AU LIVE BLOG: Session – Autodesk Software Production Questions Answered

This session is being moderated by Gary M. Davis (good friend of mine) and he will be taking questions from the audience…

The session is starting.
Introductions

• Gary Davis, Production Artist
• Mark Gerhard, AE from ImagineIT
• John Higgs, Partner, Corgan Media Lab.

Question: Network Rending with Mental Ray… whats allowed and what isn’t

Distributed Rendering has some limitations, to use distributed rendering vs. not distributed rendering

Use rendering passes.

Distributed rendering is not the same thing as network rendering. So you can have the rendering farm rendering with MR in the same unlimited fashion as scanline. (machine per frame). Distributed rendering is many machines per frame.

All machines are tied up with distributed rendering, regular network rendering the machines are not. If you have to stop a machine in distributed render mode, you stop the whole rendering process.

Attendee Question: What’s up with Max Maya for AEC industry?

Max has more hooks for AEC industry. Not that Maya is bad, but it has more hooks. Another driving factor over what to use is the hiring pool. If you have a studio, what are the artists you are hiring using? That helps drive the

User Question: When working with Revit, whats the best file format for getting data to 3dsMax?

Use DWG, use Layers, the use the advanced file linking. Lots of discussion about preserving material entities. 3rd Party file translaters (like okin) is your friend.

Attendee Question: How to use Real Time 3D. Clients want to do realtime walk throughs? Try Cult 3D. (www.cult3d.com) or try unreal levels. Be wary of client expectation ands limited end results.

Look at a book by Jason Busbee for porting stuff to Unreal.

Question. How to control other PC’s over the network. RealVNC, remote desktop, Dameware.

The discussion has moved out to compositing. No specific question. Showing some effects breakdowns from Corgan Media lab.

Now talking about render elements. Mental Ray now uses Render Elements. Talking about the advantages using compositing for saving time and functionality. Render mattes for everything to make compositing easier.

Use the Matte Texture Element for everything (found in the Render Elements>matte dialog box.)

Talking about using Object ID’s and Material IDs for setting mattes. Object IDs are found at (Object Properties>G-Buffer Extract)

Conclusion. Talking about the value of training, get it, get secluded (away from the office). Session Concludes

AUTHORS NOTE: This is capture of the “Stream of thought”. If you have specific questions about more detail of what was discussed, please post a question.

Advertisement

~ by learn3dsmax on November 27, 2007.