3ds Max Design 2012 New Features Webinar Posted

3ds Max Design 2012 New Features Webinar (June 17, 2011)

Eddie Perlberg demos the new features in in Autodesk® 3ds Max® Design 2012:

- Nitrous-accelerated graphics core, a new viewport system engineered to provide dramatic improvements in performance and visual quality
- Iray® renderer, from mental images
- Substance procedural textures
- Non-photorealistic (NPR) effects
- Civil View feature set
- Sculpting and painting enhancements

About the speaker:

Eddie Perlberg has spent the last four years at Autodesk as a Technical Specialist with a focus on Design Visualization. Prior to joining Autodesk, Eddie spent 17 years in and supporting the architectural industry. He worked for an Autodesk reseller to help customers with their implementation of Autodesk solutions—including Autodesk® Architectural Desktop, Revit®, Autodesk® VIZ, and 3ds Max. Most recently, Eddie worked at various firms, including R.A. Smith as a project manager for the visualization department and as CAD manager for Kohl's Department Stores and Kahler Slater Architects.

Attendee Questions from the Webinar

Q: Does iray use the same technology az "Progressive Path Tracing" in V-Ray rendering engine? Are they equal?

A: no completely different

Q: so it (iray) wouldn't work with ATI boards?
A: no, iray will only work with Nvidia CUDA enabled hw or CPUs. Nitrous will work with ATI cards

Q: So we need to buy really expensive GPUs to use iray properly?
A: no, you can get great results on a GTX480 for less than $200 USD, it just might hold up to the heat loads like a quadro card would

Q: How about the memory limitations on GPUs
A: yes, the scene must fit on the card

Q: Is there a difference in Nitrous we saw earlier and iray?

A: Nitrous is similar to a game engine and uses DX shaders to display matierals and lighting, Iray uses GPUs to compute. http://area.autodesk.com/blogs/shane/what_is_gpu_based_rendering

Q: where is the Substance Marketplace?
A: turbosquid.com offers substances

Q: Are they free?
A: http://turbosquid.com/substance

Q: Do Substance material workflow works with plugins like V-Ray?
A: yes it should, it's essentially a bitmap

Q: In terms of compatibility I've been having problems importing complex solid and meshes from autocad, even with the Autodesk's  objects enablers patch...How does it works with 3ds mac 2012?

A: make sure you use filelink and not import

Q: So no iray support for ATI Fire Pro cards?
A: no

Q:  iray renderer works with V-ray ?
A: no

Q: what is the technology  that should be provided in GPUs in order to work  with iray?
A: CUDA

Q: Hi, how about The problem of repeated patterns  of material  can we solve this problem using the substance material ?

A: although substances still technically tile still, there are much better ways now to avoid the look of tiled materials with substance. plus there are some advanced substance filters in teh bonus pack that help further. it is much easy to avoid this problem with substances!

Q: I see the Nitrous display shows a good idea of the materials. Does that work only with Autodesk Materials?

A: Nitrous will display most all of the material types we ship with, some map types are not supported. the help docs should provide more detial to this.

Q: How much system RAM should we need for 2012 version ?

A: 8gb is really the reconmended min these days, scenes you all are creating are getting real big

Q: Are we limited to substance materials in order to use Iray

A: no, substances are more of a bitmap than a material type. iray will only work with physically based matials like the Arch & Design mats.

Q: I have a quadro 4000 - why do I get white specks in my renderings even when I leave for several hours

A: to complelely converge on complex lighting situtations (lots of glass and reflective objects) it can take some time to clear the noise. there are tricks to get around this though. the benifit is you can within seconds get a great sense of what the overall lighting results are going to be. for high res renders and mid range hw it could still take 4+ hrs to converge on that "perfict" image

Q: where can you get a GTX480 for under $200? I've never seen it sold for less than 300...
A: ok $300, but there are other options under $200 that work well too.

Q: how does iray compare to other 'point and shoot' renderers like maxwell render in terms of speed and accuracy?

A: similar in approach, but highly optimized to tak advantage of CUDA hardware.

Q: How can we get a desired quality for a final render using iray, i mean, how can we guess how many time should we leave the render to complete?

A: jeff has some good tips and tricks on his blog, http://jeffpatton.net/blog/

Q: Where do you find the Nitrous NPR Settings script?

A: http://docs.autodesk.com/3DSMAX/14/ENU/MAXScript%20Help%202012/files/GUID-34892DB6-E840-4F52-9175-30332799B7B-634.htm

Q: Is iray intended to replace V-Ray or mental ray

A: iray works really well for the physically accurate, if you want something that doesn't look real or doesn't have to then vray or mental ray will continue to be better solutions

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