your project to Blu-ray, go ahead and selectExport to Encore. This will bring up a dialog box with several options. Nameyour disc something appropriate. Under Type, select Blu-ray Disc, single-layerMPEG-2 (incidentally, Encore supports both MPEG-2 and H.264/AVC, but we’lluse MPEG-2 for this project).

Next, choose whether you want to Author with Menus or do a Direct Burnwithout Menus (left). Most of us will want to author discs with menus as wedo with DVD. Verify that you have the correct encoding setting selected. Onceyou have that done, click OK to start the encoding. You will be asked what toname the encoded file and where to save it. Encoding times will vary based onthe length of your video and the encoding settings you have chosen.

Step 2:AuthorYourDiscAfter theencodingisfinished,

Then, click Param Curve Out-Of-Range button. A small window will appear. This isParam Curve Out-of-Range Types window. Constant is default value.

For example, choose Cycle and click OK. Curve will be like image below. 3dsmaxdefine curve in out-of-range area (out of your defined keyframe). Play animation.

Try other options, like Loop, Ping Pong, Linear and Relative Repeat. Below isexplanation for each option.

CycleBasically, this option just repeat your keyframe in specific range you'vecreated.

LoopWhen you select this option, you may notice no difference with Cycle.It's true for animation with extreme condition in end and first frame. But,if end and first frame condition in close enough, 3dsmax will try tointerpolate the transition. This is useful when you want to createsmoother loop animation.

Ping PongPing Pong like the name itself is used to create back and forthanimation.

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Once finished the simulation, we can play the sequence in the viewport to see if we like it or not. If youlike it, jump to the next point. Otherwise, we adjust the setting of the cloth. For that, I recommend toread the manual and learn better the parameters that affect the cloth and the objects, etc...

At this point, we can apply a material to our cloth. Otherwise, in the material requires UVW coordinates,its better apply it BEFORE the simulation (or go to a point under the stack and apply there the UVWMapping). In our case, we choose a plain color with no texture coordinates. The material it�s reallysimple, simulating velvet. For that, only put a FallOff map in the Diffusse channel with the colors intensered in one and pinky red in other, as you see here:

At last, we can do the final touch. How we used a medium to low mesh for the simulation, is time torefine the geometry. For that we use the new TurboSmooth modifier of 3DSMAX 7 and apply 2iterations of smooth, obtaining a good density and adding extra detail. And for last, the Shell modifier,that give a thikness extra to the cloth:

Now, we only render the sequence and enjoy the falling cloth...:

Postproduction

Once the sequence is rendered, we can do to final touch. In this concrete case, we can stretch the videoso we can obtain an ultra low motion animation. For this task we use Motion Perfect from Dynapel, aeasy to use program that can done the stretch that we want. Only have to load the video, set a rate of400% slow and wait to generate the video. That�s all. The slow motion effect in this case is perfectand looks pretty:

Here you can see final animation

PART TWO: Picking the cloth

Let�s go now with the opposite case, what is to quit the cloth of the object, showing it. The procedureit�s a little some complicated, but it allow us to make more complex animations with the cloth, forexample, that a character pick a cloth.

So, starting with the previous scene, the better its to colapse the stack to the Simcloth modifier in thalast completed frame, and saving the scene with another name, keeping like that:

Convert the sphere to an editable poly. In the main toolbar change selection mode to window.

animation: SimCloth Flagwritten by: Martin

06-7-2004info@evermotion.org

For many cloth animation is probably the hardest thing to do. I agree it is very difficult to do, but with the right amount of know how you cancreate a realistic looking cloth effect with very little effort using SimCloth. Here I will show you how to create a flag using SimCloth by ChaosStudios. The objective of doing this tutorial was to create a piece of cloth attached to a pole that when act as a flag when ever the pole wasmoved.

Create a plane that will act as you floor for the scene

Create a cylinder that will act as our pole in the scene, convert it to and editable poly, and name this model pole.

Create another plane but this time in the Front Viewport with a length and width segments set to 15 , convert this to and editable polyand name it flag. Select all of the faces on the flag model and select extrude, do not extract too much we still want this to be cloth, soonly exctract a little bit.

Add a SimCloth Modifier to the Flag Model and select the vertex menu from the sub-selection menu

Select the vertecies closest to the pole and click the new button to add this selection to a group , rename this Pole Connect, also turnoff collisions because we do not want the flag colliding with the pole inside of the pole.

Click the attach box and click the pole to connect the verticies to the pole

Go back to the main SimCloth Menu and select the cloth selection under the object type menu

Leave all the settings as their defaults but turn on check for intersections in the global menu, enable bend forces in the integrity menuand change the stiffness for the springs in the bend forces to 50. We are doing this so that the faces do not bend so much when theyare called on to bend.

Animation

Flash Frame-By-Frame Animation:Keyframe and In-Between BasicsBy Adrien-Luc Sanders, About.com

Repeating and Adjusting the Timeline

Now the next step would be to repeat the steps again, this time between frames 7 and 13, on frame 10--though you maywant to tighten your frames. After finishing the first five frames--your primary and secondary keys, and your primaryin-betweens--you'll be able to play your timeline and see--albeit somewhat flickery--how the motion progresses. The greatthing about Flash is that you don't have to do much work to adjust the timeline on your animation (while drawing it byhand might require redrawing many frames, which is why when drawing by hand it's usually best to do stick figures first toget the motion down before starting on detail) ; you can drag keyframes around as you wish to shorten or expand motion.

Mine was looking a bit slow, so I cut a few frames--bringing it down to nine with my keys at 1, 5, and 9, primaryin-betweens at 3 and 7, leaving secondary in-betweens at 2, 4, 6, and 8. Each time you go down a level in in-betweens tofill in more of your timeline and add more detail, you'll have even more drawings--almost like a pyramid hierarchy, inexpanding tiers of detail.

Index: Flash Frame-By-Frame Animation: Keyframe andIn-Between Basics

Animation Basics: Getting Started1.

Starting Point: First Key2.

Creating More Keys3.

In-Betweening4.

In-Betweening II5.

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"Making of The Gates of Hell " by Mario Russo

rendered version of default displacement on the mesh

Ok, Mixing both results is possible to achieve better results at the final render,

Now the texture preparation:

There is no secrect trick on preparation of the textures, you can easyly find some very good wall/concrete textures, buy some ofthe great 3DTotal textures or take some with your own digital camera. What will make the difference is the care when dealingwith details and customization (like the door texture). As far as almost every project overview here inside 3D Total covers nicelytexture creation and preparation through layer blending, I´ll show only few steps I used to mix these one. In many case you´llnote that you should make a couple experiences with blending mode to find the desired result, according he color and darknessof the layers involved.

Dirty Blending

Blending normal mode(around 65%)

Blending by Overlay(around 65%)

Blending By Multiply (around 65%)

"3D Compositing Guide - part2" by Simon Reeves

This is the 2nd part of this guide, more ‘how' than ‘what' from the first part.I've just realised how long ago it was now when I wrote he first part nearly 6 months, time flies these days . Check the firstpart about the different passes you may want to use and why, here .

Compositors

There are a few major compositors, Shake , Combustion , After Effects, Nuke , Fusion and XSI's FxTree.

The most commonly used and standard is probably Shake (although it has now been discontinued by Apple) and as with the 3dside of things, probably even more so, the principles are the same.

