Cgtuts+

Achieving Realistic Results With 3ds Max & V-Ray, An Interior Lighting And Rendering Overview

Pratik Gulati — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 09:00:21 +0000

In this tutorial, Pratik Gulati will give you an insightful overview of interior lighting and rendering in 3d Studio Max using V-Ray. Pratik will discuss his work-flow and the techniques he uses to achieve realistic results. You’ll learn how to setup interior lighting, create V-Ray shaders and the settings needed to render a modern bathroom scene realistically!

Step 1

After opening 3D Studio Max, the first thing we need to do is change our units setup. So go to Customize>Units Setup… and choose “US Standard – Feet w/Decimal Inches” as our units.

Step 2

When working with with cg environments where we want photo real quality it is really important to make sure that our object scale is accurate, its plays an important role while achieving a good render. As you can see the scene is quiet simple.

It’s a small bathroom mostly made up of simple shapes with a circular bathtub in center and a big glass door at the front, which is allowing environment light to enter. There is also an artificial cove light towards the left top side of the room.

Step 3

Next we’ll assign V-Ray as our renderer. Press “F10″ and a new window will come up, this will allow you to enable V-Ray as the render engine and also enable V-Ray materials in the material editor.

Step 4

Now assign a simple Grey V-Ray material to all the objects in the scene, this is to save time when setting up scene lighting and render settings. Since a plain material renders faster than reflective and glossy materials, which would be later applied to various objects.

Step 5

I am using a normal Max camera for this scene. To create a camera, go to the “Cameras” tab in the Create menu and click on “Free”. This will allow you to create a free camera (ie without a target.)

Step 6

We will be using a regular 35mm lens with a 54 degree field of view.

Step 7

Let’s discuss the placement for the various lights. Lights 1-4 are V-Ray lights which affect our scene directly, as we can see by the placement of the lights below.

Step 8

Here are the basic parameters of the lights that are changed:

Color – The color of the light.
Multiplier – Multiplier for the light color; this is also the light intensity in the units chosen by the Intensity units parameter.
Invisible – This setting controls whether the shape of the VRayLight source is visible in the rendered result. When this option is turned off, the source is rendered in the current light color. Otherwise it is not visible in the scene.
Subdivs – This defines the samples or the “Quality” of the light, 8-10 should be used for test renders, and 15-20 for finals. Increasing the samples will increase your render times.

Step 9

Color settings of the lights.

Step 10

We also use a “Target Direct Light”, to mimic the light from the sun and sky.

Step 11

Here are the basic parameters that I’ve changed for the Direct light.

Step 12

For the cove area we have used a vray light and the vray light shader. To achieve the effect we create the vray light according to the size of the opening, and place the light facing downwards

Step 13

In the steps below we will do the render settings in V-Ray, press “F10″ and then in the “Global Switches” rollout uncheck “Default Lights “.

Default lights – Allows you to control the default lights in the scene.
Off – The default lights in the scene will be always switched off.
In the “Image Sampler (Antialiasing) rollout, select “Adaptive DMC” for the “Type”, and “Catmull-Rom” as the “Antialiasing Filter”. Also change the “Min” and “Max: subdivs.

Image sampler refers to an algorithm for sampling and filtering the image function.

Fixed – This sampler always takes the same number of samples per pixel.
Adaptive DMC – This sampler takes a variable number of samples per pixel depending on the difference in the intensity of the pixels.
Adaptive subdivision – This sampler divides the image into an adaptive grid-like structure and refines depending on the difference in pixel Intensity.

Also in the “Color Mapping” rollout, change the color mapping “Type” to “Exponential”, this mode will saturate the colors based on their brightness. This can be useful to prevent Burn-outs in very bright areas (for example around light sources etc). This mode will not clip bright colors, but will instead saturate them.

Step 14

In the “Indirect Illumination (GI)” rollout, select “Irradiance Map” and “Light Cache” as the primary and secondary engine.

Step 15

Irradiance Map – The basic idea is to compute the indirect illumination only at some points in the scene, and interpolate for the rest of the Points. The irradiance map is very fast compared to direct computation, especially for scenes with large flat areas
Current preset – This dropdown list allows you to choose from several presets for some of the irradiance map parameters
Hemispheric subdivs (HSph. subdivs) – This controls the quality of individual GI samples. Smaller values make things faster, but may produce Blotchy results. Higher values produce smoother images.

Step 16

Light Cache – The light map is built by tracing many eye paths from the camera. Each of the bounces in the path stores the illumination from the rest of the path into a 3D structure, very similar to the photon map

In the “Light Cache” rollout, put 3000 for “Subdivs” and set the “Number Of Passes” to 5 .

