Brian Smith

There have been numerous questions regarding the creation of more VRay V.I. articles so I wanted to clarify what has been done and what is intended for future articles.

The article ‘Critical VRay Settings – Part I’ was created because it was voted for. Our original intent was to write 10 pages or less on the subject, but we quickly realized that short of posting some typical settings without any meaningful discussion about why and what the settings do, there was no way to write about the entire program. Not wanting to do a mediocre job, 10 pages quickly blew up to 25 pages and all we made it through was IR, LC, and antialiasing…what we consider to be the most important and difficult features in VRay. It then dawned on us that if we wrote so in depth about these features, it would look ridiculous to write abbreviated descriptions about all the others. So then we decided that we would make it a series of articles. But that idea got nixed when we (Vismasters, CGA, and 3DAS) discussed that it would be detrimental to write essentially a small book of VRay when we were simultaneously trying to launch a new initiative for online classes. The idea for online classes started long before the VRay article and it was only started because it was heavily requested and received strong support in the poll that was conducted. In hindsight, I guess it would have been wise to have just left VRay out of the poll, just make the VRay article be a few presets, or just not use the name ‘…Part I’, thus implying that a Part II, III, etc would be following. Since it is already written, we’re going to change the name of the article to ‘Irradiance Maps, Light Cache, and Antialiasing with V-Ray’. At least it won’t confuse future readers. There won’t be follow up VRay article - it just wouldn’t be a financially smart thing to do. We apologize for all the confusion and getting everyone’s hopes up. This wasn’t all planned out as sinisterly as some people seem to have thought. We never knew more than a couple weeks in advance what articles we were going to write. There definitely won’t be any need to pay anything to finish any articles. The decision to tie the VRay article in with the online classes was done solely to provide users a detailed look at the quality and scope of the material presented in the online classes. We thought giving a written description of the first module would be a great way to do it.

Anyway, we have decided to postpone the V.I. until March to give ourselves time to prepare adequately for the online classes as well as the Imagina conference. Below are some of the remaining V.I. articles that will be posted starting again in March.

Week 17 - Managing system resources

Week 18 - Creating Onyx trees

Week 19 – TBD

Week 20 - A few tips and tricks (Guest article by Visarty)

Week 21 - Preparing AutoCAD linework

Week 22 - Creating furniture (Guest article by Intero Visuals)

Week 23 – Building walls – Lofts vs. Edit Polys

Week 24 - TBD

Week 25 – Understanding architectural drawings

Week 26 - TBD

__________________
Brian Smith
www.3dats.com
3D Architectural Training Solutions

Macer

I'd like to say thank you Brian, for all the information that you have parted with, and all for the benefit of others!

I understand what you are saying about the V-Ray Course and I don't feel as though I have been lead into anything though, on the contrary, I feel grateful to have recieved 'Part I' for free. Unfortunately the cost of the course puts it out of my reach for the moment, are you going to be producing a V-Ray book by any chance? I worked my way through your 'Foundation 3ds Max 8 Architectural Visualization' book several months ago and found it to be a very useful learning tool.

I realise that the on-line course would provide a better learning experience but a book would cost only a fraction of the price of the course. Go on, please, pretty please??.....

Thanks again.

vizwhiz

Brian

not everyone uses vray, you have covered That sufficiently

ok now, so move on

so

when are The numerous articles/Tutorials/preferred settings
of mental ray going To be published/released/posted??

sometime soon i hope

you have beat vray over The head long enough, (so move on)
just joking but anything mental ray would be greatly appreciated

Thanks

Randy
fun-da-mental

Ray

Brian(s): thanks for all the effort you've put in so far.
Any chance that the online courses can eventually be released on dvd?

Brian Smith

It wont be for at least a year. 3DAS will have ownership of the video but we are contractually bound for the next year during which time we are not allowed to release a DVD. A big turn off is the pirating issue that hurts any dvd. I'm sure someone with capture the online footage eventually though.

__________________
Brian Smith
www.3dats.com
3D Architectural Training Solutions