The Dead Rise!

Haven't posted anything in a couple days, so I probably haven't been doing much.  However, reports of my demise are greatly exaggerated.

I've been playing around with a few areas of 3ds Max recently that I haven't previously had a lot of experience with, including a lot of Reactor simulations.  But the one thing that has me pretty excited at this point is mrProxy objects which, combined with the new Object Paint feature in Max 2011, really lets you generate a ton of randomly (within parameters) generated meshes by painting them directly into a scene.  The mrProxy objects save significantly on CPU time for rendering, and really keep the viewport from locking up due to excessive geometry.

The primary application, at this point, is generating extremely dense forests without wrecking my computer.  No more need to screw around with half-assed opacity-mapped mattes that go haywire with the mrPhysicalSky and Mental Ray in general, and no more need to limit scatter objects to 50 or so in a scene.  I was able to paint 150+ proxies for a 30,000 polygon mesh into my scene and render it out in minutes at 720p.

I will be using this to update The Camp and The Shack in the near future.  And I will have some screenshots maybe as soon as tomorrow evening.

Stay tuned!