Subdivs – This determines how many paths are traced from the camera. The actual number of paths is the square of the subdivs (the default of 1000 Subdivs means that 1 000 000 paths will be traced from the camera.)
Number of passes – The light cache is computed in several passes, which are then combined into the final light cache. Each pass is rendered in a separate thread independently of the other passes. This ensures that the light cache is consistent across computers with a different number of CPUs. In general, a light cache computed with a smaller number of passes may be less noisy than a light cache computed with more passes, for the same number of samples; however a small number of passes cannot be distributed effectively across several threads.

Step 17

Now let’s texture the scene, actually its quiet simple. The basic parameters that will be used in material are as follows:

Diffuse – This is the Diffuse color of the material.
Roughness – This parameter can be used to simulate rough surfaces, or surfaces covered with dust.
Reflect – The reflection color.
Reflection Glossiness – Controls the sharpness of reflections. A value of 1.0 means perfect mirror-like reflections; lower values produce Blurry or “Glossy” reflections. Use the “Subdivs” parameter below to control the quality of glossy reflections.

Step 18

The wood rack is made of a VRay Material with a Diffuse map and a slight amount of Reflection and Glossiness.

Step 19

The bath tub is a White VRay material with some glossy reflections.

Step 20

The Mosaic tiles are a reflective VRay material, with a Diffuse and Bump map assigned.

Step 21

The glass for the door is made of a white VRay material with white “Reflection” and “Refraction” colors and a “Falloff” map.

Step 22

And finally the mirror is made of a White VRay material with white sharp reflections.

That concludes this look at interior lighting and rendering in 3ds Max & V-Ray, I hope you’ve found it helpful!

Create Awesome Cloth Simulations using nDynamics in Maya

Alan Monroig — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 09:00:39 +0000

Dynamics simulations can be a powerful tool when trying to generate realistic looking effects that would be very difficult to achieve manually. In this tutorial you will learn how to use nDynamics’ passive colliders and ncloth objects, in conjunction with fields like air and gravity, to easily simulate realistic dynamic objects such as a windy flag or a water container.November of 2009

Final Effect Preview

Step 1

Go to “Create > Polygon Primitives > Plane”.

Step 2

Create a plane that matches the size of a flag and rotate it by ’90′ degrees.

Step 3

Open the Attributes Editor for the plane, name it, and increase the “Subdivisions Width” to ’30′, and the “Subdivisions Height” to ’50′.

Step 4

Your plane should now look like this:

Step 5

Go to “Create > Polygon Primitives > Cylinder”

Step 6

Position the cylinder, and scale it to match the size of a flag pole.

Step 7

Select all the top faces of the pole.

Step 8

With the faces still selected, got to “Polygons > Edit Mesh > Extrude”.

Step 9

Extrude those faces until you get a nice pole shape.

Step 10

Select the top vertex of the pole.

Step 11

Use the move tool to position the vertex.

Step 12

Go to “Window > Rendering Editors > Hypershade”.

Step 13

With “Create mental ray Nodes” active, create a new “mia_material_x”.

Step 14

Open the Attributes Editor of the material you just created, name it, select the preset called “Copper”, and adjust the “Diffuse” and “Reflection” colors accordingly.

Step 15

Apply the material to the pole.

Step 16

Go to “Window > Rendering Editors > Hypershade” again.

Step 17

With “Create mental ray Nodes active”, create a new “mia_material_x”.

Step 18

Go to the Attributes Editor of the material, name it, and decrease the “Reflectivity” value to ’0′.

Step 19

Click on the checkerboard button, to the right of the “Diffuse” color value, to open the “File” browser window.

Step 20

The Attributes Editor should now change. Select the image you want to use to texture the flag.

Step 21

Apply the material to the flag, and with the flag selected go to “Create UV´s > Planar Mapping”.

Step 22

Select the option highlighted below so you can see if the texture looks good.

Step 23

If your texture looks bad like mine, go to “Create UV´s > Planar Mapping (settings)”.

Step 24

This will open a new window where you can change the projection axis to whatever works for your scene, and then click “Project”.

Step 25

Your flag should now display the texture correctly.

Step 26

Select the flag, and in the “nDynamics” menu, go to “nMesh > Create nCloth”.

Step 27

Increase the number of frames of the animation.

Step 28

If you play the animation now, you will see that the flag just falls down. This is because the flag is not attached to the pole.

Step 29

Rewind the animation.

Step 30

Select the flag, and in the “Window” menu, go to “Show > Isolate Select > View Selected”.

Step 31

You should now only see the flag, which will make it easier to work with.

Step 32

Select all of the vertexes that you want to be attached to the pole.

