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

'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).

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

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...