2006 Meeting Summaries

February 2006

Installation Distribution Dilemmas? In our February meeting on Tuesday, the 21st at RFX , we talked about how to use mental queue™ to help maintain mental ray installation in a render farm. The program and data distribution technology built into mental queue can be useful for a number of things to make a mental ray pipeline more efficient. In a previous LAmrUG meeting, we focused on the queue management aspect of mental queue, but I wanted to focus this meeting on its capability to make it easier to install programs across a render farm, and keep this installation up-to-date and efficient. This product has been in use on a 64-bit 1000 processor AMD Opteron render farm being used in Berlin for a 3D CG feature movie. It is ready for beta-testing here in LA.

July 2006

SIGGRAPH Preparation We had a great pre-SIGGRAPH meeting, July 25 LAmrUG meeting at Digital Domain in Venice. Publicly shared shaders, glimpses of Andy's book, and a showing of Sprite Entertainment's SIGGRAPH short.

October 2006

Fall Getogether - Tips and VFX Tricks In a Los Angeles mental ray User Group meeting on Wednesday, November 1st at RFX , we caught up with each other and talked about things going on mental ray. First, we shared some tips with regard to standalone 3.5 and the applications. Then we had a 'Show and Tell' with Olcun Tan from Gradient FX, who showed us his fake window shader which can be used for reducing big city modeling tasks.