For those that need to examine a 3dsmax9 caustic scene, here's a simple setup that uses A&D materials and illustrates both reflective and refractive caustics.

Max9 Caustics (click to enlarge)

Caustic Scene:
http://jeffpatton.net/Blog-images/MR_caustics.zip

Next, I posted some .hdr examples over at the Vizdepot.com website. Thought I'd add them here as well.

HDRI Setup 1:

This is the most basic setup. A single skylight with a .hdr file & final gather.
Scene: http://pixelperfectgraphics.biz/Dow...rchitecture.zip

HDRI Setup 2:

This setup is basically the same as the one above, but I've added the mrSun to the scene.
Scene: http://pixelperfectgraphics.biz/Dow...itecture_02.zip

HDRI Setup 3:

In this setup I used the daylight system with the mrSun/mrSky and a .hdr file is used in the haze slot of the mrSky.
Scene: http://pixelperfectgraphics.biz/Dow...itecture_03.zip

Notes about HDRI scenes:
1. The model used in the scene is a free model from Turbosquid.com
2. I left the background empty in the first two scenes on purpose to illustrate that the background isn't contributing to the illumination. For example if you use the mr physical sky or a .hdr file as the environment map, it will not affect your lighting solution UNLESS you add a skylight and configure the skylight to use the environment map for illumination.
3. You can use whatever final gather settings you like. The settings I used are my own. If you're new to mental ray and question my settings, I would strongly recommend spending some time with the great GI/FG tutorials that ship with Max9 for a better understanding of how the GI/FG settings work so you can optimize/tune the settings for your own scenes.

Just trying to get things back in order here from our trip to San Diego for SIGGRAPH. I'm glad that I was able to finally meet a lot of my fellow CG'ers. I'll be the first to admit that my very first public speaking event (Masters Class) didn't go too smoothly. I let my nerves get the best of me, but as odd as it sounds I wasn't nervous about speaking in front of a group of people...I was nervous about how my content would be received, and how I would perform at presenting my content. There's a lot that I would change if I had this trip to do over again, but unfortunately we still can't travel back in time.

Here are a few of the photos I took while in San Diego:

San Diego (click to enlarge)


San Diego (click to enlarge)


San Diego (click to enlarge)


San Diego (click to enlarge)


I wasn't "allowed" to take any photos from the convention center for some reason. I know on the SIGGRAPH website it states "No photography allowed", but since I've seen photography from just about every SIGGRAPH over the years I figured it was allowed to some extent.

I suppose where I went wrong was lugging around my SLR camera instead of a small pocket camera. I say this because the "suits" were nagging me about my camera as soon as I walked into the exhibition hall. That sucked big time...especially when I see people taking pictures all around me...even walking around with small palm video cameras video taping. Oh well, I'm not surprised at my luck...I've had it all my life.

Ok, enough of that and onto the mr architectural interiors part of this post. I've received a few requests to show the settings I used in a few of my interior examples. So here goes:

Arch-Viz Interior 01 (click to enlarge)


Before saying anything about my settings let me first state this: These settings are not "physically correct" and I only used them because I personally liked the results & control the settings provided.

Now, onto the settings: I illuminated this scene with a daylight system configured with the mrSun/mrSky combo. Here are the settings for the sun/sky:

Interior 01 screen capture (click to enlarge)


Interior 01 screen capture 2 (click to enlarge)


As you can see, I increased the mrSky multiplier to give more blue light from the sky into the scene. I also increased the FG mulitplier to brighten the indirect lighting effect. Why did I not simply increase the brightness value on the logarithmic exposure control? Because I was able to tweak the amount of skylight & indirect lighting this way. Let's just call it artistic freedom.

Now the second example:

Arch-Viz Interior (click to enlarge)


Interior 02 screen capture 1 (click to enlarge)


Interior 02 screen capture 2 (click to enlarge)


Again, only the mrSun/mrSky system was used to illuminate the scene, but this time I used final gather (no GI) with the help of ambient occlusion on the white A&D material applied to the entire scene. Just as before, I boosted the FG multiplier as well as the the mrSun/mrSky multipliers over adjusting the exposure control brightness because I liked the look it provided.