I'm taking a slight deviation from the Material Editor series of tutorials to answer a support question posted in the blogs today. The request was to show the animation of a lifter on a camshaft, so here I'm presenting a method that works for me   more »

I've been in Madison, Wisconsin training this week and am now back in the office looking forward to a weekend (holiday in the US) sitting on my porch with a couple of cool friends (Grolsch). Follow the link inside to vote in the Autodesk Masters program...   more »

In this video tutorial you'll learn to extract materials assigned to objects in the scene which are not currently in a material library or the material editor. As an example of when this may typically occur in production we'll use a merged object from another scene.   more »

In order to use materials in multiple scenes you must store the materials in library files on your hard drive that can be accessed from any scene. in this video tutorial out go through the process of creating and saving Material Libraries.   more »

I'm starting a project I've intended to address for some time to introduce new users to the concept of the Material Editor in 3ds Max and VIZ. This will be very basic at first to address common support questions. Eventually I'll work into more details on fundamental materials creation.   more »

First, my apologies for not posting tutorials recently but I've been traveling a lot lately and can't post while I'm on the road. This video tutorial we'll cover an issue that's come up in my travels about Smoothing Groups in 3ds Max and VIZ. The concept is simple: if adjacent faces share a common smoothing group number, then the edge between them is smoothed. Here I'll illustrate the basics of how it all works.   more »

I'm back in my office from traveling and hope to get back to posting some video tutorials later this week, but in the meantime here's a book review that should interest everyone who has dabbled in mental ray and is having a tough time getting their minds around the concept.   more »