Weblog: Pieter Vanderwerff Visualisations

I am currently in the process of updating the design of the visualisations website with a more professional look. The following two pictures below document the progress so far. The website will be a very clean simple design similar to the existing website theme, the main differences will be a cleaner layout making the page less cluttered, more colour! and lighting that puts an emphasis on the center of the page drawing attention to the important content.

Visualisations website redesign showing the new projects page | full size image

The new design will take advantage of jquery to do effects such as changing images and fading the menu lights in and out on hover. As a proof of concept project i am considering making a simple cms for the website that takes advantage of jquery and ajax to do inline editing of all content.

Below is an example for the flash ram player, this is a more advanced version of the one i made for this previous post, Mental Ray Render Optimisation. The main difference is that it now loads in the images instead of embedding them so it is possible to use it for different situations without recompiling the swf file every time.

The flash file receives the url to the images you want displayed via flashvars, it then uses a loader to load the images and display the loading progress. The ram player as it is has some limitations, you can only use it for images 500 x 375px without having to change the action script code and at the moment it does not support the text summary's shown in the Mental Ray Render Optimisation post. I will add this functionality and post an update when i have time.

This tutorial was created to document my procedure for optimising the render settings in mental ray to create a scene that renders quickly and most importantly looks good. There are 3 key lighting settings that should be looked at to produce a good result, these key setting are Global Illumination (GI), Final Gather (FG) and Ambient Occlusion (AO).

The current 3ds max scene you can see is based on the Jubilee Chapel by Richard Meier and was created for a previous project. The model in this scene is complex but the lighting and materials are set up very simply. The lighting in the scene is from a MR sun and sky with soft shadows, and the materials are Arch & Design with the matte finish template and a diffuse colour.

Move the slider in the flash file above to see the comparison between a non-optimised render (FG - High, GI - None, AO - None) which took 21 minutes to complete vs an optimised render (FG - Low, GI - Low, AO - on) which took 5 and a half minutes to render.

Richard Lord at Flint has updated the lines and collisions branch of the Flint SVN. It now supports collisions with some new Zone types and I guess in the future it will ideally support all Zones. As my BoundingShape class was written it does not support any Zones other than the LineZone, to accommodate for the new Zone types and for others to be supported in the future I have updated the BoundingShape class. The archive below has the updated Flint code as well as the updated BoundingShape class.

The way in which you use this class is just the same as outlined here, Flint line collision tutorial, the only difference is you will need the archived file above and the BoundingShape class now supports more Zone types.

I have made this tutorial to help make it clearer how to do line collisions using my Bounding Shape action in Flint. This tutorial is not necessarily the best or most efficient way of doing this, it is just the way I have found to work well for me.

First you will need to download and extract the Flintcollide.rar file that I have put together, contained within this archive is the Flint code from the Lines and Collisions Branch of the SVN with the addition of my own BoundingShape.as file in the twoD/actions folder. Within the flint source code I have removed the flintparticles/threeD folder to reduce file size since this technique is 2D only. Also within this archive I have included the flash file of the line collisions example shown above.