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3ds Max Subscription Advantage Pack: iray, PhysX, substances!

Posted by Ken Pimentel, 10 September 2010 8:00 pm

Subscription customers get some treats this month! Hope you enjoy them. I've posted the features & benefits for 3ds Max 2011, but it is the same features for 3ds Max Design 2011. You'll get these by the end of September, I don't want to say more than that until the date is officially disclosed.

Subscription Advantage Pack for 3ds Max 2011 and 3ds Max Design 2011
 

Features and Benefits

Overview

The Autodesk® Subscription Advantage Pack for Autodesk® 3ds Max® 2011 software integrates state-of-the-art technology from renowned industry companies who are working with Autodesk to revolutionize rendering and simulation workflows. Featuring lightweight, resolution-independent procedural textures; GPU-accelerated rigid-body dynamics; and one of the world’s first physically accurate “point-and-shoot” renderers, the Advantage Pack for 3ds Max 2011 delivers cutting-edge tools that help leverage the latest hardware advances to help customers maintain their competitive advantage.

Top Features and Benefits

Substance Procedural Textures

Achieve a vast range of look variations with a new library of up to 75 Substance procedural textures. These dynamic, resolution-independent textures have a tiny memory and disk space footprint, making them very good for exporting to games engines via the Allegorithmic Substance Air middleware offering; integration is currently provided for Unreal® Engine 3 game engine, Emergent's Gamebryo game engine, and Unity. Alternatively, textures can be baked to bitmaps for use with certain renderers. Some examples of dynamically editable and animatable parameters are: brick distribution, surface aging, and mortar thickness in a brick wall; pupil size, eye color, and extent of veining in an eye texture; and the age, roughness, curb borders, and lane markings of a street texture.

PhysX Rigid-Body Dynamics

Create more compelling, dynamic rigid-body simulations directly in the 3ds Max viewport. The multi-threaded NVIDIA® PhysX® engine supports static, dynamic, and kinematic rigid bodies (the latter for rag doll simulations), and a number of constraints: Rigid, Slide, Hinge, Twist, Universal, Ball & Socket, and Gear. Animators can more quickly create a wider range of realistic dynamic simulations, and can also use the toolset for modeling: for example, creating a randomly placed landscape of rocks. Assigning physical properties – friction, density, and bounciness – is as simple as choosing from a set of initial preset real-world materials and tweaking parameters as required.

iray Photorealistic Renderer

Creating realistic images has never been easier with 3ds Max, using the newly integrated iray® rendering technology from mental images. Another major milestone in the Rendering Revolution, iray enables artists to set up their scene, press “render,” and get predictable, photo-real results without worrying about rendering settings­ just like a “point-and-shoot” camera. Artists can focus on their creative vision as they intuitively use real world materials, lighting, and settings to more accurately portray the physical world; iray progressively refines the image until the desired level of detail is achieved. iray works with standard multi-core CPUs. However, NVIDIA CUDA-enabled GPU hardware will significantly accelerate the rendering process.

More information on Shane's blog on iray

92 Comments

drp281

Posted 10 September 2010 6:31 pm

these features look cool

Jonathan de Blok

Posted 10 September 2010 6:40 pm

Very nice!

mahi

Posted 10 September 2010 7:09 pm

Good to see new tools but....

I think I can now say I will look into Vray RT over iray for my needs. I would like an interactive ray tracer for mental ray, but I have never used iray so who knows for sure what it would be good for in my workflow. Also I am hoping on the UI front that things like dynamics become more integrated into a node based work flow such as slate. As it is now, it looks like another tab with its own unique dialog boxes that do fit in a unified UI.

I do love new features as much as the next person, but with XBR I would like to see a shift to where everything works together such as dynamics/cloth/particles....


3DMadness

Posted 10 September 2010 7:11 pm

Will this procedural texture work with other renders like vray and final render?