Step 33

In the “nDynamics” menu, go to “nConstraint > Transform”.

Step 34

Select the flag, and in the “Window” menu go to “Show > Isolate Select > View Selected” this will make everything visible again.

Step 35

Select the pole.

Step 36

In the “nDynamics” menu, go to “nMesh > Create Passive Collider”.

Step 37

If you play the animation, you should now see the flag hanging from the pole. This is realistic, but an unmoving flag is not very dynamic, so let’s add some wind.

Step 38

Go to the Attributes Editor of the flag´s “nucleus1”, and in the “Gravity and Wind” section, change the following values:

Air Density = 10.000

Wind Speed = 8.000

Wind Direction = – 1.000 z axis

Step 39

If you play the animation now, it should look pretty good. All you need to do is smooth the polygons by pressing ’3′ on the keyboard (with the flag selected).

Step 40

Perfect! We are done with the first section of this tutorial, just don´t forget to save your scene!

Step 41

Create a new scene, and go to “Create > Polygon Primitives > Plane”.

Step 42

Create a square plane.

Step 43

Go to the Attributes Editor of the plane, name it, and change the “Subdivisions Width” to ’50′, and the “Subdivisions Height” to ’50′

Step 44

Go to “Create > Polygon Primitives > Sphere”.

Step 45

Create a sphere and position it very high above the plane.

Step 46

Go to “Window > Rendering Editors > Hypershade”.

Step 47

Make sure you have “Create mental ray Nodes” active, and create a new “mia_material_x”.

Step 48

Go to the Attributes Editor of the material, name it, and change the following options:

Diffuse: Color = Green; Weight = 0.100

Reflection: Color = Green; Reflectivity = 1.000; Glossiness = 0.500; Glossy Samples = 30; Metal Material = Active

Step 49

Apply the material to the ball.

Step 50

Go to “Window > Rendering Editors > Hypershade”.

Step 51

With “Create mental ray Nodes” active, create a new “mia_material_x”.

Step 52

Go to the Attributes Editor of the material, name it, and decrease the “Reflectivity” value to ’0′.

Step 53

Hit the checkerboard button to the right of the “Diffuse” Color value. This will open the file browser window where you can select the image that you want to use to texture the plane.

Step 54

Apply the material to the plane.

Step 55

Select the plane, and in the “Polygons” menu, go to “Create UV´s > Planar Mapping”.

Step 56

Select the plane again, and in the “nDynamics” menu, go to “nMesh > Create nCloth”.

Step 57

Select one vertex from each corner of the plane.

Step 58

With the vertexes still selected, go to the “nDynamics” menu, and choose “nConstraint > Transform”.

Step 59

Select the ball, and in the “nDynamics” menu, go to “nMesh > Create Passive Collider”.

Step 60

With the ball still selected, go to “Fields > Gravity”.

Step 61

Increase the number of frames of the animation.

Step 62

Position your camera.

Step 63

Play the animation.

Step 64

The plane should just stretch instead of tearing.

Step 65

Rewind the animation.

Step 66

Select the faces of the plane that you want to tear.

Step 67

In the “nDynamics” menu, go to “nConstraint > Tearable Surface”.

Step 68

You should see some dots covering the faces you selected.

Step 69

If you play the animation now, your plane should tear naturally. End of tutorial! Hope you liked it!!

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Quick Tip: How To Render Frames And Video In 3D Studio Max

Chandan Kumar — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 09:00:02 +0000

You requested it and Chandan Kumar has delivered. In this beginner level quick tip, Chandan will explain how to render your animations out of 3ds Max, as both image sequences with alpha channel information included (ideal for post work.) Or in a direct movie format such as .mov or .avi with some helpful tips on codecs and compression.

Video

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Note: click the ‘Monitor’ icon to view tutorial in full-screen HD.

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Rendering A Realistic Guitar In Maya Using VRay

Sansar Tripathi — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 09:00:28 +0000

In this tutorial you’ll learn how to render a realistic electric guitar in Maya using VRay. Sansar will cover the process of creating and applying materials and textures to the model. And how to setup Vray to achieve a very realistic render in Maya with HDRI reflections and global illumination.

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Note: click the ‘Monitor’ icon to view tutorial in full-screen HD.

75 High-Res Rusty Metal Textures – Tuts+ Premium Texture Pack

Chandan Kumar — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 09:00:59 +0000

This week’s premium content comes to us from Cgtuts+ regular Chandan Kumar. Chandan has put together another outstanding collection of high resolution rusty metal textures, ideal for adding a little grit to your next project. These textures are available exclusively to our Tuts+ Premium members, so Log in to your Premium account or Join Now to download!

