MentalCore allows you easily solve many rendering problems such as Ambient Occlusion transparency.

The MentalCore environment shader allows you to control the environment for different stages of rendering (reflections, finalgatheretc)

Create and preview render passes at the click of a button. MentalCore makes working with render passes simple, straightforward and simple.

MentalCore comes with a wide range of material, texture and utility shaders, making it even easier and faster to achieve the look you desire.

Working with subsurface scattering in MentalCore is easier then ever. You can also output front, mid and back scattering layers to render passes to further tweak the look in compositing.

CoreCG Launches MentalCore, Breakthrough Solution for Optimizing the Maya and mental ray Workflow
New Plugin Eliminates CG Pipeline Bottlenecks and Accelerates Rendering

Auckland, NZ (January 24, 2012) – CoreCG, a New Zealand-based research and development (R&D) company that specializes in creative solutions for CG animation and visual effects, today announced the release of MentalCore - a cross-platform, standalone plugin designed to help artists achieve maximum creativity and efficiency while using NVIDIA® mental ray® with Autodesk® Maya®. The release follows two years of extensive use at Oktobor Animation, a year of beta testing by high profile film, television, and game companies, and a soft launch in December 2011.

“We saw an overwhelming response to our beta phase and are excited to introduce an off-the-shelf solution that answers such a huge community need. Eliminating common CG pipeline bottlenecks can require dedicated R&D and often complicated workarounds,” said Jason Adams, creative director, CoreCG and Oktobor Animation. “We built MentalCore to simplify workflows and expedite rendering, so artists spend less time troubleshooting and more time on the quality of their work. It’s truly an efficient, reliable solution for artists made by artists.”

MentalCore, developed by Supervising Technical Director Corey Frew at Oktobor Animation, animation studio for several high-profile Nickelodeon series, is production-proven and provides enhancements to the standard rendering workflow using Autodesk Maya with NVIDIA mental ray. Suitable for any size studio, MentalCore supports Maya 2011 and Maya 2012, and hosts a user-friendly interface and robust feature set, including:
· Render Globals Interface - Quick access to all global settings and render passes
· Node Based Render Pass System - Reliable render pass system that eases linking to objects, materials and lights
· Shader Library - Achieve desired looks with new material, texture and utility shaders
· Color Management System - Easily adopt a linear color workflow
· Preview Render Passes - Preview render passes in the renderview without the memory overhead of rendering all other passes in one go
· Ambient Occlusion Transparency - Support for ambient occlusion transparency
· Python API - Easily integrate MentalCore into any pipeline
· mental ray Compatibility - Compatible with mental ray standalone renderer

A complete list of features is available here.

Dominic Alderson, 3D supervisor and lead technical director, The Mill TV and Film, London, shared, “You can tell a great deal of time and thought went into MentalCore; it’s a reliable product, with a great price tag, that can save studios both time and money. The ability to work across multiple scenes and carry your render setup with MentalCore makes life a breeze. I no longer have to build render layers over and over again or use custom scripts. It provides me with a better option for generating a clean, fast render pass system – allowing me to spend more time on creative development and less time fixing technicalities.”

“CoreCG has successfully written one of the best integrations with mental ray yet,” said Mark Wallman, a Freelance Technical Director and Senior Lecturer at the University of Hertfordshire. “MentalCore is easy for any artist to pick up quickly, and it’s got fantastic features like unified sampling and simplified shaders that take on a large bulk of shading work. Its UI is clean and efficient, which can save artists and studios a significant amount of time.”

David Trenear, studio manager, Game Labs Apps, is purchasing 18 floating licenses of MentalCore for use in future game development. He shared, “High-quality game design poses its own set of unique technical challenges, especially when factoring in tight deadlines and budgets. MentalCore helps remove those challenges with an easy-to-use interface and practical features that expand our lighting and shading functionality. It simplifies our shading workflow by removing the time-consuming process of creating custom shaders. We’ve seen what MentalCore can do and how it can accelerate our day-to-day operations, and truly believe it will enhance the quality of our games.”

“MentalCore is a great development and lighting tool with a well designed interface and time-saving features – the ability to preview render passes, ambient occlusion transparency and Python API,” said Alexander Morano, supervisor of pipeline research and development, Nickelodeon Animation Studio. “The speed of iteration through a scene to get layers set up for lighting is amazingly quick; you can achieve looks that would normally take three to five times longer by hand without the overhead of setting up shaders and layers.”

Pricing and Availability
MentalCore is now available for purchase on the CoreCG website as a node locked license at an introductory price of US $189, or a floating license for US $199. Modified pricing is available for educational institutions, contact sales@core-cg.com for more information. A free 30-day trial of MentalCore is available on http://www.core-cg.com/.