Ken Pimentel

Posted 10 September 2010 7:17 pm

re: substance and vray
yes, it works with any renderer as it is converted to a map for rendering purposes

re: integration
Subscription drops tend to be smaller and less integrated things by nature. In many cases, we've historically addressed the integration issues in the following release.

mahi

Posted 10 September 2010 7:23 pm

Just wanted to say my last post was my knee jerk reaction to the Advantage Pack after getting here from the link in kens other post >

http://area.autodesk.com/forum/autodesk-3ds-max/autodesk-3ds-max--3ds-max-design-2011/what-the-community-wants/page-1/

PS: Ken I asked a while ago about a logo redesign with color across the board for 3ds Max. I think you said I would not have to wait long. Any news you can share on that?


mahi

Posted 10 September 2010 7:26 pm

No edit button here!!!

I said: "PS: Ken I asked a while ago about a logo redesign with color across the board for 3ds Max. I think you said I would not have to wait long. Any news you can share on that?"

Sorry I did not mean "logo" redesign. I wanted to say Icon.

"we've historically addressed the integration issues in the following release. "

Thanks for that Ken. It is good to hear.

Ummmmmm, I found the edit button. I guess I need to not work and post at the same time. Sorry everyone for that!

Ken Pimentel

Posted 10 September 2010 7:34 pm

re: mahi
Icons are slow progress (3,750 of them). However, UI color consistency is something we view as important as well as better icons for the dark theme (which I assume you were asking about). I can't really tell you specifics of the future (unfortunately). I can say we're not ignoring these issues.

Hadi Ghasemzadeh

Posted 10 September 2010 7:38 pm

These are nice features. Specially the rigid body physics. Thanks2

Zov

Posted 10 September 2010 7:50 pm

Hello, ken. Very nice!
I was curious about the Quicksilver and Iray... I wonder if... with the integrated Iray, Quicksilver will continue into the next versions of Max...

Ken Pimentel

Posted 10 September 2010 7:56 pm

re: Qs
First of all, Hot Fix 2 fixed several Qs problems. If you haven't tried it lately, give it a go. We can never talk definitively about future features, but I can see no reason to remove it and further research is under way. Qs is not iray - they are radically different. Qs does a lot with pixel shader technology while iray is a physically-based ray tracing engine that uses the GPU for acceleration and has certain restrictions on shaders/workflows.

3DMadness

Posted 10 September 2010 8:33 pm

Looking at Maya 2011 my guess is that quicksilver will go to max viewport, but its just a guess...

Ken Pimentel

Posted 10 September 2010 8:36 pm

re: Qs in the viewport
Sounds like a great idea to me

Ostro

Posted 10 September 2010 9:35 pm

I guess so too since we don't have the active viewport shading when using mental ray...

but general speaking Iray is a huge step that have been taken and it would change the rendering work-flow especially for architects...

what i hope is to organize the autodesk material even more like better preview of the material ... maybe using images for previewing to have better idea than the standard preview just for the sake of speed and giving more information on where to use those materials...

Ken Pimentel

Posted 11 September 2010 12:24 am

re: havok
We will be announcing some news about that too soon. There is another reason that PhysX is going in...

Erik López

Posted 11 September 2010 12:36 am

Where is the cloth Nvidia simulation? no, just kidding those features look great

Ostro

Posted 11 September 2010 1:33 pm

@ Julien

if you've seen the video again you would notice that she said it's a high resolution rendering...
and by comparison to the mr settings that would achieve such result i bet it would take 4 hours or even more
regardless to the time of tweaking it

considering your self using the FG brute force method... I bet it would take way too long
+ using DOF would no longer add time to your rendering and it's so accurate...


so after all i guess it's something really worth trying even for professional guys



yiannisk

Posted 11 September 2010 6:53 pm

that's very nice! cheers!

Gryp Master

Posted 11 September 2010 8:45 pm

I hope to unify all you have to do with dynamics, hair, clothes, etc. breeze. a good system as the demolition of the film by 2012 and do not leave the old systems so that the program move better.
and thanks for listening

Terskov Alexander

Posted 11 September 2010 9:16 pm

What about stereo camera in 3ds Max?

scionik

Posted 11 September 2010 9:19 pm

iray and Substance Procedural Textures!!!! cool!!!

PiXeL_MoNKeY

Posted 12 September 2010 3:00 am

Sevensheaven I will try to answer your questions as best I can:
1: Do the Substance textures still need UV coordinates of can they be used as fully procedural (XYZ) textures?
-- Yes they need UV coordinates as the maps are 2d procedurals and not 3d procedurals. Allegorithmic also has their Substance Designer (separate commercial package) which will allow you to create your substance maps and expose your desired outputs.

