Archive for the ‘Book Progress’ Category
The book is shipping
I’m very pleased to announce the the “Mastering mental ray” book has started to ship! I got my first copy today, and it is really cool to have the final product in my hands. The cover turned out great, and the glossy finish really makes it look like a photograph. The cover image is an example scene from the book, the classic “Sponza Palace Atrium” model from Marko Dabrovic of 3LHD in Zagreb, Croatia. The image was produced in 3ds Max Design 2011 beta with Final Gather and Global Illumination. The quality and realism of the cover owes everything to Marko’s beautiful model.
The book was an incredible amount of work, and all together was in production for over a year. Most of the hard production was in the last 7 months, and on most days I worked from the time I got up in the morning until I couldn’t keep awake at night. In addition to the book I was teaching two classes in the spring and fall, along with other 3d production work.
Writing a book about rendering was, quite frankly, much more time consuming than I imagined at the onset. It is one thing to write about a feature or how to assemble boxes into a building, and it is another things to talk about the techniques of rendering, and to work through the many different possibilities for all the settings to generate concise examples with the desired results. It isn’t more difficult, necessarily, but certainly time consuming. I had things rendering all the time it seemed, and worked continuously on multiple machines in order to be able to test-render scenes and continue to write and build models. The Light Lab used in much of the book was produced by my son and business partner Ryan from a photograph of a spa, and gave some opportunities to examine lighting and other mental ray features in a straightforward scene.
Mark Gerhard was my Technical Editor for the book. He initially pitched the book to Sybex based on a presentation George Matos and I gave, the first “mental ray Seminar” at Flashpoint Academy in spring of last year. Much thanks goes to Mark for pitching the book and being a good mentor/Tech Editor throughout the development of the book. He certainly is the Max guru, and a good friend.
I’m glad the book has shipped, and look forward to writing more and interacting with the readers. Let me know if you have question on the book, and let me know if I got anything wrong! :)
Jenni
The “mental ray Seminar” 2010
On May 20th 2010 I will be hosting the second annual “mental ray Seminar” to be held at Moraine Valley Community College in Palos Hills, IL.
This is a free event sponsored by Autodesk, Moraine Valley Community College, 4D Artists, and Hagerman. Additional details and sponsors will be announced as the event gets closer. If you are interested in providing door prizes, please let me know via email: jenni at mastering-mentalray.com.
Registration details will follow, and registration is required for the live event. Hagerman has generously offered to provide GoToMeeting access to attendees worldwide.
The mr Seminar will be based on my book “Mastering mental ray” and we are planning on covering many highlights from the book. The meeting is tentatively scheduled to start at 8am for breakfast and networking, free lunch from 11:30 to 1, and then more seminar from 1pm to 4pm. Additional networking and socializing time ends at 5pm sharp.
Watch for more details!
Final DVD burned, and another book?
I got the DVD image from Wiley’s production group late last week, and went through the files and checked them again for accuracy. Autodesk changed a few minor things in the latest build so I changed a few files so they will open correctly and find the files they need.
Wiley moved all the book files into a sub-folder to work with their Flash menus, so people will hopefully figure out to go to the “Lesson Files” folder for the folders mentioned in the book. They also moved the IPF files for Irradiance Particles into a separate folder, and again I’m sure people will figure out where the pre-computed files are located.
A friend of mine at NVIDIA asked me if I would be interested in writing a book about the new iray application, which would be great I’m sure, so I’m starting to put together some ideas for what to cover. The book would not be specific to 3ds Max/Design and would potentially cover products from Autodesk and other developers like Dassault. Interesting? Is that something you would like to see?
Jenni
Book development winding down, and more content
At this stage of the game I am busy editing PDFs from the typesetter and making a few changes here and there in wording and also in the images provided with the book. The images, when large and/or viewed on the computer, are clear and understandable. However once they are shrunk to fit on the page sometimes the details you need to see in order to understand my point are blended away. Chapter 3, in particular, I went through and re-rendered a number of images to blow up regions and also boosted the brightness and contrast on some to make the point and display the effect I desired.