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A Tuts+ Premium membership gives you access to over 700 exclusive in-depth tutorials from industry professionals, in addition you’ll also gain access to source files, top selling e-books, courses and member only forums. With new content added weekly from Aetuts+, PSDtuts+, Vectortuts+, Nettuts+, Audiotuts+, Activetuts+, and Phototuts+, there’s always something new to learn. Take a Tour or Join Today.

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How To Generate And Render Caustics In 3D Studio Max

Chandan Kumar — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 09:00:37 +0000

In this beginner level tutorial, author Chandan Kumar will explain how to generate and render caustics in 3D Studio Max. Caustics are an essential element in adding a level of believability to your renders, and simulate the effect of light bending while passing through a transparent or semi-transparent medium such as glass or liquid.

Video

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Note: click the ‘Monitor’ icon to view tutorial in full-screen HD.

Best of Tuts+ in January 2012

David Appleyard — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 05:20:40 +0000

Each month, we bring together a selection of the best tutorials and articles from across the whole Tuts+ network. Whether you’d like to read the top posts from your favorite site, or would like to start learning something completely new, this is the best place to start!

Psdtuts+ — Photoshop Tutorials

Create a Pimped Out Truck Using Photoshop and Point and Shoot Photos

Making modifications to your car or truck in Photoshop can be a lot of fun. In this tutorial we will demonstrate how to create a pimped out truck modification using photos taken with a simple point and shoot camera, with no advanced lighting setup. Let’s get started!

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Create an Elephant Sundae Using Photo Manipulation Techniques

Photoshop is great at seamlessly combing photos to create an entirely new scene. In this tutorial we will create an elephant sundae using several stock photos. Let’s get started!

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The Incredible Digital Art of Michael Oswald

In this article we will be featuring the work of Michael Oswald. Oswald is a digital artist with a unique style. His technique involves a combination of photo manipulation and digital painting techniques and the results are often stunning. Let’s take a look!

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Nettuts+ — Web Development Tutorials

Sublime Text 2 Tips and Tricks (Updated)

Sublime Text 2 is one of the fastest and most incredible code editors to be released in a long time! With a community and plugin ecosystem as passionate as this one, it just might be impossible for any other editor to catch up. I’ll show you my favorite tips and tricks today.

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An In Depth Analysis of HTML5 Multimedia and Accessibility

In this tutorial, youll learn how HTML5 helps to provide you with several ways of presenting your media content to users. As a result, youll increase the availability of your media to users with different
needs and requirements, making it more accessible.

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Writing an API Wrapper in Ruby with TDD

Sooner or later, all developers are required to interact with an API. The most difficult part is always related to reliably testing the code we write, and, as we want to make sure that everything works properly, we continuosly run code that queries the API itself. This process is slow and inefficient, as we can experience network issues and data inconsistencies (the API results may change). Let’s review how we can avoid all of this effort with Ruby.

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Vectortuts+ — Illustrator Tutorials

How to Illustrate a Microscope in Illustrator

The microscopes is a symbol of our civilization. Throughout this tutorial on how to illustrate a vector microscope you’ll take advantage of numerous Illustrator tools. You will learn how to use blends, art brushes and 3D rendering in Adobe Illustrator. Let’s get started!

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Create a Picture Gallery in Illustrator

This work is a common project created together with Iaroslav Lazunov and Alexander Egupov. We have used 3D rendering, Blends, Opacity masks, making this three-dimensional stage with vanishing points. Learn every step in how to create this picture gallery work.

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Important Resources for Learning How to Design Typefaces and Full Fonts

If you’re serious about creating a typeface design, then you’ll need some solid resources to get started. Learn effective typeface design workflows, how to take an initial spark of an idea from sketch, through Illustrator, into Fontlab, and then work your creation into a complete and custom font design. Here are multiple tutorials that show you how to create fonts in Illustrator and Fontlab, and you can also dive into articles that describe the foundation of quality type design with ample inspirational examples.

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Webdesigntuts+ — Web Design Tutorials

A Beginner’s Guide to Pairing Fonts

Pairing fonts can be a challenge. Selecting two or more fonts which work well is one thing – selecting two which work together to achieve your typographic aims may have you reaching for the aspirin. Let’s see if we can alleviate any headaches. This guide will help you get started with font pairing for the web.

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Design a Series of Smart Banner Ads in Photoshop

With the continuous growth of the Internet, online marketing has gotten bigger every year, and along with it, the advertising industry. One major factor in all this craziness is buying and selling ads.

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Twitter Bootstrap 101: Introduction

Twitter’s Bootstrap is an excellent set of carefully crafted user interface elements, layouts, and javascript tools, freely available to use in your next web design project. This video series aims to introduce you to Bootstrap; taking you all the way from downloading the resources, to building a complete Bootstrap-based website.