2: Does iRay converge to a fully photorealistic solution using both CPU and GPU calculations or are there limitations because only GPU code is used?
-- iray will use all of the resources it can, however your scene must fit into the memory of the device (system and each individual gpu). There are also string commands that can be used to control what is actually used to render with iray.

3: Is iRay also usable as an interactive ActiveShade renderer, reflecting scene changes in realtime, like V-Ray RT?
-- No it is currently only supported as a standard and material renderer, but who knows what the future will bring.

For those asking about Substance, it will work with all standard plugin renderers (brazil, fr, vray, etc) as well as mr and QS.

-Eric

Terskov Alexander

Posted 12 September 2010 2:38 pm

Good rope system - is my dream in games - all fantasy games must have this feature!

Ken Pimentel

Posted 12 September 2010 2:44 pm

We have a partnership with nvidia that we hope continues for many years. Initially, you should expect less as we're focused on design/integration and unification efforts. This means that we can't simply throw stuff into 3ds Max because we want to make sure it works for VFX as well as Game dev.

milfora

Posted 12 September 2010 11:25 pm

PhysX integration? Quiksilver? Do I sense a possible real-time engine within Max?
It already seems so tantalisingly close.

AM

Intars5d

Posted 12 September 2010 11:55 pm

Quicksilver turned out to be interesting tool indeed. PhysX, Quicksilver, iray - those things may so tremendously impact and speed up things in max. Interesting how far it can be pushed and how may look with a further development? Have no idea but have feeling things may look very interesting

PiXeL_MoNKeY

Posted 13 September 2010 2:06 am

From the top of the blog:
"You'll get these by the end of September, I don't want to say more than that until the date is officially disclosed."

-Eric

Maryus3D

Posted 13 September 2010 7:14 pm

what abou maya?

Ken Pimentel

Posted 13 September 2010 8:35 pm

Maya has it's own subscription advantage pack. It does not include iray or PhysX, but it includes other things.

visualz

Posted 13 September 2010 11:57 pm

here's a screen grab of the substance textures available

http://www.screencast.com/users/visualZ/folders/Jing/media/f1988480-5880-4b1f-93c1-582c2e295cdc

//gD

PiXeL_MoNKeY

Posted 14 September 2010 11:14 pm

re:gD
You are missing the noise maps in that image.

re:Maya features
It would probably be best to go and post those comments on Cory's Blog for the Maya Advantage Pack.

re:loran
My guess is that the mental ray render wasn't optimized. In other words the power of iray is that you don't have to worry about the tricks or cheats to make it faster. As long as you are using supported components you simply select a method for controlling how the renderer knows when to stop (time, passes, or unlimited). There are a few more options, but that is the general idea.

-Eric

duttyfoot

Posted 15 September 2010 12:00 am

"re:Maya features
It would probably be best to go and post those comments on Cory's Blog for the Maya Advantage Pack."

I'll do just that

The Cult of 3D

Posted 15 September 2010 6:10 pm

@julien Tromeur: The Lady pointed out that she manually set the limit for the iray rendering at 2:40 in order to see what happens after exactly the same time that iray took to complete. I believe iray is rendering that image faster than mental ray, also because you can throw more GPUs in the system if you can.

Ken Pimentel

Posted 15 September 2010 6:17 pm

re: iray GPU hw in video
I believe she had a single Quadro 5000 to do that video. We have some beta customers who are working on getting four Tesla GPUs set up in one PC for a crazy fast experience. The Fermi-based GPUs are roughly 2-3X faster than the older generation. For example, a Quadro 5000 (Fermi) is a little more than 2X faster than a Quadro 5800 (pre-Fermi), and is roughly 5X faster than a single quad-core i7.

timd1971

Posted 17 September 2010 2:01 am

So Quadro 5000 (Fermi) is about 5x faster than a single quad-core i7? So why don't computers use the video card technology instead of the CPU if they are so much faster... I guess they just don't work the same way at all? Maybe this only applies to rendering? Or are video cards much faster than cpus since the newer video cards have so many cores? Are they like little parallel processing computers or somthing? i am confused. : )