Personally my preference is to use the FxTree within XSI. The similarities between FxTree and Shake are a good example of thelack of contrast between compositing apps, including similar nodes layout and workflow. They are what I have most knowledgein, so I will use them as the main apps in this guide.

Instead of using layers like you would in Photoshop (or Combustion/After Effects in fact), Shake and FxTree for instance arenode-based so every effect/filter/operator is a node inside a ‘tree' which can contain one or many in or outputs. Having this tree,you can always go back and adjust set ings in any node as it will not have been applied permanently, frozen or collapsed, andthus non-destructive.

The Tree

Now here is my compositing tree in FxTree, as well a comparison tree in Shake and Fusion, just to show you how much or littlethey differ.The nodes are very similar in the different apps, Shake and FxTree are nearly identical and have a few key features. They bothhave an edit button to bring up the properties of a node and a view button so you can view the tree up until that point.The small lumps around the nodes are where you plug in other nodes. These vary from node to node, for instance ‘Input' nodesdon't require an input, like ‘Output' nodes don't require an output. And some nodes can have multiple inputs for different reasons.On the FxTree, the green ones along the top are the inputs, the blue on the site are for mattes, and the red at the bottom is forthe output.FxTree:

Shake:

VIEW MORETEMPLATES

"Making of The Gates of Hell " by Mario Russo

When settting up UVs for highly detailed things, Sometimes is necessary adopting different strategies. If it´s a flat color, no UV isneeded at all, in this case, I wanted a concrete/stone look (UV requiered), but if I Unwrapped each human figure as I would if it´shighres, I would have much more time spent and probably would not reach the deadline at safe time. A good solution I ´ve foundis collapsing a good couple of human figure on the umbral, and then applying a single UV mapping to them all and then repeatingthe process until every single one is grouped, collapsed and mapped. For the walls a planar mapping will be fine (exept the holesdettached and maped individually.

LIGHTING

I used a single sky light with lightracer with the following customization parameter:

On the side viewport you can see the scene setup

VIEW MORETEMPLATES

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3.7 REGIONS AND 3D FACES AND A BIT OF EXTRUDING

LESSON 3-1 INTRODUCTION TO 3-D LESSON 3-9 ADD NG MATERIALS

LESSON 3-2 ISOMETRIC DRAW NG LESSON 3-10 PR MITIVE SOL DS

LESSON 3-3 WORK NG N 3D MENSIONS LESS ON 3-11 BOOLEAN OPERATIONS

LESSON 3-4 VIEW NG 3-D OBJECTS LESSON 3-12 CHANGING FROM THE WCS TOTHE UCS

LESSON 3-5 BASIC W REFRAMEMODELS LESSON 3-13 MAPP NG MATERIALS

LESSON 3-6 L NE THICKNESS LESSON 3-14 CREAT NG NEW MATERIALS

LESSON 3-7 REGIONS AND 3-D FACES LESSON 3-15 EXTRA PROJECTS AND ATUTORIAL

LESSON 3-7a MORE ABOUT EXTRUD NG& LOFT NG LESSON 3-16 PUTT NG IT ALL TOGETHER -

MODEL A BU LD NG

LESSON 3-8 REVOLVED OBJECTS LESSON 3-17 NTRODUCTION TO RENDER NGAND LIGHT NG

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Topics covered in this Lesson:

Extruding | Lofting

The purpose of this lesson is to look further at the EXTRUDE command. As you saw in Lesson 3-7, itcan be used to create a 3D solid from a closed 2D shape. Two other ways you can extrude (which youmay have seen as options on the command line) are to taper the extrusion and the extrude a shapealong a path. If you need to, you can also combine the two options and extrude along a path whiletapering the shape (shown below).

One example where you can use extruded paths is to represent pipes in a drawing. You may not usethe tapered path option often, but at least it's there.

EXTRUDING ALONG A PATH

Draw a POLYLINE from 0,0 to 120,0 to 120,120 to 240,120 to 240,0 and then press<Enter> to finish the command.

Do a Zoom > Extents to see the polyline and then zoom out a little more. Your line should look likethis:

Next you will put a 24 unit radius on all the corners. The easiest way to do this is using the Polylineoption of the FILLET command.

Command: F <ENTER>FILLETCurrent settings: Mode = TRIM, Radius = 0.0000Select first object or [Polyline/Radius/Trim/mUltiple]: RSpecify fillet radius <0.0000>: 24Select first object or [Polyline/Radius/Trim/mUltiple]: PSelect 2D polyline: <SELECT THE POLYLINE>3 lines were filleted

What you're going to do next is extrude a circle a long the polyline - or to be more accurate, the pathof the polyline. This would be one way of drawing pipes in 3D. For this example, you'll draw a pipelinewith a diameter of 12 units.

Next draw CIRCLE at the bottom right end of polyline. Use a diameter of 12 (radius of 6). Once youhave that, you need to rotate it in 3D. This is covered in the next lesson as well. To do this, you willselect the circle, select the axis you want it rotated around and then choose the angle.

Command: ROTATE3DCurrent positive angle: ANGDIR=counterclockwise ANGBASE=0Select objects: <SELECT THE CIRCLE> 1 foundSelect objects: <ENTER>Specify first point on axis or define axis by[Object/Last/View/Xaxis/Yaxis/Zaxis/2points]: X Specify a pointon the X axis<0,0,0>: <SELECT THE BOTTOM RIGHT END OF THE POLYLINE - Makesure your Osnaps are on for endpoints>Specify rotation angle or [Reference]: 90 <ENTER>

Your circle should have rotated 90 degrees and now you are looking at the side of it so the circleappears to be a line as shown in the image below.

The example above is very simple, but think of how you can create complex shapes using this simplecommand.

USING THE LOFT COMMAND

The goal of this exercise is to create a "twisted Cube" - a 20x20x20 cube that looks like the top wastwisted 45o. We're going to start with a simple one. Draw a square 20x20. Copy it in the same place.Rotated the 2nd square 45o using the midpoints of the square as the base point. Finally, move the 2ndsquare up 20 units. You should have something like this from the SW view:

From left to right, the original square, the copied and rotated square and the moved 2nd square. Copythe 2 rectangles over (out of the way) to use in another exercise.

Next you will create a lofted object from the 2 rectangles using the defaults.

Command: LOFTSelect cross-sections in lofting order: <SELECT BOTTOM SQUARE> 1found

Select cross-sections in lofting order: <SELECT TOP SQUARE> 1found, 2 total

Select cross-sections in lofting order: <ENTER, Then Dialogappears>Enter an option [Guides/Path/Cross-sections only] <Cross-sections only>: <PRESS OK IN THE DIALOG>

After hitting OK, you square will be turned into one lofted 3D Solid.

Now something doesn't look quite right to me. I would expect that corners of the squares would beeven so that the lofted square looks like a 'twisted cube'. Instead, you can see lines going from themiddle of the bottom square to a corner of the top square. Use the HIDE command to see how itlooks. It looks a little strange, but you can make out that it has some odd shapes.

Take the pair of squares that you copied over earlier and draw lines from lower corner to upper corneras shown in the drawing below:

Now start the LOFT command again. This time you'll try something different. Select the squares againas your cross sections, then instead of accepting the default, use the Guides option <G>. Now selectthe four lines which will guide the loft to create a shape that better represents what you want.