I’m also working on additional materials for educators – PowerPoint presentations on each chapter, videos, and additional exercises. There were a lot of things that didn’t make it into the book, despite the generous page count, and I’ll be working through those examples in the coming months. I’m not sure how much will be available free and what may be available in another format, perhaps a DVD ‘extras’. Chapter video introductions/overviews are planned to be made available free on the web site once they are completed. I’m providing these as I believe that some things will be easier to grasp as videos, and being able to hear, see, and do are important to learning and memory.
If you have specific training materials you would find valuable, please let me know. I appreciate feedback as I work to develop the materials.
Jenni
“Mastering mental ray” now available for pre-sale at Amazon.
You can now pre-order the book, and if you use this link http://tinyurl.com/y94ase4 I will make an extra two dollars. Sweet!
It is actually pretty exciting for me, and signals I am nearing the end of the development of the book. I’m getting things organized right now for the chapter video introductions and rendering a few things for the DVD content.
Jenni
Caustics Animation and Book Update
Caustics example from "Mastering mental ray"
My technical Editor Mark Gerhard asked to have an animation made of one of the caustics demos scenes from Chapter 6, “Global Illumination and Caustics”, shown above. The link to the rotating torus image is http://www.mentalray4design.com/mental_ray/Caustics.mov (11mb).
The book is coming along well, and I’m working on edits from a variety of editors, and hope to be finished quite soon. Chapter 2, “Materials and Maps” got a reworking to reduce content in some areas and increase it in others, adding more focus on the Arch & Design material rather than other optimizations in ProMaterials. I’v also go through second drafts of chapters 6, 8, 9 and 10. I’m now going through some edits for a second draft of Chapter 7, “Importons and Irradiance Particles” and then will be looking at chapter overview videos.
Much thanks goes out to Sebastian Dosch of Dosch Design (www.doschdesign.com) for providing a car model and HDRI environments for the book!
Jenni
First Draft of Chapter 10 Done
Finally – the first draft of Chapter 10 is done, the last chapter. It was great to be able to write, “In this last section of the book I cover…”. Now it is a matter of getting back to the numerous edits and corrections for the previous chapters. I get chapters back from various editors at random times. Each editor has their specialty, and the things they are looking for and correct. Mariann is my Acquisitions Editor (AE) and is the one that pitched the book internally at Wiley and is overseeing things. Mark is my Technical Editor (TE) and makes sure everything works and is correct. Jen is my Development Editor (DE) and is responsible for overall content, structure, and deadlines. Now there are Copy Editors (CE) involved as chapters get finalized. The CE is the last stage before actual typesetting, I believe. I’ll then have a PDF to sign off on, although I can still make minor edits as long as the length of a page isn’t increased.
For the final round of edits from the Copy Editor I find that many things are changed that completely change the meaning of what I wrote. They will misinterpret what the technical term represents and rearrange the sentence to match what they think it means, and it then makes no sense at all. So I have to spend a lot of time picking through every edit they made to see if what they changed still makes sense. Reading through their edits, though, will help with my writing as I am training myself to get it right the first time instead of needing them to fix it and send it back for me to then pick through and validate. I can be trained! I’m going through Chapter 5, “Indirect Illumination and Final Gather” right now. Chapter 3′s doc file got corrupted by a script the Wiley provides, we think, and I have to rebuild a big chunk. The backups have the same fatal flaw, so the last rewrite that I did was mostly lost. As I tell my students, it is always easier the second time!
Because of the color format of the book I am limited in the number of pages I can write, and although 400 sounds like a lot, I have been more limited by this number than anything else. When you look at a feature, like Render Elements in Chapter 10, you have to make a decision about what will be included and what will not. You just kinda skip stuff. My instinct is to be thorough and explain every bell and whistle. This book isn’t a “mr Bible”, though, and there isn’t room for all of that, every detail, so I have had to learn to let that go.