Ken Pimentel

Posted 17 September 2010 12:11 pm

re: iterative rendring workflow
iray will not support this workflow in the subscription release. We are researching other modes, but we can't talk about future features on a public forum.

re: GPU RAM
Customer using a 2Gb GPU was able to render a 6M poly scene with textures.

pvt.Antonov

Posted 17 September 2010 9:03 pm

Oh gosh...For some reason i have expected iray to be a production (animation ) gpu APPROXIMATE renderer..
I thought it will be a revolution in gpu rendering scene when same results as mental ray can be achived in seconds.
But as usual they make another one button no brainer for dummies.Oh i forgot...
We must get more INCOME!
MOOOAR =/

timd1971

Posted 19 September 2010 1:19 am

ok... so correct me if I am wrong... iRay doesn't do what ShaderLight, Vray RT, OctaneRender, Arion, Furryball, etc do? I guess they utilize the GPU to rendr quickly to a viewport for fast feedback?

I guess iRay just lets you set a time limit on your render, or unlimited etc? will it let you work while rendering and rotate, etc in realtime, and see the results?

timd1971

Posted 19 September 2010 1:44 am

True Iray here?:
http://www.mentalimages.com/products/iray.html

ok, so the subscription version is NOT a interactive renderer as in the above link? Shouldn't call this Iray then, but maybe something else? half-a$$ Iray maybe? Don't tease us like that! Must be a future XBR integrated feature again. (can't talk about it yet again, jeez, just get it done already) Well...at least we have so many other interactive renderers to choose from anyways and the list is growing. Sounds to be something pretty standard anyways coming up in most 3d apps due to use of multi gpu computations...surprised its taken this long to have noticed all that wasted power sitting in the pc while the CPU chews through it????

Ken Pimentel

Posted 19 September 2010 2:14 pm

re: interactive iray
I think a lot of people will appreciate getting iray as a production render that uses their GPU even if it isn't fully "ActiveShade" or interactive. It's not a situation of all or none. People need to get used to what iray does and doesn't do. It definitely is NOT a preview of mental ray, though iray shares a subset of mental ray workflows.

Historically, we've released subscription extensions in "basic" mode only to improve on them later when a release shipped. Subscription extensions are not new releases of the product - so we're limited in the scope they can have. I'm sorry, I can't say more than that.

mahi

Posted 20 September 2010 2:27 pm

Iray. I have to say I saw this coming. Back when it was introduced I read up on it at Mental Images and got the impression it is not targeted at all to animation and the VFX market. A lot of features went miss understood and hopes were hi. I would hope that the next release of Max / Mental ray has an interactive render separate from Iray. I can see Iray being wonderful for doing still images of products and architecture, but for anyone doing animation with a mental ray workflow, this may not be for you.

For me, I use 3ds Max 2011, I want to start to see Autodesk define what people want from the 2 versions of Max and Max Design. I can see me using Iray for some things, but not much for what I do. Not that this is a bad thing because as mentioned here before interactive renderers are becoming standard. I just dont want to pay for them over what I do for my subscription for Max

Ken Pimentel

Posted 21 September 2010 3:25 pm

Glad you posted. We do not comment on future features or releases. If you are a subscriber then you are eligble for anything we might release during your period.

We are working with mi to figure out options with RS and we will be posting more performance benchmarks. Stay tuned.

ElectronSpeed

Posted 21 September 2010 9:25 pm

Where can I get this advance pack ?

Ken Pimentel

Posted 21 September 2010 9:40 pm

You must be on subscription and you'll be able to download at the end of Sept.

garek007

Posted 22 September 2010 10:15 pm

Where on the subscription site do you download? Is it under the general 'releases' list?

Ken Pimentel

Posted 23 September 2010 11:24 am

re: benchmarks
I will get to it, it is part of my GTC preso, I just need to find time to assemble it in a blog.

pixelmonk

Posted 25 September 2010 1:53 am

kinda wish Autodesk would **** or get off the pot w/Mental Ray and Maya. It seems Max gets all the dedicated MR lovin while Maya folks continually get shafted w/buggy releases. Congrats to the Max team for pressing forward with MR.

Phil Miller

Posted 25 September 2010 2:04 pm

Good questions - we're pulling together a FAQ on all of this BTW.

>>is the iray, which comes with the subscription, capable of something like Distributed Bucket Rendering or Split Scanlines?