Command: loftSelect cross-sections in lofting order: 1 found

Select cross-sections in lofting order: 1 found, 2 total

Select cross-sections in lofting order:Enter an option [Guides/Path/Cross-sections only] <Cross-sections only>: GSelect guide curves:1 found

Select guide curves:1 found, 2 total

Select guide curves:1 found, 3 total

Select guide curves:1 found, 4 total

Select guide curves: <ENTER>

Stomp images by Jens ZalzalaClick here to see .mov movie of above.Click here to see .avi movie of above.

Here are some other sites that can provide a good introduction to the theory and techniques of global illumination:

http://freespace.virgin.net/hugo.elias/radiosity/radiosity.htm - A really good explanation of Radiosity http://www.highend3d.com/maya/tutorials/gi/ - A similar tutorial for Maya http://www.3dluvr.com/marcosss/ - Some Arnold Renders http://www.rendermania.com/HDRI/index.shtml http://graphics.stanford.edu/~henrik/images/global.html - Some good Global Illumination / Radiosity Examples http://www.artifactoryvfx.com/ - The inspiration for Globaltk -- Julian Butler's Maya Global Lighting Rig http://www.3dluvr.com/lightengine3d/downloads/rayDiffuse/rayDiffuse1.html - Raydiffuse Homepage http://www.lightflowtech.com/elf/ - Lightflowtech HomePage http://www.umlaut.fr/XSI/FinalGathering.html - Mental Ray's Final Gathering Technique VS Arnold http://www.debevec.org/HDRShop/ - HDR Shop - Great Resource for info on High Dynamic Range rendering.

Also has a Houdini plug-in to allow you to create global lighting set-up from an HDR image.

Installation and UsageRight-click and save to disc these files:

global.tkglobal.cmd

Simply put the two scripts provided into your common scripts directory.In the global.tk file, change the line:

set PATH /usr/home/etc/global.cmd.... to the path in which you are storing the .cmd file.In your Houdini session, in a textport type:

tk path_to_file/global.tk (where "path_to_file" is the actual path tothe file).

NOTE: If you have added to or modified your HOUDINI_PATH, you can place the scriptsin houdini/scripts/tk directory and the houdini/scripts/macro directoryrespectively, then you would only have to type: tk global.tk You still have tomodify the PATH variable in the global.tk script as described above.

For further ease of use, map the launching of this utility to a hotkey: alias F1 "tkglobal.tk"

Hit the help button for more instructions.All objects created will be prepended with "G_".Set the resolution of the lights. Low resolutions like will result in fastrendering, but poor quality. Go to about 256 to start, and up from there for better quality.Set the "Depth Map" paramater... near, mid or farthest. This will require some experimentation to get right. These settings use a different algorith to calculate shadow maps, and you should change this from default if youare getting artifacts.Click the "Create New Global Dome" button. This will create a new dome to which your lights will be instanced,

Now comes the easy part. Next you will EXTRUDE the circle along the path of the polyline.

Command: EXTEXTRUDECurrent wire frame density: ISOLINES=4Select objects: <SELECT THE CIRCLE> 1 foundSelect objects: <ENTER>Specify height of extrusion or [Path]: PSelect extrusion path or [Taper angle]: <SELECT THE PLINE>

Note: After the Extrude command, the polyline will still be there. If you need to keep your drawingclean, remember to erase the path if you don't need it any more. To see how it looks, view the objectin the SW Isometric view, and use the HIDE command. It should look like this:

This is just one option available with the Extrude command. Try it on other paths and see how it works.You will find that if your circle is too large, it may not be able to be extruded on polylines with tightcorners. Any object that can be extruded can be extruded along a path. A path can be any open objectsuch as lines, arc, polylines, splines, etc.

For more practice, try to created a cord for your lamp (Lesson 3-8) using a Spline as the path. Youcan also extrude 2 circles along a path (make one one circle smaller) and then subtract the smallerdiameter extrusion from the larger to create a hollow pipe.

EXTRUDING WITH A TAPER

Extruding along a taper gives you another option in your 3D toolbox. Here is an example of how it isdone:

Draw a RECTANGLE 100 units by 100 units.

EXTRUDE the Rectangle 50 units high with a taper angle of 45 °. Here are the commands needed.

Command: RECRECTANGSpecify first corner point or [Chamfer/Elevation/Fillet/Thickness/Width]: 0,0Specify other corner point or [Dimensions]: 100,100

Command: EXTEXTRUDECurrent wire frame density: ISOLINES=4Select objects to extrude: <SELECT THE RECTANGLE> l

Compare the 2 objects, the 2nd one should look more like the goal of a twisted cube.

To change how you view things in AutoCAD 2007, use the VISUALSTYLES command. This newcommand allows you to quickly change settings for how you view 3D objects that previously neededthe knowledge of several system variables.

Use the settings highlighted below and press the "Apply to Current Viewport" button. You should nowhave a clear view that illustrated the differences between the first lofted object and the second oneusing guides.

Try creating your own lofted 3D Solids. Anything that can be extruded can be lofted - so any closedshape will work. There are many other options to this command, but in a effort to be brief and coverthe basics, I will not go further into this command. Remember to pick the cross sections in the correctorder, add guides to better define the shape.

In review, you can see how extruding and lofting are two simple commands that give you a lot ofpower in the 3D world. Get familiar with extruding, as it is a great way to build things in 3D. Lofting willallow you to create more 'organic' shaped that any previous version of AutoCAD.

Extra Practice: Draw this object. Start with a 3DPolyline (3DPOLY) and then extrude the circlealong the path of the polyline.

Extra Practice: Copy this drawing that shows the dimensions on the left and an isometric view forreference. Then create a lofted object (using the default setting) to look like this.

RETURN TO THE TOP OF THE LESSON | RETURN TO THE TABLE OF CONTENTS

CONTINUE TO THE NEXT LESSON - 3-8 >

Take the quiz for this lesson

Round the shape around knukle.

We want to transform the singlevertex of the knukle top in a nicelosange. To acheive such result,select the vertex, move it a bitlaterally. Use knife on the longeredge. Then subdivide the centraledge of losange. Move the newcenter down. Remake all quads.

Select as shown, raise the vertexto form knukles and tendons.

Home Membership Services FAQ Contact Us

HDRI Guide Forum

If you want to get the best out of the HDRIs and Background Images available on 3six0.net, the following guide

will show you how.

While the majority of the information in this guide will be applicable to any 3D rendering package, it was

compiled using Autodesk 3ds max and VRay, and some settings may vary depending on the software used.

Page 1 2 3

1. Resizing / Transforming HDRI images

All of our High Dynamic Range images come in Latitude/Longitude format, and are available only in the highest

possible resolution (i.e. the resolution at which they were taken).

While a high resolution HDRI is beneficial for creating realistic reflections in your 3D scene, you may sometimes

want to use a lower-res version of the image in order to light the scene more efficiently. In order to resize a high

dynamic range image, we recommend you use either HDRShop (Version 1.0 or later) or Adobe Photoshop (CS2 or

later), although other software is available.

To resize an image in HDRShop, open the

file, and choose 'Size' and then 'Arbitrary

Resize' from the Image Menu (Figure 01).

Figure 01

The number you should enter will vary depending on the

amount of memory available to you, but values such as

those chosen in the example image (512x256) should

suffice (Figure 02). Ensure that you save the file under a

different filename to the original high-res image, as you

should still use that for reflections in your 3D render.

