Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Exposing the Mental Ray Production Shaders in Max 2008

As promised, here is the way to expose the production shaders that exist in the max.mi.
CAUTION this is for you advanced users out there. Please save a copy of the max .mi before you change it scenes at the moment. There is no support for this part of Max

1. find the file called>> production_max.mi
2. open in notepad
3. do a search and replace
find "hidden" replace with # "hidden"
EXCEPT FOR THE FIRST ENTRY!!!!!!
The result is that the MI Production Shadersare exposed to Mental Ray.

These include:
mr Raytype Switcher
mr Raytype Switcher (advanced)
mr Raytype Switcher (environment)
mr Card Opacity
mr Motion Blur
mr Motion Vector Export
mr Matte/Shadow/Reflection (map)
mr Camera Map
mr Mirror Ball
mr Gray Ballmr Gamma & Gain
mr Matte/Shadow/Reflection (material)
mr Gamma
mr Gain

Wednesday, January 9, 2008

Combustion 2008

After a long anticipation we finally have a new version of Combustion to bring us into the age of HD. The new improvements in Combustion 2008 concentrate in two area's a new Color Wrap and improvements to the Schematics:

  • Interactive adjustment of gamma, gain, offset, hue, saturation, and contrast
  • Intuitive hue shift and tint color wheel for fast, accurate color balancing.
  • Interactive Histogram and curves editing modes
  • Independent controls for color correcting the image’s shadow, midtone, and highlight regions
  • “Match” feature for fast scene-to-scene color correction
  • “Selective” feature for sampling up to three color regions for isolated correction.

    These new improvements should make a more fluid workflow for SD and HD alike especially since now we can work in 8 , 10 , 16 , 32 and float bit depth