The upcoming version of Max iray can only use the processors on the local machine. Other machines would have to get sequential frames - like traditional Max network rendering.

>> My mainboards do have two PCI-E 2.0 x16 slots plus one PCI-E 2.0 x4. Would iray be able to fully use 3 graphics cards ion these slots or is the x4 limitation of the 3rd slot a slowdown for

We have not noticed a slow down on iray rendering for X8 and x4 slots as compared to x16 slots, as there's not that much data going across the bus per second. NVIDIA has not tested on PIC-EX slots slower than X4.

- Phil


c0cllc

Posted 25 September 2010 2:21 pm

Thanks fot these fast answers! That's really fantastic, so i can put 3 cards in each of my systems.
I missed another, last, question, it's about the graphics memory limit:

So what i understood, is, that at the point, when a scene can't fit into the video memory of each GPU, the CPU's continue the job without the GPUs. So things will become slower. My question is, if a scene needs for example 5 GB of normal memory in CPU-only rendering in Mental Ray, how much VGA memory would the scene need for iRay to fully use a GPU. Is there any divisor taht could help us estimate our VGA memory needs?

Phil Miller

Posted 25 September 2010 4:43 pm

>>Is there any divisor that could help us estimate our (GPU) memory needs?

iray will consume the same amount of memory for a given scene whether it's using the GPU or CPU, but that amount will be different than what mental ray requires. We'll put together some rules of thumb for estimating that amount in the FAQ. I do know that if you're working with large scenes (+10mil faces) and/or large amounts of textures (+1GB), then you should consider the the Quadro and Tesla boards for their larger memory so you can maintain your speed. These boards will be up to 6GB next month.

- Phil

c0cllc

Posted 25 September 2010 8:07 pm

By the way- does "physically correct" mean, there is no need for Sky Portals anymore? But if using Sky Portals, we could still fake reality?...

MirkoH

Posted 27 September 2010 10:57 am

"So for £432 you get 3 gig memory on the cards [...]"

@Rik72: as far as I know GPU memory on seperate grafic cards can not be summed up. So in this case, you would have over 1000 cuda cores, but only 1 gig of GPU memory in total.

Ken Pimentel

Posted 27 September 2010 1:27 pm

re: GPU memory
No, you cannot sum it up. However, I think exactly how much memory you're going to need is something you'll want to understand and this can only be done by practical experiments. We are saying between 5M and 10M polys per 1Gb.

Ken Pimentel

Posted 27 September 2010 1:47 pm

iray is pretty smart about resources, so it is going to try to use all the GPUs if it thinks it can fit the scene onto them. If it can't then I believe it will only use the higher memory boards and exclude the GPUs. Also, there is maxscript exposure for telling iray which CPU/GPU resources to use.

c0cllc

Posted 27 September 2010 2:28 pm

Will subscribers of localized 3ds Max Design 2011 versions (in my case: german) get that pack later ot at the same time, as the english?

Phil Miller

Posted 27 September 2010 2:42 pm

Correct - if a machine has GPUs of different memory sizes, and the scene doesn't fit into the smaller GPU's memory, then iray will continue to use the GPUs where the scene fits, as well as the CPUs.

>>So if we had one x 2gig 460...

Not sure why the talk of 2GB here as the 460 is either a 1 or a 3/4 GB card. The largest memory on GTX is 1.5 GB with the 480. It's the Quadro's and Tesla's that have 2.5 GB, 3 GB and 6 GB versions.

>>If it's mostly about the number of cores then seems like the 460s are certainly the way to go.

The 460 might currently be your best price/core option, but your best core/slot game-card option is clearly the 480 with +43% more cores than a 460. Even a 470 has 1/3 more cores than a 460.

- Phil

c0cllc

Posted 27 September 2010 2:55 pm

@ Phil Miller

maybe you missed that there are several GTX 460 out with a memory of 2048MB.
Check it out:

http://www.gainward.com/main/vgapro.php?id=400
http://www.palit.biz/main/vgapro.php?id=1354

Ken Pimentel

Posted 27 September 2010 2:57 pm

Your CUDA processors have to access GPU memory for performance reasons. Accessing other GPUs or the CPUs memory is not an option.

re: localization
Sept 29th is a world-wide availability the advantage pack. iray will be localized as part of this, so you should be able to get hold of a German version of our advantage pack for iray. We are not localizing the PhysX package. Only iray and Substance.

c0cllc

Posted 27 September 2010 5:17 pm

ist there a difference for iray when cards run in SLI mode?