Figure 02

To resize an HDR or EXR image in

Adobe Photoshop, simply open the

file, choose 'Image Size' from the

'Image' menu, and enter new values

in the Width and Height fields (Figure

03). Again, ensure that you save the

file under a different filename to the

original file you downloaded.

Figure 03

Figure 04

Should you need your HDRI in a

different format than the

Latitude/Longitude Spherical Map

that 3Six0 provides, for example a

Vertical Cross, we would again

suggest using HDRShop. To

transform the image, simply choose

'Panorama' then 'Panoramic

Transformations' from the 'Image'

Menu (Figure 04).

Codebrush

In the menu that appears, change the Source Image format to Latitude/Longitude, and the Destination Image

format to whatever you require. Select an appropriate resolution, and click 'OK' to perform the transformation

(Figure 05).

Figure 05

Page 1 2 3

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HDTV TutorialAuthor: Gabriel Torres

Type: Tutorials Last Updated: April 20, 2005

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Connecting Thru Component Video

If your HDTV panel doesn't have DVI nor VGA inputs, the solution toconnect it to your PC is using its component video inputs. To use this typeof connection your video card must have component video output. Theproblem, however, is that is not so easy to recognize if a video card has ornot this kind of output because it shares the same connector used bySuper Video (S-Video). Almost all video cards nowadays have one S-Videoconnector, but the majority don't have component video output availablein this connector.

One way to detect if your S-Video connector has component video outputor not is looking at it. If it has only four pins, this means it has onlyS-Video output and doesn't have component video output. If it has morethan four pins, this may mean that it has component video output. Checkon Figure 6.

Figure 6: Identifying the S-Video connector used by your video card.

Pay attention that we said "may". This happens because there are somevideo cards – specially those with video capture (VIVO) function – thathave more than four pins on their S-Video connector, but these extra pinsare used by another feature, not by component video.

In summary: if the S-Video connector from your video card has four pins,it doesn't have component video output, if it has more than four pins, itmay have component video output.

To be sure, only reading the board manual and looking on its specs to seeif it has this feature.

To use the component video output from your video card, you will need anadaptor. This adaptor usually comes with video cards that have componentvideo output. So, if you video card came with a component video adaptor,this means it has component video output!

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High Definition BlogDefining High Definition

Hooking Up A PC to A HDTV

The question of hooking up a PC to a HDTV comes up often and the subject has many twists and turnsdepending on the video card in the computer, the type connection, DVI, VGA, component, etc., and thetype HDTV and its associated video connections. This essay is intended to be a starter for those that wishto make the PC to HDTV connection.

Also for you strictly technical guys out there, I do take a little poetic license to try and simplify the subject somewhat.

IntroductionSome HDTVs are PC ready and some are not. Most HDTVs are just that, TVs and are not intended to beconnected to a computer, but most all HDTVs can be connected to a computer with varying success. CRTbased HDTVs are probably the least desirable HDTVs to hook to a computer because of the overscanassociated with these type TVs. The fixed pixel type TVs generally will be the best type HDTVs forconnection to a PC and many of them are equipped with a VGA port for connection of a PC. These unitsgenerally will only require the use of a VGA cable and the setting of the PC video card to match therecommended resolution of the HDTV.

OverscanOverscan has been a part of TV since the beginning. Basically TVs are set to display a smaller area of thepicture than what is received in order to insure there will not be any black borders around the picture. Theoverscan is due to the TV settings not the devices sending the signal to the TV.

The reason the TV manufacturers do this is twofold. First it was determined that people want to have theentire area of the picture filled. We have seen many posts about getting rid of the black or grey bars on the16:9 sets when 4:3 images are displayed on this forum. Fact is most people would rather watch a stretchedor zoomed picture as opposed to the black or grey bars. Second is the precision of the TVs themselves.Early models in particular could not produce a straight line at the edges of the picture. Over the years thetechnology has improved in CRTs to where this is the case with computer monitors are set with a smallblack border around the picture. This is required in order to be able to see the entire computer frame. Forsome reason people will accept this setting for a computer monitor, but will not for watching TV.

Fixed pixel monitors have eliminated this issue, but because the television programming producers stillproduce images targeted for the "sweet spot" many plasmas and flat panels only display the overscanedpicture instead of the entire picture. If they displayed the entire picture received, you would get blacksurrounds or video noise in the surround areas on many programs.

Due to the overscan issue, it caused a problem when you try to use the HDTV as a computer monitor inthat some of the desktop is not displayed on the TV screen. The amout of the desktop that is cut off willvary between 5% and 15% according to what I have read.

Here are two screen captures of my desktop:

enter "tz" in the To field. This renames the file chopsdata from "chan0" to "tz" (see, we're going toreplace the tz from the geometry chop!)

get a MERGE CHOP and feed the DELETE CHOPand the RENAME CHOP as inputs. That's it! We'venow replaced the tz with the file data.

7.

Go back to the sop editor, and append a CHANNEL SOP to that GRIDSOP. in the parameters, select CHOP Net "ch1" and the CHOP "merge1".Set the blue display flag on this sop. You should see Australia. Don'tworry if you don't. Setting the correct rows and columns on the grid sopwill fix that.

8.

I then appended a TRANSFORM SOP to the CHANNEL SOP and set theScale-Z value to 0.3 (set the display flag now on for this sop). You shouldsee the heights lowered. Perhaps you'll want to lower them some more.

9.

SOP Network

How's that?? Maybe it looks a mess, butthe grid's no longer flat - right? Thepicture is corrected in the next step. Thisway of importing data so much easierthan the File Editing & Perl Scriptalternatives (which are described later).Chops make it easy and visual.

With Chops, Columns of numbers are imported asindividual animation channels. Bits of geometry canthen be re-written with these channels. This techniquerequires the point-order of the geometry and datasetto match, which it does, but the grid is too big (at 100by 40). There's 2838 points in aust.chan, but 4000points on the 100x40 grid. So let's make the gridsmaller.

Some final fixes: You can now fiddle with the GRID SOP rows and column values until the australiaimage appears correctly. The ridges should move about. Hint - try:

Rows=34Columns=86

You might like to change the grid type from Polygon to NURBS. This will smooth the mountainpeaks.

10.

I found that sometimes the grid image in sops didn't update properly when I changed the number ofrows & columns. Not sure why. Could be a bug. I found if I clicked back and forth on the blue

11.

3. For parameter B Rotation enter 90, Plane will turn:

4. Customize sizes Plan for flag:

5. Quantity of segments put 21 (since on a flag will be 3 colors,it is necessary that number divided on 3 must be without rest) and 25:

6. Press right mouse button on Plane and select Make Editable:

Enlarge Image

Enlarge Image

Enlarge Image

Example 5: Texture antialiasing

This example deals with texture antialiasing and the effect of the color threshold for theTwo-level and Adaptive subdivision samplers. V-Ray does not support Max's mechanism for supersampling materials and maps. Instead,texture antialiasing is controlled by the image samplers. By default V-Ray antialiases everything in the image, including textures. This is especiallyuseful for textures w th small details or noisy bump maps as seen in Example 3. The Colorthreshold parameter controls the extent to wh ch texture antialiasing is performed. The effectof this parameter is most noticeable with the Adaptive subdivison sampler and low min rates.For the four images below, min/max rate of -3/2 was used:

Color threshold 10.0 Color threshold 5.0

Color threshold 1.0 Color threshold 0.1

Note that the edges of the object in those images is always sharp. This is because the Objectoutline opt on is turned on - see Example 6. If you set the Color threshold to a high value, you are effectively telling V-Ray not to antialiastextures. You can use this fact to speed up the rendering of complex materials. Note however,that this will disable antialiasing of V-Ray shadows, reflections etc as well.

