This tutorial of the Florence Design Academy (www.florencedesignacademy.com), the leading Design School in Europe, explains how to create a glowing material by using architectural and standard materials. Additionally it will explain how to use the Glare shader to improve glow effects.

Glowing material

The Making Of 'AH1Z Viper Helicopter'

This tutorial by  Martin Kostov and in this article I will have the honor of explaining the creation of my image “AH-1Z Viper Helicopter”. First of all, I want to start by telling you that I did not work alone on this project. The high poly modeling was done by my friend and colleague Ivo Jovchev. We wanted to create a good piece of art and at the same time wanted to keep the poly count as low as possible. The first step we took was to look for references. We were lucky and found a lot of high quality photos on the internet. I cannot stress enough how important it is to have good references (Fig.01 – 03).

Material Tutorial: Glowing Material with Mental Ray

For this material you must use Mental Ray.

Glowing materials are very useful to create light effects. For example a neon-light effect.

This kind of material is a light-emitting material. It will create light and shadows like an Omni Light.

Let's check out the steps we are going to do:

1. Change in the material editor the Standard material to an Architectural -image 1-.

2. Choose the color of your glowing material in the diffuse color slot.

3. Now go to the setting "luminance cd/m2". This setting allows you to create a material which is able to emit light. This setting is very similar to the standard "self-illumination" slot. But in the architectural material you can add a value which is much more higher than 100. The higher the value the brighter the material's light emission. 

'Displacement Map Chainmail'

by Tom Isaksen

Software Used :

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3ds Max and mental ray

Step 1 : Modeling

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In this tutorial I want to show a relatively easy technique for making a chainmail in 3ds Max using a displacement map and mental ray. In this example I’ll show how to make the displacement map and how to get a good quality render with as few artifacts as possible using a simple Arch & Design material. The idea is that you can use this setup to create a tileable chainmail texture like I used on this knight (Fig.02).

Making Of Horned Man

The Making Of Horned Man by Paul Large, website www.opifex.co.uk , email : 0x_my_s0x@hotmail.com . The image started as a sketch inside ZBrush and grew from there into the final image almost by accident. Sketching characters in ZBrush is a great way to concept ideas, mess around with forms and come up with cool new things. After the sketch I retopologised the head section of the model and from there used the polypaint tools in ZBrush to create the textures. Rendering was handled with Mental Ray in 3ds Max. I find Mental Ray to be the most accessible of the available rendering systems for Max, and the fact that Max already comes with it makes it great. Also, having used XSI for many years, the creation of shaders in Mental Ray has become second nature to me

source : www.3dtotal.com

Key Highlights of Autodesk 3ds Max 2010

Innovative Creative Tools

• A new Graphite modeling and texturing system introduces at least 100 additional creative tools and helps artists explore and more rapidly iterate their ideas.
• The addition of render-like effects in the viewport display - such as soft shadowing, exposure control and ambient occlusion - offers near photo-real quality for faster decision making.

Powerful New Referencing and Scene Management Capabilities

• Artists can create robust referencing workflows to help organize complex scenes more easily by treating multiple objects and scenes as a single Container object.
• A new Material Explorer helps to simplify the way artists interact with objects and materials, making iterations much easier even in highly complex scenes.
• The new multithreaded xView mesh analyzer technology helps to significantly reduce errors by providing in-viewport reporting on several types of mesh.

Enhanced Software Interoperability and Pipeline Integration

• 3ds Max 2010 is the first animation package to integrate mental images' powerful mental mill technology. This allows users to develop, test and maintain hardware-agnostic shaders and complex shader graphs for hardware and software rendering with real-time visual feedback.
• Enhanced OBJ support and ProOptimizer technology provide improved interoperability with Autodesk Mudbox software.
• Additional support for C# and .NET gives developers the access they need to customize, extend and integrate 3ds Max into their existing pipelines. Read More ....
  

Source : usa.autodesk.com

Red Vertex Foliage Tutorial

This tutorial used 3dsmax and vray, With very large scene and plants to make impression of a forest. Read more...

Source : www.evermotion.org

Announcement: free CAT for Subscription customers!

Autodesk announce release of plug-in CAT for subscription program. Subcribers will recieve great tool for character animation in the price of almost one thousand US dollar.

Autodesk® 3ds Max® CAT software is a complete character animation toolset for Autodesk® 3ds Max® 2009 and Autodesk® 3ds Max® Design 2009 software. With this latest addition of Character Animation Tools (CAT) to the 3ds Max 3ds Max Design software, Autodesk continues to demonstrate its industry leadership in character animation by providing artists with even more flexibility to create complex 3D characters and animations inside the award winning 3ds Max software. 3ds Max CAT offers artists in the film, post-production, design visualization, and games industries an environment to produce better animations faster. Read more...