demoreel 2010 from art mak on Vimeo.

My demoreel, still in progress!

Software used:
3D Studio Max, Vray, Photoshop, After-Effects

Credits:
Music by Audio Delux
Audi R8 from Turbosquid
00:10 Model by 3DAllusions.com
00:30 Room design by SOM

In this tutorial, we will take the scene that we created in Part 1 (dynamics) and render it with caustics ON. So lets get started:

1. Create an omni light in top viewport, above the water pool. Go to modify panel and input the following omni light parameters:
To get the “Vray light properties” window, right-click on the light. In the vray light properties window it is important to to set high values for “caustic subdivs” (between 1500-3000 is a good value), and very high values for “caustic multiplier” (at least 25,000) for the caustics to be visible.

2. Make water material:

3. Activate caustics by going to “Render (F10) – Render Setup – Vray:Caustics tab”, after some research, I found out that those numbers work pretty well:

Here are my render settings that I used to render the caustic animation, its all pretty standard, I marked where I changed some numbers from their default values, also I used Gamma 1.8 for linear color-mapping. There is a very good tutorial about gamma set-up here: aversis gamma tutorial

So by now you should be able to see some caustics going on, but it just doesn’t look too exciting enough, here are couple of things I did to make them stand out more:

4. I added more balls (copies of the original ball) to the Rigid Body Collection by following same steps like in Part 1 tutorial, this would create more waves and therefore, more visible caustics:

5. Finally, I increased the intensity of the omni light to 2.0, this really emphasized the caustics!

This concludes the two part tutorial about water dynamics and vray caustics, if you have any questions, please leave a comment and I will do my best to respond with further explanation.

Thanks for stopping by!

-Art

I finally had the time to create this tutorial about water dynamics and caustics in 3d studio max and vray. I divided this into two parts, part one deals with “reactor” and how to achieve effect of ball dropping into water. Part 2 is all about caustics. Here we go:

1. Go to “Customize – Units” and make sure your units are set as the above picture, sometimes the reactor will not work well with units like feet and inches, so I use generic units a lot when making this kind of stuff.

2. Make a plane (see thumbnail):

Length = 1060 (60 segments)
Width = 430 (40 segments)

3. Now create pool walls and floor using boxes, each wall should be a seperate box and make sure they don’t overlap, there should be a small gap between them. Reactor doesn’t like intersections! I applied sub-object material to the walls to get the tiles on the inside (it is one object).

4. Go to “Create tab – Space Warps – Reactor – Water”, click and drag in top viewport to create water plane modifier. Make it similar size as your plane from step 2.

5. Position the water modifier on top of your plane from step 2. Click on “Bind to Space Warp” from top toolbar (see image). Click and drag from plane to water modifier. This will create a bind, and reactor animation will automatically transfer to your plane later.

6. Create a sphere.

7. To activate reactor toolbar, right click on empty space on your top toolbar menu and select “reactor”, this will open a new toolbar with many icons. Now, select first icon and click in the middle of your scene, this will place the RBCollection object into your scene, the location of this object is not important.

8. Select the RBCollection object and go to “modify” tab, click on “Pick” or “Add” and pick the pool walls, floor, and a sphere. Do not touch the water plane.

9. Almost there!
Now we need to assign mass to sphere so when it hits the water modifier will make waves.

Select the sphere. Go to “Utilities – Reactor – Properties”. Make Mass 100, and make sure “Bounding Sphere” is checked and “Unyielding” is unchecked, just like the above image:

In the “Preview & Animation” tab, click “Create Animation”. This is it!
3D Studio Max will take all the real-world physics and calculate the animation for you.

IMPORTANT: make sure your time frame is set to 0 on your main timeline on the bottom of the screen, before you click on create animation, otherwise, max will create keys that don’t start at 0. Do that for everytime you click on “Create Animation”.

10. If you followed all the step then you should get the wave effect on the surface of your plane, at this step, it is OK to hide the water modifier and just leave your original plane.

11. I had to increase the Mass of the ball in order to get the illusion half-sinking / floating. Don’t forget that you must click “Create Animation” everytime you make any change to Mass or any other reactor properties.

11b. Also to make waves higher, you can increase the strength of the water modifier.