Example 6: G-Buffer based antialiasing

In Example 5, the edges of the object are always sharp, regardless of the value of the Colorthreshold. This is because the Object outline option is turned on. Here are the first and thelast of the images from the previous example, rendered with Object outline off:

Color threshold 10.0, Object outline off Color threshold 0.1, Object outline off

Now the antialiasing of edges depends only on the Color threshold. By default, the Objectoutline option is on, meaning that the outlines of objects are always antialiased. If there aremany small objects in the scene, this may slow the rendering. In that case, t's better to turnthis off and use only the Color threshold to control image qual ty. On the other hand, if there are lots of fine textures in the image, which you don't wantsupersampled, you can simply turn up the Color threshold. In order to still keep object edgessharp, you'll need the Object outline option. The other options (Normals, Z-Value, Material ID) allow you to choose addit onal areas inwhich to force antialiasing. For example, the Normals option allows you to always antialiasinternal object edges, in addit on to the object outline, as shown in the example below(min/max rate -3/2, Color threshold 10.0, Object outline on):

Normals off Normals on

. . .

The Cube option forces the display of the texture in the six directions. This is why the cylinder can showtexture on its curved part, and why the cylinder shows a texture discontinuity.

Tube

. . .

The Tube option can be compared to a paper sheet rolled in the direction of its wideness, with both endsperfectly joining. The results on the plane and cube primitives are interesting to note : the virtual papersheet is rolled around the front plane surface.

Sphere

. . .

The Sphere option works the same way as the previous option, but this time, the paper sheet is rolled bothin the wideness and in the length directions. Again, the results on the plane and cube primitives areinteresting to note.

Internal allowed me to see it again. (i've noticed that YaFray doesn't recognize halo effects for some reason. ihave the same trouble when i try to get it to render star effects too.)

(Note - you can also create a TrackTo Constraint for the camera, so that (almost) whatever you do to thecamera, the icosphere will be centered. Do as follows: Select the camera, then the icosphere. Press Ctrl+Tand choose TrackTo Constraint. Move the camera to test it out.)

You should now have an icosphere with halo effects at each vertex that looks like this:

Making a Smoke Plume

Smoke is easiest to model, and learning it first will give you some insight into the particle system. Begin bymaking a simple particle emission that you can see in the view window as follows:

Simple Particle Emission

RMB on the icosphere to select it1.Press F7 to display Object buttons2.Click the "Physics" Tab and in the second pane labeled "particles" hit "NEW"3.The Particles and Particle Motion tabs are displayed (** It is possible to split the panels so that youcan see both at once. LMB on either the Particle or Particle Motion label and drag to the side. Thepanels will separate. ** This is an optional step and not necessary to complete the tutorial)

4.

Before going further, Press the F12 key to make a quick render of the current state of the object. What youshould see at this point is nothing, or a small white sphere. Your icosphere appears to have vanished, orgotten smaller. This is because you have now declared all its vertices to be nothing more than particleemitters. Also, the particles have no visible attributes at this point, so there is nothing for the renderer to see.(NOTE: Using Version 2.42, following these instructions produces a small halo object at the center of thesphere)

With the icosphere selected, make the following two changes to the particle system:

LMB on the Particles tab1.Click on the Static button.2.Click on the "Particle motion" tab.3.Change the value of Norm from 0.000 to 0.100 (Hint: click ten times on the right arrow symbol in the4.

Now, apply a subsurf modifier. (You DO need this now.) Go into the edit panel (F9) click the “Add Modifier” button, and click subsurf. You canuse a level 1 or 2 for now. You also may want to click the “Optimal Draw” button so it’s easier to see what you’re doing.

Okay, go back into Edit Mode (TAB) so we can start the main work. This is the part that will probably take you the longest. Choose a separatesection (a section of the picture that is completely enclosed) and select all of the vertices in that section. This part must be done one section ata time. Once you have the vertices selected, go into front or side view (NUM 1 or NUM 3) and extrude (E). Move it in the Z direction to thelevel of thickness that you want your carving to be (in my example, I moved it .1 in the Z direction, meaning that my carving won’t be incrediblythick).

Now you have to start making faces. Select any 3 or 4 vertices that are near each other on the top layer, and create a face (F). I recommendthat you use mostly squares, with a few triangles where necessary. Do this to complete an entire section.

Here's how it's set up.

We need a keyframe at the end of the animation for Rotat on set to 1 x 125.

You should see the space jet following the Vegas animated path now. Here are three screenshots that should help you.

Figure 1

He slings himself back in the lumpy burgundy chair his Croatian architect friend “acquired” for himyears ago, and stares at the smoke coming from the cigarette. As it rises in its column of heated air, it’s battedaround on all sides by cooler air surrounding it. The higher the smoke rises, the slower and the more faint andspread out it gets. He takes a sip from his short glass of gin and tonic, comparing the movement of the realsmoke to his particles in the playblast window.

“Would you mind not chopping carrots so loudly,” Koosh asks.

“I’m done with the carrots,” with a final loud chop. “Now what if I accidentally chopped off myfinger and I needed a cigarette to calm me down while we waited for the ambulance to come?”

It was a rhetorical question, but Koosh decided to answer anyway, “I would douse your stump with mygin to disinfect it, grab the finger off the floor before the cats get at it, and duct tape it back on and give youcab fare to the hospital.”

Not even paying the slightest mind to his sarcasm, “what are you doing this for, anyway, can’t they justshoot a live cigarette?”

“I don’t think they want a baby holding a lit cigarette in the spot, so they want CGI smoke comingfrom the one it’s got.”

“Why is there a baby holding a cigarette? Isn’t that illegal?”

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Now for the object we will be texturing

press SPACE>ADD>MESH>MONKEY add a subsurf modifier and set smooth then re-size (S) to 2 and position it so itcovers at least a bit of all the small cubes it should look something like this.....

Scaling Up for HD Wednesday 1 March 2006 at 12:13 PM

Whether you like it or not, high definition is here to stay. Sure we all love thecrisp, clear picture on our new HDTVs, but we're also stuck rendering enormousproject files because of this great leap into the future of entertainment. If you're aparticleIllusion user, HD offers another challenge. How do you get emitters thatwere created to fit the old world to fit into this new one?

Biggie-Size your EmittersMost emitters, and especially those marked as background emitters (see the July,August or October 2004 libraries), were created back in the olden days when640x480 was a standard project resolution. If you create a project at 1920x1080and place one of those emitters as a background, you'll notice a lot of emptyspace on your stage.

We need to scale up an emitter meant for a width of 640 to 1920, which is a littlemore difficult than it may seem, since there's no tool in particleIllusion that willscale up everything on the stage. So first off, we'll need to do a tiny bit of math towork things out. 1920 divided by 640 equals 3. So we need to scale everything up3 times, or 300%, to get them to fit the width of our new stage size.

