Archive for September, 2010
Photoshop – View Print Size
Sep 30th
Have you ever tried to use Adobe® Photoshop® Print Size preview and been bewildered on why it fails? If so, this might help explain things to you. Adobe® Photoshop® doesn’t know your screen resolution so it uses a default 72 screen resolution setting.
If you go to your Adobe® Photoshop® preferences (ctrl+k) and pick the Units and Rulers tab you’ll see a box that reads Screen Resolution. You’ll more than likely, unless someone has changed it, see a 72 in the box. You need to change the setting, one time, on each of your production monitors.
Take out a tape measure and measure your screen, but don’t include your monitor frame. When measuring don’t measure diagonally; measure either horizontally or vertically. In my case my screen measures 20.5 inches horizontally.
Go to your computers display settings and choose Screen Resolution. When you choose Screen Resolution from your desktop you’ll see a box labeled Resolution. In my case my screen resolution is 1920.
Divide Screen Resolution by screen dimension, in my case I get 93.658.
Paste the number you get by dividing your screen resolution by your horizontal viewable space, in my case I get 93.658.
My illustration is formatted to be printed at 8.5″ x 11″ and my screen image is to scale!
Photorealistic Rendering
Sep 28th
V-Ray Render Setup
Sep 24th
Good morning! I have been bombarded with request to explain my render setup for my strip mall render.
The render was accomplished using V-Ray 1.50.SP5 for Autodesk® 3ds Max® Design. Post production was done using Adobe® Photoshop® CS5.
In V-Ray you have hundreds of little toggles and spinners that control your render. V-Ray uses a very advanced algorithm and I would suggest, to help maintain your sanity, to learn what all the settings do.
Below you’ll find some screen grabs of my workflow:
Leave “clamp output” unchecked so you can access all that 32-bit floating point pixel information in Photoshop.
More to come!
Subscription Advantage Pack for 3ds Max 2011 and 3ds Max Design 2011
Sep 10th
Subscription Advantage Pack for 3ds Max 2011 and 3ds Max Design 2011
Features and Benefits
Overview
The Autodesk® Subscription Advantage Pack for Autodesk® 3ds Max® 2011 software integrates state-of-the-art technology from renowned industry companies who are working with Autodesk to revolutionize rendering and simulation workflows. Featuring lightweight, resolution-independent procedural textures; GPU-accelerated rigid-body dynamics; and one of the world’s first physically accurate “point-and-shoot” renderers, the Advantage Pack for 3ds Max 2011 delivers cutting-edge tools that help leverage the latest hardware advances to help customers maintain their competitive advantage.
Top Features and Benefits
Substance Procedural Textures
Achieve a vast range of look variations with a new library of up to 75 Substance procedural textures. These dynamic, resolution-independent textures have a tiny memory and disk space footprint, making them very good for exporting to games engines via the Allegorithmic Substance Air middleware offering; integration is currently provided for Unreal® Engine 3 game engine, Emergent’s Gamebryo game engine, and Unity. Alternatively, textures can be baked to bitmaps for use with certain renderers. Some examples of dynamically editable and animatable parameters are: brick distribution, surface aging, and mortar thickness in a brick wall; pupil size, eye color, and extent of veining in an eye texture; and the age, roughness, curb borders, and lane markings of a street texture.
PhysX Rigid-Body Dynamics
Create more compelling, dynamic rigid-body simulations directly in the 3ds Max viewport. The multi-threaded NVIDIA® PhysX® engine supports static, dynamic, and kinematic rigid bodies (the latter for rag doll simulations), and a number of constraints: Rigid, Slide, Hinge, Twist, Universal, Ball & Socket, and Gear. Animators can more quickly create a wider range of realistic dynamic simulations, and can also use the toolset for modeling: for example, creating a randomly placed landscape of rocks. Assigning physical properties – friction, density, and bounciness – is as simple as choosing from a set of initial preset real-world materials and tweaking parameters as required.
iray Photorealistic Renderer
Creating realistic images has never been easier with 3ds Max, using the newly integrated iray® rendering technology from mental images. Another major milestone in the Rendering Revolution, iray enables artists to set up their scene, press “render,” and get predictable, photo-real results without worrying about rendering settings just like a “point-and-shoot” camera. Artists can focus on their creative vision as they intuitively use real world materials, lighting, and settings to more accurately portray the physical world; iray progressively refines the image until the desired level of detail is achieved. iray works with standard multi-core CPUs. However, NVIDIA CUDA-enabled GPU hardware will significantly accelerate the rendering process.
Monitor AutoCAD/AutoCAD-based applications’ virtual memory usage
Sep 10th
Overview
Use the Autodesk Performance Monitor to gauge the virtual memory utilized by running versions of AutoCAD and AutoCAD-based vertical products.
The Performance Monitor is a Windows desktop gadget that provides a color-coded status bar indicating the level of usage of virtual memory by AutoCAD products. To get the best performance from Windows applications, it is better to use physical memory. When running low on physical memory, powerful programs like Autodesk applications are forced to use disk as memory. When this happens, memory intensive applications become less responsive. The Performance Monitor for AutoCAD provides you with feedback on how your system resources are being used as you work with your designs. The technology preview supports Windows 7 and Windows Vista at this time. Both 32-bit and 64-bit systems are supported.
Download Now
AutoCAD 2011 to be Available on Mac, iPad and iPhone
Sep 9th
AutoCAD 2011 to be Available on Mac, iPad and iPhone
Autodesk will be releasing AutoCAD for Mac software this fall. It takes full advantage of the Mac OS X platform, with an intuitive, graphical user interface that makes it easy to bring your ideas to life. And because it’s AutoCAD, you’re working natively in DWG format, so you can easily share files with clients, suppliers, and partners around the world, regardless of platform.
In addition, Autodesk recently released AutoCAD WS. AutoCAD WS is a free companion application for AutoCAD software that gives AutoCAD customers the ability to view, edit, and share DWG™ files through a web browser and on select mobile devices, including Apple® iPhone™ and Apple® iPad™. There will also be a plug-in for AutoCAD software that enables customers to access AutoCAD WS directly from inside their AutoCAD software.