12. Now to make the ball move more across the surface of water, I added a wind modifier.

From reactor toolbar select an icon that looks like a chicken with an arrow and click somewhere in your scene to add it. Orient it so it is pointing towards the ball. Set wind speed to 15,000 in the modify tab.

Go to Reactor again and click on “Create Animation” once more.

13. The ball should now move toward the edge of the pool and hit a wall.

And thats how to make waves by dropping a ball into the pool!

Now you are ready to for Part 2 (caustics).
-Art

Another texture baking test using vray renderer inside of 3d studio max 2009. I tried to use gobo-effect lighting, like the use in live performances on stage and stuff or on shows like Jay Leno, so it is not smudged or anything (this is the actual lighting set-up). The only blurry thing is the quality of the baked texture (512×512), but its just a test anyway! Its so cool, when all the textures were baked and I re-applied them to the objects, I could rotate around in viewport and see my scene fully lit (without any lights!). You can see in the thumbnails, those are sceenshots directly from max:

Here is short animation, check out the render time per frame (2 seconds!) instead of 40 seconds!

This time, I did two steps:

Step 1: bake textures for all objects in the scene.

Step 2: render fly-thru animation.

Before baking, it took about 40 seconds to render 1 frame (800 x 480px), but with baked textures it took roughly 2 seconds per frame! Also, I didn’t even use any GI and lights to render the animation, because all the lights and shadows are baked in.

Next step, I want to learn how to incorporate this scene or different scene into real-time interactive experience, so that people can walk around instead of just watch the animation!

Here is the baked texture (I changed color in photoshop and added logo):

Here are some interesting results that I got by applying the same map to the room walls and floor, and then just using UV-Map to scale and rotate the texture:

There are no lights in the scene, all the light is coming from vraylightmtl.

Post-production of house in japan from arthur makhnev on Vimeo.

Modeling of House in Japan from arthur makhnev on Vimeo.

I was also wondering if you guys watch the new show called “Flashforward”, because many people say that this show tries to appeal to Lost fans. They even had Oceanic Airlines ad in the background in one of the scenes. But today I watched episode 3, it has to do with 137 seconds, which is how long the people blacked out for on entire planet. What is interesting is how they got 137, it is from hebrew word Kaballah, when spelled in hebrew it will add up to 137.

So this kind of made me think, and try to find out what Lost numbers (4,8,15,16,23,42) mean in hebrew. Here is a little research I did:

4 – Letter Dalit – The image of Daleth is a gate, an entrance, and an exit. For the initiated person Daleth is the gate or entrance to the inner Light, to Knowledge and Wisdom, to order and structure, and to a new foundation on which new life can be built.

8 – Letter Hheth – Hhaith is the term for the profession of a tailor; and hiyeth is the action of sewing. Both word imply the making of a garment. In the spiritual sense a robe is the symbol of the physical body. The soul has taken on a physical body like man dresses himself with a garment. Hmmm… didn’t Jacob do something like than in Season 5?

15 and 16 is really strange! Those numbers are exceptions, they represent the names of God, but I couldn’t find the actual names…but could it be two Gods?? Jacob and the other guy, Gods?

23 – the only thing I found was some passage on google, passage number 23 and it contains this:

“For there is no enchantment with Jacob, neither is there any divination with Israel; now is it said of Jacob and of Israel: ‘What hath God wrought!”

42 – I couldn’t really calculate and find letter for this number, because I don’t really know hebrew, but here is what I found from wikipedia:

There were 42 Ancient Egyptian Gods in Egypt and in order to get to heaver (I think), the guy had to name all of them or else…

In Kaballah, 42 is the number with which God creates the Universe, and it represents Endless or Infinity.

Also note, there are six seasons and six numbers, could this also mean something?

4 – Season 1 (entrance)
8 – Season 2 (soul searching and related stuff / faith vs fact?)
15 – Season 3 (God 1, perhaps Jacob’s nemesis)
16 – Season 4 (God 2)
23 – Season 5 (Jacob / time travel)
42 – Season 6 (creation of the universe or actually back to number 4 / the exit?)

Number 108 (sum of all numbers) – couldn’t find much, but might be even more significant then all this research, and perhaps the answer to LOST!