LAmrUG

Los Angeles mental ray^® User Group

Agenda

7:00-7:45PM Reception & Refreshments
7:45-9:45PM Discreet max6 Presentation
9:45-10:15PM Discussion

Notes

At the Motion Works Studios in Marina del Rey, we met to see a presentation from Discreet about the integration of mental ray^® into 3ds max 6^®. The space was on the side of Motion Works Studios' motion capture stage, so we had lots of room. Brian Gorne with Motion Media, a Discreet reseller, helped set up the meeting place and provided refreshments, so plenty of free beer and munchies to go around. There was a nice projector setup and an secondary, big HD plasma screen for viewing. The atmosphere was casual, making it excellent for learning and meeting people.

Shawn Steiner, Discreet's Southwest Regional Manager for Animation, introduced us to the Discreet folks who came in especially for this meeting. We met Dan Prochazka, Product Manager of 3ds max, Claude Robillard, Engineering Manager for 3ds max rendering, and Vincent Brisebois, CG Specialist (AE). The presentation was divided into two parts, a powerpoint presentation and a demonstration.

In the first part, Claude showed us the goals and the implementation of the integration of mental ray into max6. For example, by using the mental ray API, they were able to speed up rendering with mental ray and provide tighter integration. Fulfilling another goal, shaders can be written without needing to know the max plugin API. An automatic mechanism for parsing the mi files to create the UI is accomplished by adding a gui option to the shader definitions. And a mechanism was constructed to ensure that the shader was offered under the correct shader type, ie material, photon, shadow, etc. For more details and to see his actual presentation from the web, go here.

In the second part of the meeting, Vincent showed us what it looked like and how it worked in the application itself. Particularly impressive were the UI implementations of features unavailable from other OEMs, such as IES lights, and the use of some novel UI approaches to make it easy to use commonly misunderstood, or underutilized, features correctly. It was fairly interactive with the users. For example, Jason Crosby, from Digital Dimension, showed us a nice production mechanism for tuning max displace when using fine approximation (cached on-the-fly tesselation). [While using the verbose listing, you can set max displace purposely too small; the warnings are signaled in red. So you can just keep increasing the max displace value until the red warnings just go away. (I think Jason C. should write up a tip for our resources section:). Anyway, Vincent had lots to show, and we ran over, which was a good thing.