Select the Zoom graph of your emitter, right-click and choose Scale from themenu. With Scale Values (y) chosen from the two options, type 300 into theScale Factor % box, and hit OK. Now your graph will be tripled in value, so if itwas set to 100%, it'll go up to 300.

Why do this rather than just drag the first emitter point up to 300? Well someemitters have animation on their Zoom graphs, and you would have to move everypoint manually. Scale ensures that all the points on the graph move the rightamount.

If the emitter you were scaling up was a Point emitter, your work is done. If itwas anything else, move on to the next paragraph.

Area, Circle and Ellipse EmittersSo you've grabbed one of those background emitters, dumped it onto the stage,increased the Zoom graph to 300%, and have been rewarded with a giant jumbledmess of particles. What's going on?

Many of the background emitters are Area emitters, and when just scaling theZoom, we haven't taken into account the Height and Width graphs. In an Areaemitter, particles are only born within the area defined by the little grey box yousee on screen. So since we've scaled the Zoom up, we also have to scale the Widthand Height graphs up in the same manner, by right-clicking and choosing Scale,and going up to 300%.

Similarly with Circle and Ellipse emitters, you'll have to scale up the Radius, or

interval (in frames) in which particles are generated.Particles have a lifetime, they last a given number of frames, from the one they are produced inonwards, then disappear. You can change the lifetime of the particles with the Life: NumButton.The Normal: NumButton used before (Particle motion tab) made the particles having a starting speedof constant value (0.1) directed along the vertex normals. To make things more "random" you can setthe Random: NumButton to 0.1 too. This also makes the particles start with random variation to thespeed.Still in the Particle motion tab, use the Force: group of NumButtons to simulate a constant force, likewind or gravity. A Force: Z: value of -0.1 will make the particles fall to the ground, for example.

This should be enough to get you started, but don't be afraid to touch some of the other parameters whileyou're experimenting. We will cover them in detail in the following sections.

Rendering a particle system

Maybe you've tried to render a picture from our example above. If the camera was aligned correctly, youwill have seen a black picture with grayish blobby spots on it. This is the standard Halo-material that Blenderassigns a newly generated particle system. Position the camera so that you get a good view of the particlesystem. If you want to add a simple environment, remember to add some lights. The Halos are renderedwithout light, unless otherwise stated, but other objects need lights to be visible.

Go to the Material Buttons ( F5 ) and add a new material for the emitter if none have been added so far.Click the Button "Halo" from the Links and Pipeline tab (Halo settings).

The Material Buttons change to the Halo Buttons. Choose Line, and adjust Lines: to a value of yourchoosing (you can see the effect directly in the Material-Preview). Decrease HaloSize: to 0.30, and choose acolor for the Halo and for the Lines (Halo settings).

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Home > Articles > Digital Video > 3D >

This chapter is from the book

3ds max 6 Killer TipsJ

< Back Page 2 of 37 Next >

on Bell presents us several dozen tips on how to getthe most out of the native 3ds max scanlinerenderer.

RAY TRACING: SPEEDING UP

THINGS (GLOBALS)If you go to the Rendering > Raytracer Settings > Raytracer tab, you'll see that the default Ray DepthControl (Maximum Depth) is set to 9. This refers to how many times rays are "bounced" through thescene, and how many reflective objects will reflect in each another. ("Department of RedundancyDepartment here....") However, this is usually overkill for most basic scenes; unless you really need a"hall of mirrors" effect, try turning this setting down to 2 or 3; it will render much faster.

Figure 6.3

Note that the Raytracer Global Include/Exclude settings (in the Raytracer menu mentionedearlier) are for use with the 3ds max default scanline renderer only; changing these settingshas no effect if you're using the mental ray renderer, which has its own ray tracing controls,

under the mental ray rendering menu section Rendering Algorithms.

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Making Your 3ds max Projects BeautifulBy Jon BellApr 16, 2004

Sample Chapter is provided courtesy of New Riders

Article Contents < Back Page 2 of 37 Next >

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Modify the settings of the Extrude Nurbs to match these:

Now, duplicate the boxes you created earlier and place them at the top, you should now have something like this:

Add a floor, and a light, and you’ll get something like this:

*Tip: 20,000 particles might be too much for older machines. Youcan put it down to 10,000. However, more particles do look better.

Extra Animation

If you play back the animation now(Alt-A) the particles should be moving very slowly down and away from the emitter.It looks very boring at the moment. Have you ever noticed how real snow doesn’t move in a straight line but tends to float around in ageneral path? This is called secondary motion. (At least, that’s what I call it.) This is what we’re going for and we can do it by setting usome vortexes.

*Note: If you have an older computer Blender may become extremely low and/or freeze. This may be a good time to save.

To make the Vortexes:

Go to Front View(1). Set the 3d cursor to the middle of the large cloud of particles by simply clicking. Add a new empty..

With the empty selected go to the same Physics window we were at before. Select Vortex from the Fields drop-down menu. Copy thesettings below.

.

Duplicate(Shift-D) the Vortex twice. Move the copies over a bit. Check to see they are spaced apart by going into Side View(3)..Duplicate it three more times. Rotate these so they’re at a 90 degree angle to the others..Make sure the particles are going through the vortexes, and not just around them..Now you should have 6 vortexes, three vertical and three horizontal,placed randomly in the middle of the cloud of particles. It should look

On the right is the fully rendered fountain.On the left, from top to bottom, are diffuse, specular, shadow, and reflection elements.

Two more elements not directly related to the objects in the scene, but important when compositing the image to othersources:on the left is the background, on the right is the alpha channel.

On the left is an atmosphere element, in this example, a light fog on the back side of the fountain.On the right is the Z-depth. The fog uses the depth of the image and objects to determine its density. The Z-depth elementcontains these depth values.

Compositing Rendered Elements

In general, you can composite elements using additive composition, which is independent of the compositing order.

The main exceptions are the background element, atmospheres, and shadows.

Background: The background is not trimmed against geometry, the background should be composited underthe other elements.

Atmosphere: The atmosphere element should be composited over all other elements.

Black-and-white shadows: Black-and-white shadows should be composited over the rest of the image(aside from the atmosphere), to dim color in the shadowed areas. This technique does not take colored lightinginto account.

In other words, the layers when you composite using black-and-white shadows appear like this:

Top: Atmosphere

Second from top: Shadow element

Middle: Diffuse + Specular + ... (other elements)

Bottom: Background

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"The Doctor is Out...(to lunch)!" +DG#002 AnimationWhere: Poser

Author: LillianHCreated: 3/29/2004Last Revision: 3/29/2004Skill Level: BeginnerViewed 287 times.

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The Easy Way

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Comments

by cobusp on Apr 10, 2004 5:53:37 am [homepage]

Wow - thank you thank you! I have been waiting for so long for such a complete and decent animation tutorial! Moreof these will always be welcome.

Cobus

by Porthos on Apr 13, 2004 5:05:20 pm [homepage]

Excellent - thanks ever so much! Porthos!

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Figure 30. Wrist IK solver.

Zoom in the hand and position the cursor at the root of the bone, positioned in the palm. Add a new bone,pointing right, with the same length as the palm bone. This will be the IK solver for the arm. (Figure 30).

Figure 31. Rigging the finger.

Position the 3D cursor at the beginning of the middle finger and in front view start building a new chain,consisting of four bones (Figure 31). Three of them will be the actual bones in the finger, and the fourth bonewill be a null bone - this is a small bone, pointing to the palm, that will help turning the whole chain to an IKchain later.