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Phototuts+ — Photography Tutorials

HDR: Love it or Leave It?

There are few techniques in the photography world that divide our community as much as HDR. High dynamic range images, or HDR images, are a special type of composite image that combines several images at different exposure settings in order to create an image with increased dynamic range. The look provided by HDR is loved by many, and disliked by perhaps just as many. In today’s article, we’re going to take a better look at what HDR is, and get some opinions from photographers using HDR.

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Inspiring Images of Cars and Motorcycles

Cars and motorbikes have been around for 100 years. Throughout the century, they have looked beautiful, satisfied our need for speed and become a symbol for thrill seeking. Today, we’ll look at photos ranging from brand new Ferrari’s to classic muscle cars.

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Quick Tip: GIMP Portable – Take Your Editing Software With You

While a number of smartphones now offer photo editing basics (and a plethora of apps to expand things even more), the portability of a solid photo editing program has been hard to come by. Photoshop is a monster in regards to space requirements and its ability to work on any system where it is not expressively installed. Picasa can be fairly ‘lightweight’ but lacks many of the more advanced photo editing tools. So what about GIMP?

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Cgtuts+ — Computer Graphics Tutorials

Modeling, UVmapping And Texturing A Low Poly T-Rex In Blender, Part 1

In the first tutorial of 2012 you’ll learn how to create an awesome low-poly dinosaur using Blender and Gimp. In today’s post artist Karan Shah will walk you through the entire modeling process step by step, and show you how to create an optimized model suitable for use in any game engine.

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Create A Realistic Explosion In Maya Using Maya Fluids

Today you’ll learn to animate and shade fluids, understand all of the major attributes, learn how adding fields will allow you to gain better control over your simulation, and how to light and render the final animation.

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SpeedTree To UDK: The Complete Workflow, Part 1 Creating The Tree

Due to the shear number of polygons often required to make believable 3D trees, creating realistic ones for use “in-game” can be a challenging, time consuming task. SpeedTree from IDV aims to change all that with it’s intuitive UI, ease of use and powerful toolset. Making believable trees and plants has literally never been easier!

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Aetuts+ — After Effects Tutorials

Dominoes” CameraTracker and Cinema 4d Case Study – Day 1

In this tutorial we’re going to go over the principle functionality of CameraTracker from The Foundry, learning basic workflow, optimizing results, aligning the ground plane and exporting this data from After Effects to Cinema 4d.

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Make An Amazing Motion Reactant Flame – Tuts+ Premium

Using just a few video elements of torch flames, we composite a burning hand by using a series of null objects and expressions to drive a time lagged displacement effect to simulate fire burning from a moving source. We use the Puppet tool for the distortion and throw on some tracked lighting effects and a displacement map for the Heat. This principle can be used to add realistic, fluid motion to any tracked object.

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Key Tips To Becoming A Successful Video Freelancer

Youve watched thousands of tutorials. Youve put in countless hours and spent many late nights working on personal projects. Youve finally come to the conclusion that this may just be something you would like to do for a career. It can seem a little intimidating at first, because how are you going to convince someone to pay you to do this? Up until now youve been your only client. How do you get more? Im going to share my insight and experiences on how to successfully launch your freelance career this year!

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Audiotuts+ — Audio & Production Tutorials

Free Professional Quality Audio Unit Plug-ins for Mac

Lets face it, software is expensive. While there are hundreds of free plug-ins available online, more often than not two problems will arise: One, most of them are for PCs leaving us Mac users feeling left out. Two, most of them are vary poor quality.

While I do agree with the saying, “The tools are only as good as the artist,” I also believe the opposite is true; that at some point the artist can only be as good as his tools are.

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Quick Tip: Drum Processing Part 4: Tips and Tricks

This short series of quick tips is designed to give you a good overview of the audio processing techniques involved in creating a professional sounding drum beat for use in house, electro and breaks in Cubase. In this final part we will look at a few ways to add even more life to your drums.

Here is a sample of the type of beat you could expect to end up with at the end of this series of tips:

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Quick Tip: Use the Doubling Technique for Quick Drums

It’s 3:30 in the afternoon when your phone rings. The head of a music library is calling and she needs your help. They have a commercial for an A-list client that needs music, and they want you to submit an entry. You’ll get $10,000 if you land the gig.

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Activetuts+ — Flash, Flex & ActionScript Tutorials

Create a Microphone-Controlled Flash Game: Code

In this mini-series, we’re creating a spaceship game where the main control is via the microphone: shout louder to make the ship fly higher. So far, we’ve created all the required graphical elements for the game. Now, it’s time to work on our code. We’ve got a lot to do, so let’s get started!

