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 the [...]
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 are [...]
Manufacturer-based glazing data
Several glass manufacturers provide optical data to the Windows® operating system and Daylight Group of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (http://windows.lbl.gov).
This group maintains a database and publishes this data via a program called Optics 5. From Optics 5 you can then export a Radiance Material (*.rad file), which can be interpreted
as mental ray [...]
This tool is an assistant which controls the date and time of a Daylight System object for key moments in the year.
It will also control Text objects to display the current Time and Date of the Daylight System:
Here is a video demonstrating its usage:
You can download the tool here.
I am proud to say that the daylight simulation tools in 3ds Max Design 2009 (and beyond) has been validated by the National Research Council of Canada.
I have participated in the process and contributed to the authoring of the following paper: 3ds Max Design Exposure Validation (pdf – 5835Kb) – which describes the process and [...]
I am pleased to contribute to the authoring of an upcoming book on 3ds Max 2010 published by 3DATS, a well known team of 3ds max training specialists. My involvement consisted into writing a chapter on the measurement of material finishes with affordable hardware for replicating in physically based rendering systems.
More details here.
I will present 2 classes at Autodesk University 2009 .
The first one will be on the topic of Daylight Simulation with 3ds Max Design 2010. The second one will be about strategies to estimate optical characteristics of surface finishes for accurate renderings.
Daylight and Lighting Analysis with Autodesk® 3ds Max® 2010:
How to predict lighting levels in [...]