Again, change to side view and reshape the bones so that they fit the finger well. It could be a tricky part andyou may also view the scene using the trackball while reshaping the bones (Figure 32).

IntroductionCreating realistic explosions inside 3d studio max used to be a major hassle. But, thanks to "Afterburn" this hasslehas been put to rest as it is now as easy to create explosions as it is to do almost anything else.In this tutorial I will cover what will be needed to create an image like that shown above, but also as an animationwhich you can use inside a scene in 3dsmax or composited into a film.

This tutorial requires you have afterburn installed and a basic understanding of the max user interface.

This tutorial also contains many pictures, so loading may be slow for those on slow connections but thats ok, itsworth it, if some images do not show then just refresh your browser and they will come up eventually.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Setting Up The ParticlesTo start with, create a SuperSpray particle system with the settings shown to the below and center it on all world axis'(0,0,0).Name this spray particle system "Explosion".

Explanation/Description of these parametersBoth Spread values give the particles a non uniformity direction, so they spread out as they go up.The Viewport display options(Ticks, and 100%) are set so we can have better control in the viewport with afterburnsettings, if you have a computer that could struggle with these calculations, you can set "Percentage of Particles" to alower amount, 50% should be fine as we are not using many particles.The rate of particle emission is changed to 9 as we do not need many particles in this tutorial."Particle Motion Variation" is set to 20 to give the particles a more random and non uniform speed."Emit Start" we change to 20 so there is a slight pause at the beginning of the animation before theparticles/explosion initiates."Emit Stop" is set to 35 as most explosions have a short burst, simulating this we will have the particles emitting foronly 15 frames.We change the "Display Until" to 55 as all of the particles of the explosion will have died away before then and wedont want to use up any more system resources than need be."Life" is set to 25 with a "Variation" of 2 to simulate once again a non uniformity and have some particles dieing offout of sync to the others."Particle Size" is set to 0.0 as we dont want to have unwanted triangles showing up inside the explosion.

Down the bottom left of the picture below, you can see a rough image of what the particles should look like at frame35.

2. On the first frame of the motion set the BVH skeleton reference into the T-Stancebinding pose. Make sure the front of the BVH skeleton is facing the "Z" direction (seethe MotionBuilder Tutorial: BVH - T-Stance in a minute )

3. Characterise the BVH skeleton with a MotionBuilder character template (see theMotionBuilder Tutorial: Custom characterize bone name template )

4. Import the model you want to drive through the BVH mocap data file.

5. Characterise the imported model with a MotionBuilder character template (you canuse the same system as in step 3 if your naming bone conventions are different toMotionBuilder standards.)

6. In the control rig of the imported model choose input BVH Character

7. Play the animation

! NOTE: Always try to match the size and position of the BVH skeleton and yourmodel as much as you can!

HOW TO CONNECT THE CHARACTERISED BVH WITH THE DRIVEN MODEL

STEP 1:

Import the BVH into the scene. Just drag and drop the BVH file into the work view.Cl ck the Import option. (For instruct ons on how to add a path to your BVH file into theAsset Browser see the MotionBuilder Tutorial: BVH - T-Stance in a minute )

STEP 2:

Characterise the BVH skeleton with your prepared template. Put the skeleton in theT-Stance and click and drag the template in the scene. Now cl ck on the small iconof the Character in the Navigator window and drag t over the skeleton. Then h t theCharacterise option and you are done! Perfect!

STEP 3:

Select Biped opt on.

Web StilisticDev.net

HDRI Images

This is a very simpl procedure that can add a much more detailed look to arender.

Ok, first things first, the obvious, open Cinema.

Ok now lets prepare our scene. First create a floor object (Object > Scene >Floor).Now create a sphere (Objects > Primitive > Sphere). With the sphereselected, in the Position Manager, set the Position Y to 100

Now create a Sky (Objects > Scene > Sky).

Ok thats all for the objects, now lets make some Materials.

First we need to download an HDRI image, I use hdrimaps.com, if you searchgoogle, im sure you'll find some different ones.

Ok, now the materials. First the Sky

In the Material Manager select File > New Material. Now Right Click, orCMD-Click in my case, and select Rename. Rename the material to Sky. Nextdouble click on the new material to open a window that contains itsproperties.

In the newly open menu, make sure you're on the Color tab and click thebutton with 3 dots (...) in the Texture Field.

This will open a file dialog. Chose the HDRI image you want to use.

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Modeling a Human hand, STEP6, Finishing steps.

Here, with 'isolate select' i can easily continue adding details to the areas between the fingers.

Make the third wrinkle where the finger meets the palm.

Continue at Level 2, forming knuckles and other basic features on the hand.

A typical detail, drag more points like shown in the picture to add character to the thumb area.

So, after some point moving the first finger starts to look like a finger. remember that you can

keep the mask we will create stay in place)

As you can see the layer now has a icon in the bottom right telling you this is now a smart object.

Now we want to add a mask to this layer.

Select your new mask and grab your Brush tool (low opacity around 30%) and completely mask the mountain area where thesun is now positioned, andabove the mountains give it just a little bit of masking so that when we animate the sun will brighting as it comes up.

1.9. Render:

Notice how the render time has increased, due to all the changes we made on the rendersetup. 1.10. Turn on the Area Shadow of the omni light.

1.11. Render:

Three-Point Lighting for 3D Renderings

Back to Main Index.

Adapted & Shortened from

Digital Lighting & RenderingBy Jeremy Birn

Three lights: the Key Light, Fill Light, and Rim Light (also calledBack Light), are adjusted to achieve the classic Hollywood lightingscheme called three-point lighting.

This GIF Animation shows the role of the 3 lights.

Here's how to set them up in your 3D scenes:

1. Start in Darkness. Make sure there are no default lights, andthere's no global ambience. When you add your first light, thereshould be no other light in the scene.

2. Add your Key Light. The Key Light creates the subject's mainillumination, and defines the most visible lighting and shadows. YourKey Light represents the dominant light source, such as the sun, awindow, or ceiling light - although the Key does not have to bepositioned exactly at this source.

Create a spot light to serve as the Key. From the top view, offset theKey Light 15 to 45 degrees to the side (to the left or right) of thecamera. From a side view, raise the Key Light above the camera, sothat it hits your subject from about 15 to 45 degrees higher than thecamera angle.

The key light is brighter than any other light illuminating the front ofthe subject, is the main shadow-caster in your scene, and casts thedarkest shadows. Specular highlights are triggered by the Key Light.

Create measure tool with pressed X on keyboard so you can create with snap function. One click near to camera lens andother click on camera target so you need to end with something like this :

{modimage}

Now we should make some parenting that make right hierarchy for camera rig. You parent like you select first object hatwant to be child in hierarchy and shift select second object that need to be parent and pres P on keyboard

So you need to parent :

1 Cameras aim on locator hat is on place of that aim. 2. locator that is on lens posi ion parent on camera

Be sure hat you do this steps correctly! To test Rig, if you move camera locator should be following camera and if you movesecond locator aim should follow locator. And you hierarchy in outliner should look something like this:

If everything is correct than we can proceed. Now you should make another distance tool. And position locators for hatdistance tool like :

1.first locator on same place like locator that is on camera lens2.Second locator somewhere in between camera and target.