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Why Bother With jQuery? A Guide for (Former) Flash Developers

If you, like many Flash developers, are looking into using HTML5 for your web apps, you’ll almost certainly have come across jQuery. It’s a very popular JavaScript library, used by a large percentage of the most visited websites – but what’s all the fuss about, and should you use it?

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An Introduction to the HTML5 Gamepad API

As HTML games begin to gradually increase in popularity, vendors are starting to introduce some exciting new APIs to make gaming that little bit sweeter for both us developers and our end players. One of these is the GamepadAPI, which allows you to connect your good old console gamepad into your computer and use it for browser based games, plug and play style. Let’s dive in!

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Wptuts+ — WordPress Tutorials

The Rise of HTML5 in WordPress

2011 was a big year for the advancement of HTML5 in the web development community. It became pretty widely adopted, especially for the mobile web. There have been major projects that help developers use HTML5, like Paul Irish’s HTML5 Boilerplate (technically 2010, but popularized in 2011) and books galore!

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Reusable Custom Meta Boxes Part 3: Extra Fields

In Part 1 and Part 2 of our custom meta box template tutorial series, we learned how to create a field array to loop through and create a custom meta box with your standard fields. Now let’s throw in a bit of JavaScript for some fancy, but highly useful fields.

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The Ultimate Quickstart Guide to Speeding Up Your WordPress Site

Give your site a boost! Implement crucial optimization techniques that will improve not only your ySlow score, but your Google rank too. In this tutorial we will cover all aspects of W3 caching, ySlow, Google page speed, CSS sprites & htaccess rules, to achieve a high ySlow score like i have done on my blog.

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Mobiletuts+ — Mobile Development Tutorials

iOS SDK: Creating an Awesome Carousel

Engage your users with stunning carousels. We’ll look at how easy and clean it can be to implement scrollable, interactive carousels in your iOS applications. With high configurability, you can have 3D, flat, rotating, and endless scrolling arrays for data, images, or buttons.

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PhoneGap From Scratch: Introduction

Want to learn how to use PhoneGap, but don’t know where to get started? Join us as we put together “Sculder”, not only a tribute to an excellent science fiction TV series, but a fully-fledged native mobile application for the believer in you!

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Mobile Flash is Far From Dead: Setting the Record Straight

In light of recent announcements from Adobe, there has been a lot of confusion over the state of the Flash Platform – specifically in regard to Flash content on mobile devices. This article seeks to clarify many of the misconceptions that exist by addressing the main points of confusion around these announcements regardless of the initial, monumental, and absolutely unbelievable blunders from failed public (and private) relations messaging and general marketing surrounding these announcements.

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Create A Stylized Character With Maya And ZBrush, Basic Blocking

Shaun Keenan — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 09:38:50 +0000

This entry is part 1 of 0 in the series Create A Stylized Character With Maya And ZBrush

In this new multi-part tutorial series, Shaun Keenan shares the techniques and workflow he uses to create characters using Maya and ZBrush. In the first lesson Shaun will demonstrate basic blocking techniques to quickly build a sculpt-able base mesh for the character’s clothing, which will then be exported to ZBrush for detailing and refinement in part two.

Video 1

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Video 2

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Video 3

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Video 4

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Video 5

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Video 6

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Video 7

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Video 8

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Editor Note* Video #8 Contains No Audio!

Note: click the ‘Monitor’ icon to view tutorial in full-screen HD.

Create A 3D Floor Plan Model From An Architectural Schematic In Blender

Karan Shah — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 09:00:40 +0000

In this tutorial you’ll learn how to create a 3D floor plan model from an 2D architectural drawing. Karan Shah will show you some simple, yet effective techniques for constructing the walls, windows and doors following a basic interior schematic in Blender. With the model complete we’ll add materials and textures, and do a final render of the scene.

Step 1

Floor Plans are simply a drawing or a diagram showing a top view of a site layout. You can see the picture to understand the meaning of some basic symbols used. More can be found
here (pdf).

Step 2

In a new file, select all objects with the ‘A’ key and press ‘Del’ to delete them. Press ‘N’ to bring up our View properties. In the Background Image Panel, add your reference image. Here I have used image courtesy of LiamKeiranCooper Ltd who kept the picture in public domain.

Step 3

Press ’7′ on the NumPad to get into the Top view. Here you can see the background image. The view must be set to ‘orthographic’ in order to see the image. You can toggle between the ortho and perspective views with the ’5′ key on the Numpad. Press Shift+A and add a Plane.