Another thing that I didn’t expect to be as challenging was the examples. One thing that Mark, my TE, stressed to me is to make examples that can be done by people and at schools and universities that may have moderate computer resources. Throughout the examples I try to keep things lean and point out ways that you can speed up the rendering of an image. I also provide pre-computed Final Gather, GI and Irradiance Particle files, along with the final result images so that you don’t even have to wait for the image to render. As an instructor, though, I don’t necessarily want the students to have everything handed to them. As Mark says, though, at a seminar you don’t have the luxury of waiting 30, 60, 90 minutes for a rendering.
So, do you scale down the examples to fit the least common denominator of computer or available seminar time? I’m being a bit facetious, but the book is “Mastering mental ray” not “Sorta Mastering mental ray”. I had heard a comment from a Max user talking about a different mr book with the comment “I never look at these books and thing ‘Wow’ and see great examples.” I’m paraphrasing, but you get the idea. So I weigh these things as I look at the examples I’m creating. There will definitely be extra projects on the DVD, whether it is content taken out of the book or large projects that were not reasonable to render.
I got a draft copy of the cover concept, and rather than their typical “Mastering” cover they have been using it shows a Sponza Palace Atrium image from the book, which is great. The name has also been shortened to just “Mastering mental ray”, and on their end it always said “Mastering mental ray”, but I think showing the application will certainly help users. Everything, with few exceptions, is geared towards 3ds Max 2010. I even have a few Max 2009 files, but not many. I’ll try and make some FBX files for anything that can’t be opened in 2009. It go to be too much to try and get it all working as Max 2009.
Cover Concept for Mastering mental ray
Jenni
Chapters 7, 8 and 9 done, and in the home stretch.
The first drafts of Chapter 7, “Importons and Irradiance Particles”, Chapter 8, “Effects”, and Chapter 9, “mr for Architecture” were completed over the last few weeks. The final chapter, “mr for Design”, is due on the 7th, and then I start getting back into revisions and corrections to the remaining chapters.
The mental ray “web brain” is being updated regularly: http://webbrain.com/u/10FG It is still very-much in development, but new content appears regularly, and this will accelerate as I get into the final stages of the book. The downloadable brain will not be available until after the book ships. It is my hope that this becomes a companion to users of the book, and mental ray/3ds Max users in general. I appreciate your feedback.
We (4DA) got exceptionally busy with a couple rush projects, so that set me a bit behind where I need to be for the book. We completed an architectural animation and a huge solar power plant animation in the course of two weeks. The solar power project, in particular, was exceptionally challenging. We did a project for this group last spring and had a lot of the 3d models cleaned-up and ready, however we enlisted the help of my friend George Matos, Melissa Marcy of Virtuality, and Tom Munz of Pulse Studios. We’ll get some images up in the gallery, once the gallery is in-place. I’m thinking about switching from the PHPBB to the CPG-Nuke CMS to combine PHBB with the Coppermine photo gallery, as I’ve done with other sites.
Our 3December celebration is on December 3rd 2009 at Flashpoint Academy in Chicago, and it looks like it will be wall-to-wall-people and a great event!
More soon!
Jenni
Back to the book..k
The first draft of Chapter 6 is done.
The first draft of Chapter 6, “Global Illumination and Caustics” is done. As usual I’ll probably find a few things I missed in the draft, but that is why it is called a ‘draft’, right? And that is why I have great Technical and Development Editors.
GI Photon Path
Books, it seems, have a number of things that affect their content. The author, certainly, and their ideas for what should and should not be there, but also the real limitations of what can fit into the space you have allocated. The list of things I’d like to cover certainly far exceeds both my time to write and the pages I have allocated to the book. Six chapters down, at least for first run-troughs, and four to go. The way things are tracking I’ll have considerably more pages that I will be able to use, and some things may get put onto the DVD as bonus material for each chapter, or even the last couple chapters that were more about using other applications with Max and mental ray, may get turned into bonus content, which will work well. That may let me add more back into the earlier chapters without having to be concerned about hitting the top-end early.