And after that parent first locator also on camera and second one to locator that is on camera aim.

Should look like this now:

Now rig is complete just need to connect parameters wi h expressions. Basic idea is to take measure from first distance tool and make hat measure driver for focus distance. And difference from those two measures driver for focus stop.

So if you look on the picture above. Focus distance should be 15 and focus stop 7.

So lets make hose expression connections.You make expressions in expression editor. First you need to enable depth of field in camera attributes. Pres RMB on focusdistance and hold until you get pull down menu and choose “create new expression” expression editor should open after that.

7. To make animation more interesting and realistic I added also Wind force (just turbulence)

Particles materials (more interesting part :) ) :

In this case I used "Material Dynamic" all the time, because I used "Particle Age" map.

"Particle Age map It alters he color (or map) of a particle based on the particle's life. The particles in a system begin as one color. At aspecified age, they begin changing (by interpolation) to a second color, and then they change again to a third color before they die out."

(part of 3ds max help)

Remember also that Particle Age work only if you add Delete operator to flow (otherwise particles don't have age).

In all maps you have to set Texture mapping : Planar form Object XYZ, otherwise 3ds max whenever you try to render will pop up you whatyou don’t have mapping coordinates. Also in main material set Self- llumination at 100%

Here is the most tricky part: "Particle Age" map has only 3 slots for color or maps... But you can dodge his using "Gradient Ramp" withGradient Type: Mapped and Source Map: Particle Age (standard) Now we can unlimited amount of color that we can apply.

My materials:

M1.This is material for rocket trails, I created 2 types this material (only difference is color in diffuse channel).

Graphics Software

Seamless Background TileSoftware Used: Corel Photo-Paint 8

I'm using the image from my last tutorial on intertwined text to make a seamless tiled background to use as Windowswallpaper.

1.) First, I open the intertwined text image I had created. I selected all the objects except for the background, then fromthe object menu, I chose combine all objects together.

2.) I knew I didn't want a solid white background for my wallpaper. A nice eggshell color would be easier on the eyes. Ichanged the fill color using the values R251 G244 B231, selected the background, and used the fill tool to change thebackground color.

3.) I see that I am going to have to make my intertwined letters a little smaller inorder to make them fit. I select the object we combined in step 1, then resized itby dragging the corner handle. The image should now look something like the oneto the right.

4.) Next, I make a duplicate of the intertwined letters by right clicking on theobject and choosing duplicate. I select both objects and center them by going toObject -> Arrange -> Align & distribute and checking the box to align to center ofdocument.

5.) Now I select one of the intertwined letters and combine it with the background(Object -> Combine -> Combine Objects with Background).

6.) With the background selected, I goto Effects -> 2D Effects -> Offset. I usethe settings horizontal 50%, vertical50%, and select wrap around.

7.) Now I select the intertwined lettersin the center of the image, and combinewith the background. Before saving, Iresampled the image down to 150 by150 pixels.

I now have a seamless tile to be used asWindows wallpaper!

If you enjoyed this tutorial, why not share it with a friend?

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4. As it works through the sequence, BOUJOU builds tracks from the features it identifies from frame to frame(shown here in yellow).

During this process, the software analyses the track information and begins to discard tracks which are inconsistentwith the overall calibration.

Next Step 5

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UV Mapping in Blender

In the tutorial about using the Blender exporter for Torque we made theassumption that people would know how to make a proper UVMap for their models. The truth is, that thisis often easier said than done. Especially for beginners, or when the model you're working on is not abasuic geometric shape anymore. This tutorials is meant to provide some information on how to apply uvmaps to more complex objects in Blender.

So lets asumme you've just finished a complex model like the one shown on the image right of this text. Tostart lets select the model and press 'f' to activate blenders so called face mode. When you have done thatthe scene looks like the image below.

Now press the 'a' key to select all faces from which the model is formed.When all faces are selected it is time to enter the UV Editor, by clicking on the window type button andselecting UV/Image editor from the popup list that appears. In this editor you'll see how the individualfaces will be projected onto the texture image.

Since we haven't done anything yet, every face will map one on one to the entiretexture. This is not going to result in a pretty mapping. We need to work on it for a bit to make up a goodmapping. Fortunately blender has a tool called LSCM unwrap. The short exmplanation of this tool is that

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Depth in Cinema 4d

So your Cinema 4D renders don't have any depth? Well this tutorial will show you how to make your renders so3D that they'll look like they're jumping off the screen.

So, here we go. Open up your render in Cinema 4D, and follow along.

1. Heres my render. It's just something I whipped up real quick. Looks flat and boring, right? Well lets fix that.

2. See this little triangle in the upper right corner of your screen?

Tutorial

In this tutorial I will try to cover everything you need to know about occlusion pass in 3 simplified parts.

The first part is explains what an occlusion pass is and what its good for.

The second part is all the technical info on how to make an occlusion pass.

the third part explains how to use it.

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Motion Blur in Adobe ® AfterEffects

Use Motion Blur in Adobe AfterEffects to give animated text andimages film’s quality of motion. First,select an object and position it on theComposition Page. In Timeline,find Position under the Transformheading. To the immediate left is asmall icon resembling a stopwatch;click it to fix the object in thatmoment of the timeline. A smalldiamond box will mark the Keyframe

and appear on the timeline. Move the Play Head down the timeline to theposition you want. Now, drag the selected object to wherever you want itto land at the end of its motion. A pink line and trail of dots will follow theobject’s path, and the timeline will mark a second Keyframe. Each dotshows the progress made with each frame. To turn on the Motion Blur,add a check to the blank box below the small m on the timeline. TheMotion Blur will not fully activate until you click the large M—theMaster Control. To save render time, do not activate the MasterControl until your entire project is complete.

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03. Name the emitter "rain1".

04. Set the Emitter type to "Surface".

How

There are two simple ways to get an occlusion pass.

Both ways will usually give a similar result, the AO shader method can often be faster and gives

much more control but the shader is not included by default in the early versions of some packages.

experiment with both so you could decide which works best for you.

Note that these steps are demonstrated with max but they are similar in every major 3d package

that has mental ray.

Skylight method

1. Save your scene as a new file to avoid losing any data.

2. Set your renderer to mental ray.

3. Set the background color to white and the global light to 1.0 (software's default ).

4. Select all the objects and give them a standard material, set it's color to white.

5.In the rendering options, turn final gather on (more samples for higher quality).

6. delete all the lights in your scene and add a sky light, set it's color to white.

7. render.

tip - instead of using a white diffuse color, you can also use the AO shader in the diffuse color slot for more fine tuning.

Ambient occlusion shader method

1. Save your scene as a new file to avoid losing any data.

2. Set your renderer to mental ray.

3. Set the background color to white and the global light to zero (everything is black).

4. select all the objects and give them a standard material, set it's color to white.

5. place an ambient/occlusion map in the self-ilumination slot (more samples for higher quality).

6. delete all the lights in your scene (they are unnecessary for this)

7. render.

quick info on the shader parameters:

samples - depending on the quality you want and the time you have, 128 is usually enough to get and high quality result.

dark / bright - its usually best just to leave it as is.

spread - Higher values soften the shadows between the geometry by expanding them further.

max distance - when set on 0 it works like the skylight, any other value makes it calculate the occlusion "locally". this parameter

determines the distance of the local calculation. this is a must for indoor scenes.