Jamie's Jewels

The History of Aspect Ratio

OK, OK, so it’s been quite a while since the last blog post, but this video is a great general one to return with. In the video “John Hess traces the evolution of the screen shape from the silent film days through the widescreen explosion of the 50s, to the aspect ratio of modern digital cameras.”

- Jamie

Autodesk at Wednesdays London User Group

Hi everyone,

Don’t forget 3ds London is happening this Wednesday with Autodesk as the main speaker, (and it should be a good one.) To start us off, Edd Stockton is going to show us the great Chrome Molly video, this time with a bit of info on how he did it all.

• Wednesday 3rd July
• For 7pm
• Upstairs at The Plough, 27 Museum Street, WC1A
  Map

The group will also be welcoming Autodesk's Alex Horst, who's flying over to present the following:

Reality Capture for Film, Games and Visualization

Creating photo-realistic digital assets is key to increasing the realism of today's games and movies. There is a fast-growing demand to bring the as-built or as-existing reality into the production pipeline. Some advanced production houses have embraced reality capture technologies, and they already use photos, videos, or lasers to capture reality. The Autodesk Reality Capture Group has developed tools that make these technologies easier to use. Combined with 3ds Max, Mudbox and Unity, see how customers can benefit by using these new tools and work-flows to create digital assets for use in a production environment.

3ds Max 2014: Visible and Invisible stuff

Get to know which recent improvements were made to 3ds Max. New tools for crowd generation, particle animation, and perspective matching and more will help you creating your animations and designs in less time. You will be given Tips & Tricks on how to utilize new functionalities, as well as receiving an overview on the changes under the hood and some recent technology updates.

Creating an Advertising Game Pitch in a day

Alex is going to a fictional pitch about a Breakfast Cereal advertising: From relaunching the product, it’s appearance and name over some sort of viral Game, prototyped in Unity. Alex has been using Kinect MotionCapturing, Sketchbook Pro, 3ds Max, Mudbox, MotionBuilder and Unity to come up with the concept, prototype and presentation within a day. He is going to present the project and a making off.

Don’t forget to follow @3dslondon on Twitter.

– Jamie.

Retopo Workflow between Autodesk Catch123D, 3ds Max and Mudbox

Autodesk’s Gary Davis has been a busy man over the past few days. In this video, he shows the basic concepts behind the workflow and interop of Autodesk Catch123D, 3ds Max  and Mudbox. Highlights include the FREE creation of high resolution, textured models using photogrammetry techniques in Autodesk Catch123D (3D models from real-world photography). The resulting, high resolution, triangulated mesh is cleaned up in 3ds Max and then, using the one-click interop between 3ds Max and Mudbox, a live link is created and the models is passed off to Mudbox.

Using the new Retopology feature of Mudbox 2014, a cleaner, quad mesh is generated with lower levels of detail, a normal map is extracted from the original high resolution mesh, and the final result is passed back to 3ds Max for use in tasks like rigging, lighting rendering or exporting to a game engine.

- Jamie

3ds Max 2014 feature video by Autodesks Gary Davis

This video highlights a few of the new features of mental ray found in Autodesk 3ds Max 2014. Some of these include rendering an AO pass on the hardware GPU as well as disabling Final Gather and using Image Based Lighting (IBL) to illuminate your scene. Also detailed is a new, more granular method of antialiasing, among other features.

The mental ray string for GPU mrAO used in this video is...

"ambient occlusion gpu" on
"ambient occlusion framebuffer" "fb_re#0"

Enjoy!