Max 9 build works now!

Hi,

with the help of some active betatesters I could track down the problem and it should load on all systems now. Thanks to all those who took the time to test the various builds.
I updated the file. Just reload it. Now we can start collecting the "real" bugs:)

Best regards,

Dieter

betatester projects

Hi,

I am still struggling with the compiler settings to get the max9 version up and running. But in the meantime I got some interesting feedback. Alejandro Suárez is brave enough to test the Beta in a bigger project:) He also wrote a script to manage many Isoobjects. Here are some images of his progress:




Best regards,

Dieter

Need help,

I got reports that the max9 build won't load on some systems. I tested it on three systems here and it loaded, but perhaps those systems were not very representative. It would help if all the testers would send me their system specs and if the max9 build loads or not. I am stuck at the moment because I have no system that doesn't load it right now and this makes debugging slow.

Best regards,

Dieter

new beta is out!

Hi,

new beta is out. All betatesters should have received an email with download link and password. If you haven't - drop me a mail. If you want to make sure to get through my spam filter then add the word "VRay" to the topic:)

Best regards,

Dieter

Bring on the images!

Hi,
I got some cool images from Oscar Hernández.











Best regards,

Dieter

Next beta is near

Hi all,

I have read through the OpenMP 2.0 standard and tried to apply it to my code. I have multiprocessor support of some functions in the preparation phase and for the viewport mesh generation now. But I am unsure if it's really faster. OpenMP seems to have a lot of administration overhead, could be that the single threaded code is still faster. I will do some more tests.
I compiled some of my older plugins for 3dsmax 9 last week and wanted to upload them to maxplugins.de. I started with OptimizeSpline (This is 6 years old now!), but I soon got reports that the plugin doesn't work on some systems. My biggest problem seems to be that I have updated the Visual Studio 2005 to service pack 1. The result is that the plugins that I am compiling won't run on a standard 3dsmax9 installation unless I am distributing the plugin with an installer. I hope I can solve this problem soon.
I got a link from betatester ACT with a small animation. Have a look here: Movie
Good to see first results from the testers.

That's it for now.

Best regards,
Dieter

CGSphere entry in motion!

Hi,

I rendered out the cgsphere animation. It was a good usability test for the whole process and I am really happy how it turned out. Please notice that there is no flickering at all involved although we have GI with secondary bounces, 3d motionblur, moving objects and lighting effects.
Another nice surprise was that the rendertime didn't increase noticeably inside the Volume. Hope you all like it.

Here's the clip:

CGSphere in motion

I rendered 3 passes: Static background with precalculated IRR Map, The fishies with singleframe IRMap and a particle pass.

Best regards,
Dieter

Happy New Year!

Hi,

happy new year to all of you! I am still enjoying some days off. And I spend some more time with my source code:). I got the viewport mesh some steps further, but have some bugs left. But it's really a lot better if you can see something in the viewport. For evaluating the plugin I worked a bit more on the CGSphere scene. If you haven't seen it on cgsphere.com, here's the image. (Thought I should show it here as well)

I should use the opportunity to thank my workmate Erik Bochmann who leads the compositing departement at mackevision and did the wonderful compositing on this image. I plan to add the 3d file to the Iso beta package. If you see what comes out of the renderer you will appreciate what he did:)
Placing the fishies was really a tedious work with the old version, because I had to render each time I moved them. Now it's easy. I even could do a little bit of keyframing and did some camera moves through the corals. I hope I can render this out sometime. I also changed the code for the cellcache. The cache is only recalculated in sequences if the parameters are animated now. This saves a lot of time for animations. I did some tests with the new OpenMP2.0 standard for Visual Studio. It seems that this could help me on getting some multiprocessor support into the plugin. The preparation phase only uses one processor right now. Perhaps I can change this for a few work steps. But it's hard to do this for the major algorithm, which is a fast marching algorithm. I don't have a clue how I can split this up into more threads. But there are some tasks left which can be parallelized easily.

I found that it's also a good way sometimes to collapse the viewport object to an editable mesh and apply VRayDisplacement. The results are quite similar to the direct Iso-raytracing, but of course faster and more convenient to work with. That's it for today.

Best regards,

Dieter