Step 4

With the Plane selected, press ‘TAB’ to get into ‘Edit’ mode. Select all the vertices with the ‘A’ key, or press ‘B’ to drag select them. Press ‘G’ and move them to the top left corner. You toggle the viewport shading between solid and wireframe with ‘Z’ key. Press ‘S’ and move the mouse to scale them down to fit the width of the wall (as shown below.)

Step 5

Now we will cover all the black solid areas i.e. the walls. This will include the windows as they are part of the walls and will be added later. Any type of door whether it’s a slider or normal, is to be left out. Select the bottom two vertices (press ‘B’ to drag select or Hold ‘Shift’ and Right click for multiple select.) And move them down just before the wall turns left. Press ‘E’ and extrude the wall again until you reach the edge.

Step 6

Select the right two vertices and press ‘E’ to extrude, and match the reference.

Step 7

Now, in order to extrude out a face from the middle, we need to add an Edge Loop. Hover your mouse over the face, and press ‘CTRL+R’ and Left Click to confirm. Move the mouse up and down and then Left click again to confirm its position.

Step 8

Create another edge loop just below the previous one using the same method, matching the width of the wall to be extruded.

Step 9

Select the two vertices and extrude the wall.

Step 10

Create another edge loop on the corner and extrude the right edge.

Step 11

Using the techniques above (extrude and edge loop division) fill all the solid black lines of the reference image with the mesh.

Step 12

To start a new separate wall, duplicate the last edge and then start extruding it. Select the last edge and press ‘Shift+D’ to Duplicate it, and left click to confirm. Move it with the Move control widget or press ‘G’ key of the keyboard. And continue extruding the mesh along to match the reference.

Step 13

Complete the walls with the techniques you learned from above steps.

Step 14

After completing the wall, select all the vertices and then press ‘E’ to extrude them along the Z axis. Now we see that the structure is taking shape. The height should be equivalent to a door.

Step 15

Press ‘Ctrl+TAB’ and select ‘Edge’ in the mesh select mode menu. Select the top two corner edges of a door (hold shift + right click to multiple select) and press ‘F’ to make a Face between them. Do this for all doors. Refer to your image and always check from all views.

Step 16

Press ’3′ on the Numpad to get into side view, and Press ‘Z’ to get into wireframe view so that we can see all the vertices behind are visible and can be selected. Press ‘B’ to drag select all the top vertices or edges, then Press ‘E’ to extrude them. This will reach the final height of the wall.

Step 17

Now we will place the windows. Press ‘TAB’ to get out of the Edit mode, and in object mode, press ‘Shift+A’ and add a ‘Cube’. In the Top view, size (press ‘S’ to scale) and place it where the window is on the reference image.

In the side view, the top part of window should align to the top of door. Press ‘TAB’ to enter into the edit mode to adjust the vertices. Adjust the bottom height of the window too. The width of the cube should be such that it should be half inside and half outside. See image below.

Step 18

Select the Wall mesh with Right click, and in the Properties button window, click on ‘Object Modifiers’.

Click on ‘Add Modifiers’ and select ‘Boolean’.

Step 19

In the Boolean modifiers panel, select ‘Cube’ in the Object, and ‘Difference’ under ‘Operation’.

To see the effect – Select the cube and press ‘H’ to hide it. You will see that there is a “hole” in the wall the size and shape of the cube. Press ‘Alt+H’ to ‘Unhide’ the Cube.

Step 20

Now select the Cube (window) and in the ‘Edit’ mode, select all the vertices and press ‘Shift+D’ to make a duplicate. Place this new cube in the location of the next window.

Now press ‘Tab’ to get out of ‘Edit’ mode, and select the Wall mesh and press ‘Apply’ in the ‘Boolean’ Modifier panel. The holes are now part of the geometry.

Move the Cube to see the windows.

Step 21

Similarly create all the needed windows with this Boolean modifier. Try doing them one by one, adjust the size and position of the cube according to the specific window.

Step 22

Now we will create the Floor. In ‘Object’ mode and in the Top view, press ‘Shift+A’ and add a ‘Plane’. Press ‘Tab’ to get into ‘Edit’ mode and adjust the vertices accordingly so that it covers the walls. Create Edge Loops or Extrude the edges where necessary.

Step 23

Make sure that there are no gaps between the edges of the floor and walls. Also in the Side view, move the floor down so it’s aligned with the bottom of the walls.

Step 24

To make doors, add a new’Cube’. And in ‘Edit’ mode, press / on the Numpad for Local view (this will show only the selected object.) In the Top view, Move or Scale the vertices to give it a nice shape. Refer to the image for the height and width.

In the Top view, and in ‘Edit’ mode. Move all the vertices of the door along the Y axis, so that the center point of the object (orange dot) should be at the corner (see image.) This will set the transform orientation of the object from that corner. Press ‘TAB’ to get out of edit mode and then press’R’ to Rotate and see the difference.

