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
Hallo,
I don´t know iray so far. As I have read it is quite easy to operate. If this is not the case and you have some in depth knowledge about iray it would of course be interesting to read about (assumed it will be integrated in max 2012).
Yes, iray is pretty straightforward to use. As you know it is not included with Max 2011, and I hope we do not have to wait until 2012 in order to have it available. As far as the content we’ve been kicking around some ideas including hardware and performance, and possibly MetaSL.
Do you mean with hardware some comparison of consumer cards versus quadro cards and perhaps fermi? Although there is not too much about this out there, I can´t imagine of filling a whole book. Nevertheless it´s becoming more and more interesting now with GPU´s being used.
We are actually looking at covering iray rendering in a number of applications, not just Autodesk, and possibly mr/materials/lights in those apps, too. It isn’t likely to be a book on the scale of the Mastering mr book, no doubt, but it could be interesting.
Will the materials and lights section go beyond your coming book (by the way, the link `table of contents` on this side isn’t functioning, so I can’t see which content it exactly covers).
Which link are you using? The TOC is at:
http://www.mastering-mentalray.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=47&Itemid=54
As far as materials and lights, that is under discussion. If someone wants to use iray but does not need in-depth coverage of mr, then it would be a good idea to cover topics in iray title so you don’t have to buy both publications.
If I use the link you posted in your answer, I get the same errormessage:
You may not be able to visit this page because of:
1. an out-of-date bookmark/favourite
2. a search engine that has an out-of-date listing for this site
3. a mistyped address
4. you have no access to this page
5. The requested resource was not found.
6. An error has occurred while processing your request.
Please try one of the following pages:
* Home Page
If difficulties persist, please contact the System Administrator of this site.
Article #47 not found
In my opinion (going to by your book) it would of course be more interesting to get some new material to read in a later book – still having to learn a lot in mental ray.
That is really odd on the link. It works here in Chrome but generates an error with IE 8. I created a new Contents article and mapped the menu to that, and it seems to work. Thanks for pointing that out!
On the book content, that is certainly a concern, to give enough new content that it makes sense for someone that already has the first book, then on the other hand it forces people to buy two books because the second one is not stand-alone. These are certainly things to consider as we formulate an outline. Thanks for you thoughts.
Since you are interested, I put the final PDF of the book’s Table of Contents on to the site at:
http://www.mastering-mentalray.com/mental_ray/TOC.pdf
What about a Maya version of mastering-mentalray?
That is certainly a possibility!
It isn’t something I’ve pushed to the publisher yet. Now that we have the benefit of some time since the book finished we can look at other options for another edition and cover some different topics.
What would you most like to see in a Maya book?
I certainly would be interested in photografic animation rendering tricks, as i usually do design previsualization(camera and object animation).
So i’d like tricks for best photographics result, but also for faster fake rendering.
But I would like the same book located on Maya, whith an advanced section on animation.
Then Architecture and Design are essential topics. Ie how work at your best with Maya, when your customers use Inventor or other cad program?
I tried to learn Maya using books written by Max, but I get often confused.
So I had to resist the first impulse to buy your book, which I found very interesting when i watch the TOC… but unfortunatly for MAX.
In any case I do not like tutorials that give you values you have to enter in settings windows.
I prefer to learn a theoretical method teaching me to think and understand how it works under the hook,
then to be able to find the most appropriate setting by myself.
I.e., after a deep explanation of how GI works, I think a good way to teach how setting to use, is a flowchart representing the pipeline to be followed to optimize the scene.
I hope my english isn’t so bad…
The step-by-step instructions are only useful to a certain extent, certainly. It is important to have those steps so people can duplicate the results, but you do need to have the theory behind the settings and show how a range of settings affect the renderings. I hope I have that covered in the book.
I appreciate your comments; I like to hear what people expect from a book.