Pierre-Felix Breton

I will be presenting two sessions at Autodesk University 2011: Fine-Tune Your Autodesk® Revit® Models for Autodesk 3ds Max® Class handout here Stump the Autodesk® 3ds Max® Champions

Here is a question that I see asked often: We are trying to do a daylight analysis that includes some frosted glass or “kalwall” style skylights which diffuse the light into the space.  We can get the VLT (Visible Light Transmittance) values easy enough.  However, is there some way to accurately (or semi-accurately) account for [...]

I recently wrote a document for Autodesk about the typical steps around the usage of mental ray in 3ds Max for architectural visualization workflows. I thought I would share it here since it may benefit many 3ds Max users, especially beginners. My goal was to create a document where the main features of 3ds Max [...]

If you noticed that the location of your Daylight System object created by FBX Import in 3ds Max does not match the project coordinates of Revit,  this is a simple thing to fix. In Revit, go in the 3D view you will export to FBX Edit the Graphic Display Options Specify a Location and Time [...]

When you File Link a complex DWG model in 3ds Max, you might want to consider leveraging the Layers Filters feature from AutoCAD as well as the “skip frozen” layers from File Link. With a little bit of standardization, you can streamline your AutoCAD to 3ds Max workflow and gain efficiency. This video demonstrates how to [...]

When you launch a floating dialog in 3ds Max such as the Material Editor or the Render Panel you may wonder where it is and how to bring it back. This usually happens when you changed your Desktop Resolution and re-launched 3ds max. What causes this problem? The root of the  problem comes from the [...]

If you are doing lighting analysis with 3ds Max Design using photometric files there are a few things that can affect the results of your simulations to keep in mind.  Its not because someone gave you a photometric file (typically an *.ies file) that this is an ”accurate” one. Always verify your data otherwise your project can go [...]

If you import an FBX model from Revit in 3ds Max you will most likely see more polygonal edges than expected. Those are not extra polygons, it is simply that generally, 3ds Max hides adjacent edges by default. In the case of FBX import, meshes are created with all edges being visible – and the viewport [...]

People complain about the fact that FBX files exported by Revit are too large. The size of the FBX files exported by Revit is influenced by the following aspects: Model size: Obviously, the more details in your 3D view, the larger it will be.  There is not much you can do about it besides controlling [...]