[sconlogue]

I thought it would be interesting to see Fire in action with various scenes, materials, lighting etc. I encourage everyone who can to screen capture you Fire using Fire and post it here.

To get the ball rolling here's a three part video walk-through I created last week on my blog just throwing some existing architectural visualization projects at Fire.

Machine Specs:
Win 7 x64
Core i7 940 3.2 Ghz
16 Gigs of RAM
Nvidia GTX 295

Scene Specs:
Part I - Exterior (school), Daylight, 300K polys
Part II - Interior (office), Night, 20+ emitters, 750K polys
Part III - Exterior (Residential/landscape), IBL, 1.5 Mil polys geometry plus 4-5 Mil polys in proxy mesh.

[Richard]

So are you going to show us the video? Now I'm keen as mustard!

[Tea_Bag]

Richard Click on the image and you will be taken to the 3 part videos

[NicoR44]

Great video's Samuel!! what did you use to capture them?

[Mihai]

Great example scenes! Thanks for taking the time to show both indoor/outdoor scenes, real production ones too. About the color changes not updating, the material changes should be instant, just like changing camera settings and lighting. Even changing displacement settings in a material will not need re-voxelisation if the new displacement values are within a certain limit (not sure exactly what that limit is). The only time re-voxelisation is necessary is if the scene geometry changes (position, objects deleted or added). Probably one of the many "riddles" of 3Dmax, especially when coupled with Active shade. One of many the plugin coding wizards are working with while trying to keep an acceptable level of sanity

[brodie_geers]

Awesome videos! It was great to see how the 3ds Max plugin is working, I haven't had a chance to try it out yet. It was also great to see that scene I remember so well from Bekerman's last challenge in more detail.

-Brodie

[sconlogue]

Brodie, - thanks, I liked your dusk museum shots. Great to have some Maxwell representation in the challenges, can't wait for the next one!

Mihai - right I thought that's how it worked, I found it strange when I got into my container house scene and suddenly color changes were not so instantaneous anymore. I'll have to test some more.

NicoR44 - When it comes to capture I'm a cheapo. I use open source tools like CamStudio along with the FFDshow codec. Camstudio has crappy audio record sync so I run Adobe Soundbooth along with it then line up my audio track and video in premiere. To stay totally open source you could use something like Cinefx (formerly Jahshaka) for your editing / audio needs. Soon I will be putting up a "Video Capture on the Cheap" tutorial on my blog to help folks who don't want to spend $$ just to make some screen cap videos.

[NicoR44]

Thanks Samuel, and again, great video's!!

[Mihnea Balta]

We'll look into the issue with long delays before showing material updates. In theory we don't export meshes when you edit materials, so it shouldn't need to go through voxelization again, but in that scene it's probably because Max thinks the geometry somehow changes when you touch the color. We'll try to reproduce it here and figure out a solution.

[Bogdan Coroi]

@sconlogue: Can you send us a scene with that issue updating materials? bogdan.coroi@gmail.com or mihnea.balta@gmail.com

Everything will be confidential of course. Thanks!

[sconlogue]

Bogdan Coroi - Sure, I can send along the container house scene. I'll pack it up and provide you with a download link as soon as I can. Thanks for taking a look!

Now some other folks gotta get some videos up here!

[sconlogue]

Still no videos, aside from my own?
Well this may help. I just put up an open source screen capture how-to tutorial up on my blog. It's the same method I used to create my videos. Pretty simple technique and it's using free software to boot! So let's see some videos!

Screen Capture Tutorial

@Bogdan - Finally getting around to packing up that scene file. I'll email you the link shortly. Thanks!

[Bogdan Coroi]

Got the scene, thanks. It seems to be an engine issue, not plug-in related. We'll try to fix it asap.

[sconlogue]

Thanks Bogdan, I have only run into the issue in that scene so it hasn't hampered my work at all. Fire has really sped things up, I'm loving it!

[Mihnea Balta]

The issue with revoxelization after changing that material should be fixed in the plug-in we've just released.