About CoreCG
Core CG Ltd., headquartered in Auckland, NZ, is a research and development company specializing in creative solutions that drive innovation and productivity in the fields of CG animation and visual effects. Incubated in a real-world production environment at Oktobor Animation, Auckland’s largest CG animation studio with credits on several high-profile Nickelodeon series, and developed with support from the New Zealand Ministry of Science and Innovation, CoreCG’s technology is production-proven. The company provides artists with efficient, affordable pipeline solutions. Its flagship product is MentalCore, a standalone plugin for NVIDIA® mental ray® and Autodesk® Maya® designed to enhance the lighting, shading and rendering workflow. For more information visit: http://www.core-cg.com/

VisualARQ is a great plugin for architects working in Rhino 3D.
VisualARQ 1.4 was released recently, have a look at some videos recorded by VisualARQ team:

VizPeople came with this nice collection of high quality HDRi spherical maps recently.
Free samples are available in the free download section, full resolution images are available in this collection for €50!

Original focus of the lectures for the program 3DS MAX is not actual now, so new information is coming from the sector of computer graphic. In last years there were lectures with themes such as matte painting, archviz, stereoscopy, colors in computer graphics, advertising visualization or Storyboard. The visitors get information on know-how, advice and recommendations from specialists such as Tomáš Muller (Temujin), Adam Hotový (Vyonyx, UK), Pavel Hruboš, Marek Denko etc. The action got bigger with two workshops with the theme Archiviz-Postproduction and sketching- classical and digital, which bring individual access and specialized information.

Every day there will be 5 lectures in the big hall with video projection and sounds. Except of that there will be an exposition of copyright works from recent book Phantasia, which was the first publication of its kind in Slovak and Czech Republic and thank to big interest there are other new projects coming.
When entering the hall, the visitors will get a bag with promotional materials, every ticket is also a chance to win one of the interesting prizes in raffle. There will be a possibility to buy books.

After many years, Maxcon has become an action, which brings a lot of new things in this sector, opportunity to Exchange information among the participants, consultation with specialits, and with each year more and more extra.

You all are welcome!

Viz People Solutions announced first Competition named: Fast Contest Edition 1. Main goal of contest is to compose provided samples into any of contestant visualization. Contest will end in last day of May. Prices are Libraries from Viz People shop.

Click here to visit Viz-People.

Dear Rhinoceros fans!

This is the moment where we, Rhino users are having the great opportunity to get PRO.
This book “3D Car Modeling with Rhinoceros” contains complete step-by-step tutorial on how to model Audi R8 in Rhinoceros NURBS!
Watch these screenshots to see the geometry and full render:

Visit : AK3D.DE website for more information on this PDF and hard cover book tutorial.

POST UPDATE

A few days ago I obtained a download link for this awesome product. Of course I was pretty excited about it, mainly because I am really big Rhinoceros fan and this is absolutely high detailed 3D model in NURBS. As this is the very first super detailed 3D model for Rhino available online for sale (as far as I know), I decided to show You some pictures of this Audi R8 3D model, so if You are unsure about buying this tutorial, or 3D model, You will find your final decision.

As I spoke with André Kutscherauer (Author of this R8 beauty), he told me some details on the background of modeling this super car:

“It began with a knowledge gap on my side. As I´m a 3D artist, I did created a lot of models with polygon techniques. Some years ago I create an Audi with polygons. That was a lot of work but the final model looked not so cool. In this time I saw a lot of Nurbs car models, that impressed me a lot. Especially Thomas Suurland was a real mentor. Since that time I “felt” a knowledge gap of me, when it comes to Nurbs modeling and I always wanted to “close” that. So I started to use Rhinoceros for creating the main models of my free artworks. I could do some basic shapes and Booleans, but that was it. In 2009 I decided to take the next step of Nurbs modeling and aimed for the R8 model. While I modeled it, I ran into countless problems and I spend a lot of time in solving these issues. I searched the internet for help but it was quite difficult to find complete solutions for specific problems. Also I did buy some books, but it was not what I searched for. After finding own ways of modeling techniques, the idea of a complete Nurbs modeling book was born. So I did select my nearly finished R8 Nurbs model file and pressed “delete” to start from scratch again.

