M&E Project Showcase!

[lynn_zhang]

Hello Community!

I’ve heard your voice – some of you mentioned in the feedback that you’d like to see other artists sharing their work. So I want to start a project showcase here for you to share your creations and see what other artists are working on. We had a very fun thread in the 3ds Max forum previously: 3DS Max project showcase! Why don’t we do something similar and see what everyone is up to? 🙂 

You can simply post any creative project you are working on using any Autodesk Media & Entertainment products in your pipeline, and here are some basic rules to follow: 

• Limit to 5 images maximum per post 
• Limit to 1 video per post 
• Compliments over critiques!  
• Treat others with respect! Here is a complete list of forum rules 

Whether you have a finished project or something work-in-progress, this is a great place for you to showcase your skills and creativity, and get feedback from your fellow artists. Have fun and I look forward to seeing everyone’s projects! 😊

Image credit: Autodesk Office - Portland

[marc.pat]

This is my last 3d model create in 3ds max 2020 with voxel remesh plugin.

You can create low and high poly 3ds model, for bake after in substance painter, and render in iray substance and vray next in 3ds max. 

For italian user I sell a video tutorial for this method... http://www.tutors3d.com/18--modellazione-voxel-remesh.html

Best Regards... Mak21.. Marcello. 

[studioG433M]

Hi everyone 🙂

Some time ago I started creating a multiexporter tool able to pass static meshes data from max to different game engines.

Currently I have a plan to make support for Unity, Unreal and Godot. There are very good engines out there so I would like to create additional "plugins" for as many of them as possible.

This is early alpha I think and only Unity and Unreal is more or less supported.

By support I mean creating collision setup, creating primitives, primitives generated for selected polygons only, so convex decomposition can be done really fast and accurate. There are numbers for each convex shape. They are "up to" limit so if you need to be very strict about convex complexity, this may be a good way to keep collision setup lighweight as needed. There is also fully working "box decomposition", object oriented box collision generation, for selected faces too.

Separate tool to managing physical materials, to make whole collision setup ready for sound designers, and for particle effects reacting on specific material hit. Selected LOD as trimesh collision ( still not ready ).

I have a plan to make possible to model trimesh collider with material separation.

It is possible to export each LOD as separate mesh, so later mesh updates will not interfere with other LODs.

In engine LOD system will have to be created by the user then.

Small snippet regarding naming issues, so with this tool user can type any mesh name, even with forbidden symbols, those will be converted into replacement character. Readable for the user, consistent in the project. With preview for those names. You can specify which characters should not be present in exported asset name.

Each engine has its own axis "issues". So this tool can export meshes without any rotation applied.

Common solution for Unity and Max is to rotate 90 degree on X axis ( to compensate Z/Y up axis ) and done.... well.... not exactly.

In Max X axis is right handed, in Unity is left handed, despite red arrow is pointing right.... So it is possible to export mesh with 100% exact orientation taking into account all axis differences. Other axis conversions are also supported.

Similar to Unreal. Z up in Max and in Unreal is not enough. Unreal has some options to translate mesh orientation but I wasn't able to make it to work so I wrote my own translation mechanism, so no actions needed on engine side, mesh in Max and in those engines has exact the same orientation.

Also I have made... let's call it - custom pivot.

I assume environment artist should not be constrained by anything when it comes to make art. Including scene arrangement, final asset fragmentation, collision setup and so on.

So with this tool it doesn't matter how you work and how many pieces you would like to keep separately and where each element has its own pivot - probably at convenient spot for the user, not for exported asset. Custom pivot acts as a ... export pivot for exported mesh. Each exporter can have different options for pivot placement like: always at [0,0,0] or at the point of first added mesh to exporter.

It can also be used as "parent" for all export meshes in case you would like to work on complex asset and its parts doesn't have to be always placed next to each other. Lock icon prevents pivot from accidental movement, but it is not frozen so it will not "unfreeze" 😉

As foror minor features:

hide / unhide each lod, colliders, entire exporter meshes separately

sorting exporters by name or by creation order

max allows multiple elements to have the same name, export name should be always different as long as user will not decide otherwise 🙂 So this tool keeps an eye on names uniqueness and if some names are the same you will be notified about it. Each exporter has green "LED". It will become red if name is duplicated. To make it even more flexible override is possible as there are situations when two ( or more ) different versions of the same asset should be exported for testing. Export name is an asset name in engine. 

Each exporter created per scene will use the same export location.

However, for the sake of flexibility in this matter each exporter can contain custom export location.

Those "M"s stands for merged / not merged state of exported LOD. Unity project structure is 100% hierarchical.

this tool can export given LOD as separate or combined meshes, all names are accordingly created and maintained during export process. By separated I mean, many meshes under common empty parent.

Because this tool is exporting custom data, I'm preparing custom import scripts which handle all the import process.

Mainly for collision recreation during import and physical material management.

