LA 3dsMax Users group

I went to this tonight, and Vince from Autodesk demonstrated alot of the new stuff in Max 9, mostly regarding mental ray.

holy crap.

that's the only words i can find.

it's absolutely amazing! there's a new shader type for MR called "arch & design", and apparently it does everything. seriously - everything. from water to cracked earth to booleaned glass to car paint. one shader does it all.

and he demonstrated how to use GI and FG together to get amazing results and super fast renders, the whole time comparing it to V-ray. 10 minutes with him and you will swear that there is absolutely no need ever for a different renderer.

he demonstrated the new MR sunlight system, all the cool render filters (like automatic edge chamfering and tons more), he showed rendering elements and batch rendering different scenes, scene states, and elements passes.

he showed at least three amazing little tricks that have been in Max since version 1 that not many people know about - everyone in the room did the collective, audible "Wow!", and then he would say "it's been in there since version one, don't you guys read the manuals?".

for example, right click in a render window. you'll get an awesome amount of scene info!

he showed the benefit of using the built-in custom UI environments. he even showed how to make your own splash screen.

and he mentioned the prices of Inferno, Flame, Toxik, and Combustion (someone asked what the differences were). I knew Inferno was pretty expensive, but i had NO IDEA how much it really was!! I'm afraid to post it! Let's say it costs over 1/20 of what Jim Carrey makes per movie...

anyway, it was an amazing night! I want to go to these every month! if there a CG user's group in your area, I suggest you go!

wow hype that sounds like it was really sweet

I was actualy accepted to go to autodesks maya and max chicago release seminar but at the last min. wasnt able to go caue the compitition that i had entered darn now im really pissed i missed it.

there's another one of these meetings tonight! anyone in Los Angeles going? I am! tonight is "tips & tricks"!

Damn you L.Ai'ans! You guys always get the best things!

hehehe... yep, iest!

JayG, you still coming?

aye, will be there.

yep, which day is it again?

Psh it's on brotha I'll find better tips then you!

ok, i got 2 tips for tonight.

the first is Global's super quick and easy handheld camera settings. (hope you don't mind, G!)

the second is the Paint Deformation in the Edit Poly (I'm figuring since Zbrush & Mudbox are so hot, maybe people don't know about Max's built-in simplified version of geometry sculpting).

How do these sound to you guys? Most of these people at this meeting, I think, are architectual people and/or videogame making people.

Ok, here's my report.

I went first with the tips and tricks. I showed them Global's awesome way of doing handheld camera motion (cuz I think every one of us who's read it has adopted it!), and showed them Paint Deformation in the Edit Poly modifier. They loved it all.

Then this other guys went, and he showed everyone Brad Noble's free rig, and explained alot of the demos to it, and what makes it a little different from alot of other rigs out there. There were 2 guys here from a production company called Mechnology who said they are now using this in productions.
http://www.bradnoble.net/rigging/index.html

He also showed us LBrush, and mentioned that he believes it's a free download until about March. It was pretty friggin' awesome watching this one.
http://www.lbrush.com/index.htm

This guy did not create these tools or anything, just was pointing us to them.

The next guy showed us a few websites for sound.
http://www.dawnmusic.com/home.html
http://www.sounddogs.com/
Both looked cool, but I think you have to pay for the stuff from them.
He also showed us this place.
http://www.itoosoft.com/english/menu.php?id=news
Be sure to check out their free plug-ins! They looked pretty cool, but honestly, I think it's kinda easy to do some of this stuff in Max without plug-ins. Anyway, check it out and judge for yourself.

Then we had a tiny discussion about Terragen, and someone mentioned this thing. Another really cool, free (or cheap) terrain generator, and they said they really liked using it with Max.
http://www.world-machine.com/

So then the next guy was an architecture guy, and he showed us how to make a complex wall with one click after you have a spline laying out the floor plan. Then he showed an amazing thing Max does, where you put a window into the wall, and it automatically cuts the hole for it! and you can resize the window, move it to any wall you want, and it just updates! This is using those AEC tools, of course. Pretty awesome stuff if you have to build a house or building!

Then the guy from Mechnology was up.
http://www.mechnology.com/
This guy showed such amazing keyboard shortcuts regarding the timeline that I just made a tiny video tutorial to show it to you guys! This absolutely floored me!! (now, keep in mind, I was really excited, and I'm just freaking out on this video!)
http://www.mackdadd.com/CG/timeline_demo.mov
It involves the timeline, the CTRL and ALT buttons, and all three mouse buttons.
Then he offered everyone this script on their website. The demo might not be working yet, but they said it would tomorrow. Anyway, it's a realtime floating render window. When I mentioned Activeshade, both of them looked at me and said, "yeah, but this works!". So, needless to say, I will be downloading this and checking it out. Sounds much better and faster than activeshade (which i never use!).
http://www.mechnology.com/company/mechl ... ender.html

Then a woman (a teacher with all her students there) got up and while she was loading in one of her students projects for us to help solve a problem, she showed us this website for getting reference of ANY kind of vehicle you could want. At the meeting, we looked up some tanks and the 60's batmobile.
http://www.suurland.com/

And that was it. I got the Autodesk shirt for my little presentation (thanks Global!!), we had pizza and beer and cookies as usual, dissed Maya for a little bit (hahahaha), and went our ways.

I got in a few SimplyCG plugs, and directed a few people here for that MaxPaint script I found and Tyson taught us to use. Wish I could've remembered the guys name that made it.

Anyway, great evening! Next month, an Nvidia representative is coming to talk about DirectX10, but I'm gonna get the lowdown on some graphics cards! (well, he's not definite, but they're trying hard).

Hey mate... sounds like you had a blast!

You're welcome to use that old tut I wrote - as I said it's not really my technique... but a very handy one to know

Those timeline shortcut are great! That's the ones where you can change the shot length, stretch things out etc right? I found those about 2 months ago, kinda by accident... when I opened up Max for the first time in 18 months! lol

Here's my report...

Motion builder is cool.

It is hardcore for character animation, and i'm actually surprised some of you amazing animators here don't use it. it's got some REALLY amazing tools in it! re-targeting rigs, motion captures, and animations is almost one click. There's all kinds of super easy built in stuff to deal with all that euler flipping/gimbel lock stuff you guys are talking about alot. The demo guy applied a regular human walk rig to a mech-type robot, and with one click reversed the angle the knees bent, so it bent back like a chicken instead of forward like a person. There's also an AMAZING built-in non-linear editor thing that lets you edit and move around animations like editor do footage. you can crossfade them, all kinds of stuff. which, in my limited experience with the motion mixer in Max, you can do a bit, but this really takes it to a new level.

That's it.