With the experience from the first model, I was able to describe every correct working step of the second model in detail. Nevertheless, I had to do every working step at least for three times, to find the optimal solution. This last solution I did write down. So I worked nearly 12 month until the model and the manuscript of the book was finished. Then I started to create some test renders and decided to make a promo video for the book. For this animation I challenged myself with a complete natural environment with 80 Millions trees, but that’s another story. After the animation was finished, it was clear that the frames will render about 4 months on my two 12-core machines. This was just perfect, as I could layout and fine-tune the manuscript and also make the translation.

All in all, the whole process did take nearly two years. I worked every day from 7 pm to 11 pm on this project as my main fulltime job costs my whole daytime. Finally I re-created my website and included an online shop to be able to offer those products.

Currently I´m just happy that I get it finished and that my girlfriend is still here. ;- ) At the moment I have no plans for creating another tutorial like that, but if the interest of the people stays like in the last days, I could get weak….”

Thanks to André for these words!

This is screenshot from my filesystem in my computer :) Finally, R8 in da haus!
3dm file available at ak3d.de. :)

Let’s have a look at the book first:

I ordered the PDF version, because I find it much more practical, better for storing, etc. but I have to say that the magic of the real book must be much better. (For those of you who buy this book, let me know!) and what’s better with my PDF, is that I can use Ctrl+F command to find exact text :)

The book contains 624 pages of step-by step tutorial, you can find every single command used, every single click made by André, so it’s very easy to make this car model even for absolute beginners in Rhinoceros! Awesome, isn’t it?
Here you can find some screenshots from the book:

The book cover. Sexy, isn’t it?

Audi R8 blueprints are included.

You will see entire process, every single click and mouse movement. In this picture you can see absolute precise curves adjustment.

Learn how to make surfaces pretty and smooth. Make your model perfect!

Every single surface is explained in a few steps to obtain the best result.

Sometimes it’s not complicated to make a model… the art is in making it really professionally.

This part shows you how to make the front mask of the car.

Modeling of the back part

Side mirror is as detailed as the rest of the model.

Extracting the R8 sign out of the photo.

One of the last objects is the wheel…

… pretty detailed as well!

So this is it. If you are still considering buying this book and 3D model, have a look at how it looks like in Rhinoceros 5 live viewport:

What do you think now, are you going to give a chance to NURBS? If so, start right HERE. :)

(Adam Hotovy, Vyonyx)

Hello!

Some time ago I was doing a bigger research for myself, where I tried to collect as many free 3D resources as possible. There are a lot of websites offering this kind of stuff, but which ones do offer quality stuff? Which of them offer just 3D models, which ones offer also materials, textures, scenes, tutorials?

Let’s have a look at the quick comparison:

Louis 20 by Vitra at Turbosquid for $31.75 or FREE 3D model from FlyingArchitecture? Even with better surface topology!

Nelson home desk (1958) at Turbosquid for $40 or at FlyingArchitecture for FREE? It’s your decision!

This was just an example of two legendary design furniture by Vitra. But there’s more… much more!
Yes, It’s true that Turbosquid offers thousands of 3d models, so it’s probably the biggest 3D models resource for artists, but it’s not the best choice in every case.

FREE RESOURCES

Here’s a list of free 3D resources I found all over the internet. If I miss something, let me know in the comments area below. Thanks :)

01

Flying Architecture – Free 3D models, materials, tutorials. Great community site!

02

3D total – various 3D stuff (human bodies, architecture, vehicles…)

03

Turbosquid – Probably the biggest resource for 3D artists.

04

Great buildings – Free resource of free 3D famous buildings all over the world.

05

Archive 3D – 25 000+ free 3D models. This is the right place for getting ANY 3d model you need. The only problem is that lot of them are not pretty “legal” – many models are from Archmodels by Evermotion (paid collections).

06

Google warehouse – Well, this is not the “top quality” database, but the idea of this community is to share. You can find here thousands of free 3D models by hundreds of artists.

07

3D model free – nice database of free 3D models, mainly for 3Ds Max.

08

3Dxtras – another free 3d models database. You have to login first to download stuff.

09

D Legend – just another free 3D nmodels site with few items to download.

10

Artist -3d – Awesome collection of free 3D models. This is nice and extensive collection.

I’ve collected about 60+ sites with free 3D models… To be continued! :)

If you have any other tips for free stuff, let me know in the comments area below!

Chaos Group introduces V-Ray 2.0 for Maya

Now with interactive rendering on CPU and GPU, V-Ray 2.0 for Maya has been officially released

Sofia, Bulgaria – April 29, 2011 – Chaos Group is thrilled to announce that V-Ray 2.0 for Maya is now available! The complete, state-of-the-art rendering solution now comes with interactive rendering on GPU and CPU. Users in all industries – from VFX to Architecture – will benefit from a more robust and
much faster rendering solution.