If you find it interesting and worth your attention, please let me know 🙂

All the best

Adam

P.S.

I did not made any icons yet, so do not take them 100% descriptive 🙂

[lynn_zhang]

Hello @marc.pat ,

Welcome to the Artists Lounge! Nice 3D model, thanks for sharing and kicking off the project showcase! 🙂

[lynn_zhang]

Hello @studioG433M ,

Welcome to the Artists Lounge! Thanks for sharing your project and wow that's a ton of details in the workflow! 😀

[-niels-]

I'm not in the M&E industry, but i do use 3DS Max for rendering stuff.

It's mostly a hobby, but i do get the occasional opportunity to do something for my work that actually gets used in media. (The control panel in the 2nd image was used in a news posting for instance)

The models i use are almost always created with Autodesk Inventor, or supplier content (step/iges) that was translated in Inventor.

I really like the Arnold engine in Max; i started out with Mentalray, which was nice, but the realism i got with Arnold was just so much higher.

Here are some recent examples:

[lynn_zhang]

Hello @-niels- 

Welcome to the Artists Lounge! Thanks for sharing your rendering projects, they look great!

It's so cool that you're using 3ds Max to render something created from Inventor. A perfect cross-industry collaboration between the 2 products. Well done!

[CGBenner]

@-niels-  Thanks for sharing Niels!  These are great as always.  For those who don't know, Niels is a bit of a celebrity in the Inventor forum, the author of the now famous Friday Pictures posts.  

[Anonymous]

Water feature using Max Fluids  

@hagen.deloss

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sgEh87El-s 

[lynn_zhang]

Looks cool! Thanks so much for sharing your work!

[hagen.deloss]

@-niels-  Love these renders, reminds me of when I was doing Storefront and fixture rendering for Adidas and Hurley! Great metal bump materials and specular.

@Anonymous unsung hero returns! That looks like a peaceful spot to rest up, i am consistently in awe of your water sim skills 😄 

Hope you all are hangin in there, really good to see familiar folks posting here. i hope I can contribute soon!

[Anonymous]

@hagen.deloss    haha  so dramatic - but thank you for the comment 🙂

[Anonymous]

Trying out some colour blending thanks to the @martin.coven tutorial.

Low res sim just to see the result, but effective for sure.

https://vimeo.com/452921485 

[Anonymous]

Another crack at a flowing river and foam, still not getting the foam right though.

Turbulent River (on youtube)

[lynn_zhang]

Hey @Anonymous that still looks great. Thanks for sharing!

[Anonymous]

Thanks, I can't quite put my finger on it at the moment but the foam..   just struggling - not sure if it is too grainy or what but there is something.

Will keep stalking the web to come up with something. 

Cheers

[lynn_zhang]

@hagen.deloss , Any insights on this?

Hope others in the community have something to share and offer you some help too. 

---

@Anonymous wrote:

Thanks, I can't quite put my finger on it at the moment but the foam..   just struggling - not sure if it is too grainy or what but there is something.

Will keep stalking the web to come up with something. 

Cheers

---

[-niels-]

---

@lynn_zhang wrote:

Hope others in the community have something to share and offer you some help too. 

---

@Anonymous Not that i have a good eye for it, i thought it looked pretty darn slick, but the only thing that looked slightly "off" was the amount of foam in that little shallow on the bottom left.

Out of curiosity, as i've only messed with fluid simulation a little, what kind of system do you use and how long does it take to calculate those awesome simulations?

Are they done with Autodesk's Bifrost or are you using another program?

[Anonymous]

@-niels-   all in native Max fluids.  I was messing around with Phoenix a little while ago but wanted to just see what I could wrangle out of Max so anything fluids wise is all out of the box.  Yeh I see the bottom left, that area as with a couple of areas at the bottom have 'rocks' in place to act as little catching areas for the turbulence, there should be foam there but maybe the dissipation is stretched a little too long.

My struggle at the moment (and on my machine) waterfall mist.. WOW.. that is really doing my head in how to actually get the foam to act like mist.

My machine, is a HPZ640, duel Xeon E5-2860 @2.5ghz.  128gb Ram and an M5000.  I have 2TB disk that I write all the sims to so I can just fire an forget.  It's hard to gauge how long as I stop and start when I work on something, then walk away and let it sim, stop, create a preview, get annoyed, clear the cache, blindly tweak some settings and have another crack at it.

Not the worlds best workflow but this is all only really for my own amusement so no pressure from anyone other than myself and that is hard enough.

[-niels-]

@Anonymous LOL at your workflow, sounds a bit like mine when i was trying stuff.

Found some gifs of those... they're pretty old...

Nowhere near as impressive as yours, though this one i did for a Halloween was pretty fun:

I guess the dual Xeon's really help with the calculating, it just takes way too long on my single CPU system to be simulating stuff inbetween actual work in Inventor. 😅