Phil Miller

Posted 27 September 2010 5:37 pm

>> you missed that there are several GTX 460 out with a memory of 2048MB.

Sure enough - some of our OEMs have indeed come out with 2GB versions of the GTX 460, and our web site's spec's haven't been updated to reflect that. I'm on the workstation side, and am not as in touch with our consumer side. On paper, two 460's should best a 480's iray performance by a bit over a third. A machine would just have a lower upper performance limit using 460’s (because more slots are in use) and you could accommodate larger scenes with Quadro & Tesla. Lots of options out there depending upon what you want to trade off – cost, PCIE slots, scene size, power, reliability.

>> is there a difference for iray when cards run in SLI mode?

SLI provides no advantage for Compute, meaning an SLI motherboard is not required for iray or other GPU ray tracing options to use multiple GPUs.

- Phil

Phil Miller

Posted 27 September 2010 6:50 pm

>>It seems that Iray is capable of great images but still needs mucho power to do it quickly (much more than Octane render for example).

There are several renderers with similar approaches to iray in their rendering (unbiased path tracing). This is a massive processing task in all cases, and many feel the GPU's speed has brought it within practical consideration for production use. Many 3D artists, especially designers, feel this rendering approach is faster than previous ones (scanline, traditional mental ray, etc.) because it’s more predictable – using light sources the way the physical world does. As a progressive renderer, designers are also often able to tell if their lighting setup is working properly in the first minute – which really cuts down on the creative iteration time. What iray then brings you is an integrated 3ds Max workflow (using many of Max’s core materials, maps and lighting) that will only improve with time.

timd1971

Posted 28 September 2010 3:50 am

any day now. (Tues maybe?) Hopefully SP1 for 3ds also! Softimage 2011.5 too? ; )

tty044

Posted 28 September 2010 9:55 am

Would Iray be used for Render To Texture?

Sevensheaven

Posted 28 September 2010 10:07 am

What types of materials are supported by iRay? Can it also render the good ol' Standard material, interpreting values such as Specular Level and Glossiness? Or is it necessary to use Mental Ray materials, Architectural materials or special iRay materials?

Ken Pimentel

Posted 28 September 2010 1:41 pm

re: more iray info
http://area.autodesk.com/blogs/ken/more_details_on_mental_image_s_iray_in_3ds_max_and_the_cloud

re: RTT
No, not at this time.

re: performance profiles of hw
There is a chart in my Rendering Revolution presentation in the blog posting above

Ken Pimentel

Posted 28 September 2010 2:06 pm

It is all based on the number of CUDA cores and scales pretty linearily. If you have 10% fewer cores, then you are 10% slower. Yes, clock rate also matters, but the number of CUDA cores is what you should focus on as the clock rates I believe are pretty close. I haven't seen more detailed benchmark than what I put into my presentation.

Rik72

Posted 28 September 2010 2:10 pm

Ken - what were the "3 fermi class" cards in the workstation?

Sevensheaven

Posted 28 September 2010 2:16 pm

Ah, cool. Thanks for the pointer to the iRay specs Ken.

Ken Pimentel

Posted 28 September 2010 2:35 pm

re: 3 fermi cards
I don't know. I think they were two C2050 and a Quadro 5000

Rik72

Posted 28 September 2010 4:10 pm

OK, so that's around 8000dollars of GPU plus the workstation cost.

Thanks Ken...

All we needed to know

c0cllc

Posted 28 September 2010 4:29 pm

So what about the Sky Portals - do they make any sense with Iray?

Ken Pimentel

Posted 28 September 2010 8:35 pm

re: sky portals
I believe they are supported, but I could be wrong on that one

c0cllc

Posted 29 September 2010 6:04 am

I have subscription for the Autocad Revit Architecture Visualization Suite (2011). This suite includes 3ds max design. So i hope i'll be also able to get the pack?