“We are very excited to release the latest version of V-Ray for Maya,” said Chaos Group CEO, Peter Mitev. “Speed increases are always something our users want to hear, and we are glad to deliver just that. Combined with interactive rending on both CPU and GPU, this 2.0 release will be a significant upgrade for many users.”

Maya users can immediately try the demo version of V-Ray 2.0 by downloading it from the Chaos Group website. The new version is also available for purchase from any authorized Chaos Group reseller. All current customers with the educational version of V-Ray 1.5 for Maya are entitled to a free upgrade to V-Ray 2.0 starting May 4th

Some of the new and upgraded features of V-Ray 2.0 have been presented in a series of videos:
• General overview of V-Ray 2.0 for Maya

• V-Ray RT and V-Ray RT GPU

• Support for dispersion in refractions for VRayMt

• PTex textures

• VRayCarPaint material

To see a full features list and watch more video previews, please click here.

Here are what leading artists and renowned studios around the world have to say about V-Ray for Maya:

• “Here at Method we have been using V-Ray for Maya since the beginning of its development. It has had huge success in house for feature and commercial work large and small. Having multiple renderer support inhouse it’s a head to head vs match to final only the best images.”

Scott Metzger, VFX Artist at Method Studios

• “I enjoy using V-Ray in Maya, it’s nice to have the option of different 3d packages, with the same great render engine. I have been using V-Ray for many years now, and V-Ray has now integrated nicely into Maya, making the lighting and rendering process very smooth, solid and thorough. I can absolutely recommend V-Ray for Maya!”

Daniel Buck, Digital Artis

To all Modo-users out there: the long-awaited Recoil rigid body simulation plugin is finally out and available at Luxology! This is the first major utilization of the new SDK in 501 and what more, a next major step for modo to becoming a full-fledged animation software. Just see for yourself in the following video:

Chaos Group to attend FMX 2011
V-Ray 2.0 for Maya presentations and workshops at the biggest industry event in Germany

Sofia, Bulgaria – April 27, 2011 – Chaos Group is gearing up for FMX 2011, an annual animation, effects, games, and interactive media conference in Stuttgart, Germany on May 3-6. The team plans to present V-Ray 2.0 for Maya and other developments with German reseller, Weltenbauer.

FMX 2011 coincides with the upcoming release of V-Ray 2.0 for Maya – now with interactive rendering on CPU and GPU – which will officially launch at the end of April. To demonstrate the plugin’s new and enhanced features, Chaos Group will run whole day presentations at Weltenbauer’s booth, in addition to hosting two free scheduled workshops.

The first workshop, featuring both V-Ray 2.0 for 3ds Max and Maya, will take place on Tuesday, May 3 at Raum Karlsruhe from 15.00-16.00h. Highlights of what attendees can expect at this workshop include:

• RT – CPU/GPU – unprecedented speed and flexibility achieved with the V-Ray interactive rendering system
• Car Paint Material – create stunning car paint shaders complete with base, flake and coat layers
• Distance Texture – use procedurally generated textures to create a wide range of effects based on the distance between various objects in the scene
• Multi-sub Texture – assign different textures based on object ID
• Light Select Render Element – extract the contribution of each light to the scene, change their intensity in post-production and compose them back together
• Stereoscopic Helper – quickly set up stereoscopic images and animations
• Lens Analysis Utility – easily match the distortion of your real world and your virtual cameras
• Lens effects – add a full range of bloom and glare effects

On day two of the show, the team will present a “Rendering and Lighting” seminar which will integrate the new features of V-Ray 2.0 for 3ds Max and Maya and teach attendees how to achieve interactive set-up of their main rendering components. Topics of this discussion include:

• Lighting & Rendering – advanced custom Sun & Sky usage and Image Based Lighting
• Realistic Materials – complex materials set-up
• Advanced Camera Matching – stereoscopy, lens effects, distortion and depth of field
• Production Quality Rendering – new GI techniques
• Advanced Compositing – new tips and techniques for compositing

This second workshop will take place on Wednesday, May 4 in Raum Karlsruhe from 11.00-12.00h.

This is the third time that Chaos Group has attended FMX 2011 to showcase their line of rendering technologies to the German animation, effects, games, and interactive media industry. “We’re thrilled to attend FMX 2011 alongside our longtime authorized dealer, Weltenbauer,” said Chaos Group CEO Peter Mitev. “We hope to put on quite the show for our German customers: from the premiere of VRay 2.0 for Maya to our many other developments. We want them to walk away amazed by the sheer power of V-Ray.”
Visitors interested in attending either of Chaos Group’s free workshops may register online here.