Notes from the Future Desk - February

Efficiency is king and sometimes little things make a big difference. Having a desktop and a laptop at the same workstation is pretty common these days, but switching from a keyboard/mouse to the touchpad is always awkward. I recently started using this software which switches dynamically from laptop to desktop simply by moving the mouse below the windows bar. No more touchpad, no more moving a mouse/keyboard receiver from USB to USB port. It works like a charm and makes me utilize both machines way more efficiently. I’d recommend you check out

VRay’s Microfacet GGX shading model works great for well lit objects but I have noticed it is hard to control reflective specular artifacts for things indirectly shaded. Even with GI off, you will get specular noise that only appears with GGX. Switching to Ward will help fix this, so beware. Neil Blevins has a good page describing some of the

3D Max has the ability to import Adobe Illustrator files nativly using the new

The 3D Max Point Cache modifier is a great way to duplicate an object/animation and introduce a time offset. It allows you to update all instances of an animation without having to maintain all but a single XML file.

Adobe makes me feel like I’m living in communism.