Jamie's Jewels

Are you a 3d Star?

Hi All, In the UK we have just launched a public competition to find a Design Visualisation Star on our 3d Design Visualisation Blog. The completion is aimed at designers, recent graduates or any other talented individuals.  Top prize is a high end graphics card from ATI, worth over £1000 and great runners-up prizes of ATI graphics cards for second and third. Click here to find out more.

Happy Max'ing

QUICKSILVER FEATURE LIMITATIONS

Morning All
 
Below is a list of known limitations for the ‘Quicksilver’ production renderer in 3ds Max / Design 2011.
This list will provide a comprehensive basis when using this very powerful toolset for the first time.

Video memory resources are consumed quickly if you have many lights with shadows in your scene. The system might render slowly or reset video cards.

1.High antialiasing settings could lead to a black render.
2.Waves map does not render correctly in Quicksilver or in the viewport renderer.
3.Very large shadow maps (i.e. 4096 x 4096) can cause render errors. Using smaller sizes (i.e. 512 x 512) will correct this error.
4.GTS 8800 cards can cause some objects to flicker.
5.Rendering of scenes that contain large number of textures could potentially cause image artifacts when rendering a sequence of frames.
6.Under certain conditions, usually compiling very complex material trees, the video card can be forced to reset on the Vista operating system and the Windows 7 operating system. The Windows XP 32-bit operating system may become unstable.
7.Quicksilver can render black frames under certain sampling settings depending on how much memory the video card has. Typically this is when memory is close to 512MB.
8.Object properties are not supported – in particular Rendering Control visibility.
9.Exclude/Include for lights is not supported.
10.Groups cannot have reflection – they need to be exploded.
11.Vertex colors are not supported in Quicksilver.
12.Only one layer of transparency is supported. When several transparent objects overlap, only the first will be drawn.
13.The thumbnail background of the material editor is not supported.
14.Gamma is not applied under command line rendering.
15.The following are unsupported maps in Quicksilver:
    i. Combustion                               
    ii. Cellular                             
    iii. Flat Mirror                             
    iv. Particle Age                              
    v. Particle MBlur                             
    vi. Thin Wall Refraction                         
    vii. Vertex Color
16.The following are not fully supported maps in Quicksilver:
    i. Falloff: Only perpendicular / parallel with viewing direction supported.
    ii. Gradient Ramp: Normal Gradient Type not supported.
    iii. Noise: Only Regular Noise Type supported.
    iv. Normal Bump: Additional Bump not supported.
    v. Raytrace: Certain adjustable parameters under Raytrace map are not supported.
    vi. Reflect/Refract: Certain adjustable parameters under Reflect/Refract map are not supported.
17.Quicksilver does not support Refraction.
18.Quicksilver does not support certain output parameters. This issue impacts all map types.
 
Happy Max’ing
 

2009, 2010 & 2011 HOTFIXES

Morning All

Please see below for some important hotfix information. It is worth noting these resolve issues that many of you have recently contacted me regarding, for example the mr 16 core ‘hair’ defect, and slate keyboard shortcut override issues. Please ensure this essential information is passed on to everyone you know using 3ds Max, and doesn’t stay only in your inbox.

 

Resolved Issues in the Autodesk 3ds Max 2009 and Autodesk 3ds Max Design 2009-2010.06.07 Hot Fix

3ds Max 2009

3ds Max Design 2009

Feature	Resolved Issue
Autodesk® Backburner™	3ds Max 2009 and 3ds Max Design 2009 is now render compatible with Backburner 2011. In various cases when changing frames while using to render strips from the Backburner Monitor, the incorrect frames were rendered. The correct frames are now be rendered. Changing render width in a job when rendering strips from the Backburner Monitor rendered a blank error frame. The blank frame is no longer rendered. When rendering with bitmaps, a program error could occur due to memory not being released; the memory is now released properly. Render To Texture (RTT) would not render to an IPv6 network. This is now possible.
Biped	When loading a Biped BIP, Xtra bones would not scale properly; they now scale correctly.
Performance	The program error on start-up, when using sixteen or more CPU cores has been fixed; also, all cores are now used.

 

 

Resolved Issues in the Autodesk 3ds Max 2010 and Autodesk 3ds Max Design 2010-2010.06.08 Hot Fix

3ds Max 2010

3ds Max Design 2010

Feature	Resolved Issue
Autodesk® Backburner™	3ds Max 2010 and 3ds Max Design 2010 is now render compatible with Backburner 2011. In various cases when changing frames while using to render strips from the Backburner Monitor, the incorrect frames were rendered. The correct frames are now be rendered. Changing render width in a job when rendering strips from the Backburner Monitor rendered a blank error frame. The blank frame is no longer rendered. When rendering with bitmaps, a program error could occur due to memory not being released; the memory is now released properly. Render To Texture (RTT) would not render to an IPv6 network. This is now possible.
Biped	When loading a Biped BIP, Xtra bones would not scale properly; they now scale correctly.
Performance	The program error on start-up, when using sixteen or more CPU cores has been fixed; also, all cores are now used.

 

 

Resolved Issues in the Autodesk 3ds Max 2011 and Autodesk 3ds Max Design 2011-2010.06.07 Hot Fix

3ds Max 2011

3ds Max Design 2011

Feature	Resolved Issue
Autodesk Materials	A program error occurred if the Autodesk Materials were uninstalled and Autosave or Save was used.  The error no longer occurs and the files are saved correctly. Autodesk Materials presets failed to load correctly on operating systems that used commas to define decimals; these presets now load correctly in this environment.
Autodesk® FBX®	An empty scene was created when loading RPC assets from Autodesk® Revit® through FBX.  An empty scene is no longer loaded. When using Autodesk Revit 2011, FBX texture maps were using GUID labels for naming texture maps; texture maps now use their appropriate file names.
Help	The "Download Vegetation" link in the Help menu now loads the proper page.
Lights	When importing IES lights their orientation would rotate, this rotation no longer occurs.
mental ray®	When using mental ray proxies and setting mental ray to use BSP2 when rendering to a sequence, some of the memory was not released .  This has been fixed. When setting mental ray to use BSP2 in 64-bit versions of 3ds Max, speckled artifacts could appear when rendering; these artifacts no longer occur.
Performance	The program error on start-up when using sixteen or more CPU cores has been fixed; also, all cores are now used.
Slate Material Editor	When minimizing the Slate Material Editor, the keyboard kept selection focus with the result that the Delete key wouldn’t work; this has been corrected.

 

 

Happy Max’ing