Step 25

While in the edit mode, add a new ‘Cylinder’. Rotate and scale it down to create the doorknob (you can add more details if you like.) Press ‘TAB’ to get out of edit mode.

Step 26

With the help of the reference image, place the doors in the correct positions (press ‘Shift+D’ to make duplicates.)

Step 27

Now we will create the window frame. Start with another new ‘Cube’, and press ‘TAB’ to enter into ‘Edit’ mode. Press the ‘Z’ key to toggle wireframe view, so that we can select the back vertices too. Press ’3′ on the Numpad to get into side view and then extrude the faces as shown in the image to make the window frame. Press ‘TAB’ to exit out of edit mode, and press / on the numpad again to get back to the scene.

Step 28

Scale and place the window frames on the walls. Make duplicates and place them according to the image.

Step 29

Now we will add a texture to the floor. Right Click on the Floor object to select it. And in the Properties window, click on the ‘Materials’ Icon. Add a New material and name it ‘Floor’, increase the ‘Diffuse’ intensity and reduce the ‘Specular’ intensity.

Step 30

Next we will add an image to the floor. (I got mine from Here.) Click on the ‘Texture’ icon next to the Material icon, and then Click on the ‘New’ button. Select ‘Image or Movie’ for the Type and in the Image panel, click on "Open’ and browse for the image.

Step 31

You can preview the texture in the 3d View. Press ‘N’ to bring up the ‘View Properties’ and in the ‘Display’ panel, select GLSL in the ‘Shading" menu (you’ll need to add some lights in the 3d view to see the texture.) Now press ‘N’ again to hide the view properties panel.

Back to the Image Texture properties, scroll down to the Mapping Panel and increase the Size of X and Y to 5 or 6 depending upon your image file.

Step 32

Now to add a separate floor to the Bathrooms, we will add a new ‘Plane’ and adjust it’s dimensions and place it just above the wooden floor so that it’s hidden.

Apply an image, just like we did on the floor (I got mine from Here.) Duplicate the Plane and adjust it’s geometry by scaling and extruding for the second bathroom.

Step 33

Select the walls and add a New material to them. Choose any color and Increase the ‘Diffuse’ intensity and set the ‘Specular’ to 0.0

Similarly assign the materials to the windows and doors. You can assign the same material to any object by selecting the material from the list.

Step 34

Now we will prepare the scene for rendering. Make sure you are Not in ‘Edit’ mode (press ‘TAB’ to toggle Edit mode on/off.) Press ’7′ on the Numpad to get into the Top view, then press ‘Shift+A’ to add a camera.

Rotate and place it however you like. Press ’0′ on the Numpad to get into camera view.

Step 35

Click on the ‘World’ settings and change the ‘Horizon Colour’ to white, then turn on ‘Ambient Occlusion’ and in the ‘Gather’ panel, increase the samples to 16. In the 3D view delete any lights if they exists.

Step 36

Click on the ‘Render Settings’ button in the property window, and change the Dimensions (resolution) to your desired size. Down in the ‘Output’ panel, choose the file format for your render.

Press ‘F12′ or click on the ‘Image’ button in the render panel. Press ‘F3′ or click on ‘Image > Save image as‘ to save the image.

Your 3D Floor map is now ready!

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Cgtuts+ Hollywood Film Studio Logo Animation Series – 20th Century Fox, Part 2

Antonio Cerri — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 12:20:00 +0000

This entry is part 2 of 1 in the series Cgtuts+ Hollywood Film Studio Logo Animation Series

Today we bring you the conclusion of Antonio Cerri’s recreation of the iconic 20th Century Fox Logo in Cinema 4D and After Effects, the first tutorial in our “Hollywood Film Studio Logo Animation Series”. In part 2 we’ll analyze the creation of the spotlights, sky map, mountains and city skyline. As well as add materials, textures and ambient lights. Finally we’ll complete the project by compositing our render passes together in After Effects.

“The Film Studio Logo Animation Series” will cover the creation of popular logo animations from the biggest studios in Hollywood, including Dreamworks Animation, 20th Century Fox, Warner Brothers Entertainment and Paramount pictures, to name just a few.

These tutorials will teach you exactly what goes into creating professional high quality logo animations and intros and will be authored by professional artist Antonio Cerri, the main man behind the popular “Hollywood Movie Title Series” that runs over on our sister site “Aetuts+”

Tutorial

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Note: click the ‘Monitor’ icon to view tutorial in full-screen HD.

Also Check Out These Other Related Tutorials From Aetuts+

Hollywood Movie Title Series