Shane Griffith

Posted 29 September 2010 12:06 pm

yes, it will be included with all the suites that 3ds Max and 3ds Max Design are a part of.

c0cllc

Posted 29 September 2010 12:26 pm

What would you say if rendering the same scene with Mental Ray (FG only, Draft settings) and with iray - would iray be slower or faster if using ONLY the CPU?

duttyfoot

Posted 29 September 2010 2:22 pm

over at cgtalk it was said it would probably be released around noon.


Sevensheaven

Posted 29 September 2010 3:06 pm

I assume subscription owners will get an e-mail notification when iRay is ready for download?

Sevensheaven

Posted 29 September 2010 3:11 pm

Ok, thanks Shane!

c0cllc

Posted 29 September 2010 4:00 pm

Now i have a question that really makes me curious!

What if i have 2 computers and use Backburner: so if i enable SPLIT SCANLINES for a rendering, that normally would not fit into the GPU memory of each of my computers. So SPLIT SCANLINES enables every computer to render only a part of the image and later Backburner stitches the parts together. Would rendering only a part of the image lead to a lower memory consumption, thus allowing us this way to often use the full GPU power even if scenes are to memory intensive for rendering them at once?

Shane Griffith

Posted 29 September 2010 4:44 pm

help docs are now online www.autodesk.com/3dsmax-help-v2011advpack

Phil Miller

Posted 29 September 2010 4:56 pm

>>Would rendering only a part of the image lead to a lower memory consumption, thus allowing us this way to often use the full GPU power even if scenes are to memory intensive for rendering them at once?

The entire scene (geometry and bitmaps) must fit into a GPU's memory in order for that GPU to process it. This is a common situation for all GPU Ray Tracing solutions at this time.

c0cllc

Posted 29 September 2010 5:17 pm

So does that mean, that whether a scene fit's into the GPU's memory or not does not depend on rendering resolution and size, thus it's something independent from the rendering process itself? So if the GPU can't render for example 1920x1080, this would automatically mean, that it would not be able to render ANY resolution, even 192x108?

Shane Griffith

Posted 29 September 2010 5:23 pm

it is not resolution dependent, this would be a good question to ask over on the FAQ thread

Sevensheaven

Posted 30 September 2010 9:26 am

Installed the Subscription Advantage Pack. Very promising, especially iRay.

A question: how do I control the DOF when using iRay? Does the camera target acts as the focal point? And is there a way to set the f-stop and shutterspeed?

Ken Pimentel

Posted 30 September 2010 10:54 am

re: PhysX
We have initiated a long-term partnership with nvidia. What you see in the subscription drop isn't going to be much different than what Nvidia makes available to developers. However, our partnership continues...

loran

Posted 4 October 2010 3:39 pm

re: Iray DOF
Select the camera, Enable Multi-Pass in the camera settings and set it to Depth of Field (Mental Ray). Change the camera target disance and the F-stop to adjust the Focus.

Sevensheaven

Posted 4 October 2010 7:14 pm

Thank you loran! Now I've only got one more burning question regarding iRay: I just couldn't get a daylight system with mrSun and mrSky to work. Set mr Photographic Exposure to 15 and all, but no matter what I did, the render remained black. A daylight scene using iRay would be very welcome.

Sevensheaven

Posted 4 October 2010 7:18 pm

Sorry, that should read: "A daylight scene tutorial using iRay would be very welcome."

loran

Posted 6 October 2010 8:41 am

re: Daylight
Create a daylight system, Set Sunlight to 'mr Sun' and Skylight 'mr Sky'. Render Iray... that simple

Sevensheaven

Posted 6 October 2010 3:12 pm

Thanks again. I did what you said when I tried it the first time (Daylight system, mr Sun and mr Sky with the haze setting). Maybe the render remained black because I used the mr Photographic Exposure settings?

I'll try it again. Maybe the scene contained something unusual that blocked a correct render.

Ken Pimentel

Posted 20 December 2010 6:48 pm

Unfortunately, we were unable to get Substances and iray to play nice before we shipped. Changes were required in iray that didn't quite happen in time. Technically, the problem has been solved, but I don't think it will be a hotfix/patch to get it to you, so it is likely to remain this way for the 3ds Max 2011 release. Sorry.

Rik72

Posted 20 December 2010 7:19 pm

Ahhh. That'll be it then. Thanks for letting me know.

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