3d Material practice

[mewrei]

I was practicing with mental ray and the material editor in 3ds Max 7 today. This is the finished rendered version

http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/26210194/

[Boris]

I like it, very abstract.

Have you herd of a plugin for max called Final Render Stage 1? It has an option in the material editor called caustics which can simulate the refraction found in either thick glass or water.

Boris's saying of the day:

When you've got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.

[mewrei]

Never heard of it. I'm more of a Cinema 4D guy. I'm just diving into 3ds Max.

I usually use mental ray for rending which is an excellent engine for rendering. It just takes forever.

http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/26254876/

That took around 40 minutes to render.

[Boris]

Final Render is probably one of the best plugins I have ever used except for maybe Thinking Particles.

Boris's saying of the day:

An optimist believes that we live in a perfect world, a pessimists fears that this is true.

[Boris]

www.deviantart.com/deviation/26406019/

This is an example of Caustics in Final Render Stage 1. It's just my Mewtwo polygonal model with a basic simulated glass material applied and a spot light.

Boris's saying of the day:

I never retreat; I just advance in a different direction.

[mewrei]

Yeah for stuff like that I'm using Cinema 4D or XSI. 3ds is great but the need to buy so many plugins is unnessesary.

You should get in contact with my modeler for my HL2 mod. His stuff is excellent. Then again his job is 3d stuff. I hit the jackpot by getting a professional 3d modeler.

[Boris]

I only have this amount of plugins for Max and Maya because I rent processor time to people who are either too impatient or don't have enough memory to render their work, but if enough people start coming to me wanting XSI I will get. But Max will be the choice of most people I know because it works so well with auto cad, but as I always say "time will tell".

Boris's saying of the day:

I don't know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.

[mewrei]

I'm working on setting up a PS3 cluster for rendering. You might want to follow suit. Each unit is uber-cheap and designed to work together.

The PPC based central processor assigns instructions to each of the 8 SPEs which process data tremendously fast. IBM has commented that it would be tremendously easy to port this kind of processing across physical units as well. You could have one or two PS3's assigning information to 10-20 other PS3's.

Floating point performance per PS3 is said to be 2Terraflops

[Boris]

If you're talking about the Playstation 3, than I have to say that Sony is on my black list of companies that I will not buy products from because their products did not live up to their promises. But I should also warn you about listening to Sony about the power of the Playstation 3 because think back to the promises that they made of the Playstation 2 and did it ever for fill them?

I'm going to stick to Pentium 4's, Intel has never given me any grief.

But it is an interesting idea assuming all the hardware live up to expectations, but time will tell as it always dose.

Boris's saying of the day:

Morons forgive and forget, wise people forgive but do not forget, I never forgive nor forget.

[mewrei]

The Pentium 4 is a terrible processor. CAD123 has taken one apart(figuratively) and they're horrible processors. Their floating point performance is terrible. I'm an advocate of AMD A64 and the Pentium Pro architectures. The Pentium Pro is old as dirt but still works great in the Pentium M processors. A64's are expensive and not many programs can utilize 64-bit mode.

I have an affinity for the PS2. Its 128-bit 333MHz processor works excellent in Linux. Problem is not many programs are 128-bit.

The reason I know the PS3 is going to live up to specs is because IBM is the one giving those specs, not Sony. If they's one company that's going to deliver its IBM. They are after all the company that just came out with the Blue Gene super computer architecture with floating point performances in the picoflops. That, my friend, is fast. Why couldn't their PowerPC based Cell processor crunch numbers like crazy as well? We've seen excellent performances in the Mac PowerPC G5

[Ctrl Alt Del 123]

To add to what Mewrei said: The Intel Pentium 4 was made by Intel's marketing department and should have been sold as a foot warmer.

From a performance point of view, Intel's Pentium M at up to 2.1 GHz is not too far behind the fastest P4 processors, although it has to get by with the aged 855 platform and does not support Hyper-Threading. The real nice thing about the Pentium M is its remarkably low thermal power of only 21 W, which is approximately 80% less than what a fast Pentium 4 produces. On a performance per watt basis, the M beats the 4 almost 21:1. If the M had dual channel, better SSE, and 64 bit extensions, it would make the 4 look like a joke and a moment of Intel history worth forgetting.

[mewrei]

Originally posted by Ctrl Alt Del 123
To add to what Mewrei said: The Intel Pentium 4 was made by Intel's marketing department and should have been sold as a foot warmer.

From a performance point of view, Intel's Pentium M at up to 2.1 GHz is not too far behind the fastest P4 processors, although it has to get by with the aged 855 platform and does not support Hyper-Threading. The real nice thing about the Pentium M is its remarkably low thermal power of only 21 W, which is approximately 80% less than what a fast Pentium 4 produces. On a performance per watt basis, the M beats the 4 almost 21:1. If the M had dual channel, better SSE, and 64 bit extensions, it would make the 4 look like a joke and a moment of Intel history worth forgetting.
We may see that very soon.

On P4 heat levels: My room is the farthest away from our heat source AND over our garage making it the coldest room in the house. I have a secondary master suite so its a big room. I've had my computer on all day rendering, and its kept my room at a sufficiently comfortable 70 degrees farenheight XDDDDD

[Boris]

There will always be a better processor. But the Pentium 4 has served me well.

Boris's saying of the day:

Morons forgive and forget, wise people forgive but do not forget, I never forgive nor forget.

[ShadowedFigure]

Dang, I can't do refraction effects worth crud, everytime I try it never works ?(

[mewrei]

Try the raytrace engine in 3ds Max.