Sponza Visual Diagnostics Image
The Wiley’s Acquisitions Editor once said to me that authors tend to over-write, and they have certainly pushed for me to keep it to-the-point and “tight”. I think about that a lot as I am working, and will often revisit paragraphs and reword them, sometimes reducing things considerably. Often times the feedback from the editors has been to add additional explanations and examples, and that has certainly helped improve the content. Overworking paragraphs and having too much time to write can have a negative effect, too, as I used to jump into a paragraph and rework it to later find that I had done the same thing and added similar thoughts elsewhere. Being conscience of those issues, and printing out the entire chapter and putting it up on your wall or spread out on the floor to get the ‘big picture’ certainly helps with the process. And having good editors. :)
Caustics Demo
Chapter 5′s 1st draft done, and revising 2, 3, and 4…
I just completed the first draft of Chapter 5, “Indirect Illumination and Final Gather”. and just completed the latest revisions (tweaks) for Chapter 2, “Materials and Maps”. Mark Gerhard has been terrific on feedback to help improve the workability of the scenes, and my Development Editor, Jen, is certainly keeping me on my toes.
Cornell Box with confetti-like settings for GI
One of the big challenges is to provide a variety of scenes for the reader to play with, but not make them so complex that they will never be able to render them except on production-ready machines. There are the settings I use for final scene, and then there is what may be practical in a school environment. My college just upgraded the CAD labs to brand new AMD quad and triple-core computers, with lots of RAM and NVISIA Quadro video cards. Prior to that we had little 1.gHz single-core machines with 1gb of RAM. Painful. You literally could not do a decent rendering let alone load and edit a large file, and it was frustrating to both me and the students. I want to give them something interesting to render and to produce a great image, but the machines could not handle the more involved scenes. Now it is a whole new world, and we can do a lot more.
So that issue is certainly something I’ve been struggling with as I work with the sample scenes. Providing pre-computed FG and GI data is really the key. Those that can compute the indirect illumination and use the higher Image Precision settings certainly can, but for those that cannot, the pre-computed FG/GI files and lots of direction for adjusting the mr settings should help. And I’m making sure that scenes have completed renderings in the .\renderoutput folder, too.
Chapter 2 focus primarily on a few features of the A&D and ProMaterials that can affect the quality and speed of your renderings. As a Mastering book, I’m not covering all the individual settings of the materials, as you can get that from the Max Bible, Mark Gerhard’s new Mastering Max 2010 book (available now), or from Max’s Help facility. One of the challenges for this book is to provide useful examples, and get it all to fit into the 400 pages that they have alloted for the book. It sounds like a lot, when comparable books are are between 250 and 330 pages.
Chapter 5, Indirect Illumination and Final Gather, provides a general overview of II techniques available in mental ray, and then moves on to using FG in a variety of scenes, both indoor and outdoor. There are some short examples, such as for an Outdoor scene, and for that I look at the use of the Falloff feature. For Indoor examples I picked a couple tough-to-render examples. No sense looking at easy examples, right?
Karina Bay FG Example Scene
One featured example is the Sponza Palace Atrium, a model by Marko Dabrovic. Marko has kindly given permission to use this model in the book, along with his photographs of the actual palace. He has also given some feedback on some of the in-process renderings. I wanted to use this scene because it is highly recognizable in the 3D community, and has become a standard of sorts for testing II techniques. It is a difficult scene because it relies heavily on II to illuminate the courtyard, and under the walkways on either side. In some ways it is an outdoor scene, and in many more ways it is an indoor scene.
Sponza Scene with FG
I also take a look at a medium-sized bathroom scene from our Karina Bay project, and examine some of the process of setting up this scene. The strong daylight through the windows makes it a bit more difficult to smooth out the FG, and we step through the process of adjusting settings and seeing the result.
Final Bath Scene
Have a great day! Jenni
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