Notes From the Future Desk: July

VRay for 2017 has been released; allegedly a whopping 50% faster. This is kind of remarkable: it has automatic noise reduction built in. Looks like they also changed the renderer options to simply be bucket or progressive… which is entirely more logical and simplified. VRay consistently releases features that are massive, even in tiny incremental updates. Adobe and Autodesk need to take note and try to keep up with their progression, they are true industry leaders.
– Jeckert

I ran into a 3DMax PFlow bug. After many days of troubleshooting, I found a bug in pFlow that happens when you have more than one mpShape call per chain of events. Meaning if you attempt to change the collision shape of a particle in a subsequent event, the new mpShape call will be ignored. An example of what I mean would be if you shatter a teapot that collides into fragments that collide, the fragments’ collision shape will be the same as the original teapot, even if defined otherwise. This has been logged as a bug with Autodesk.
– Jeckert

It very unfortunate that more emphasis isn’t placed on the quality of error messages. Autodesk and Adobe both are guilty of rather unhelpful error messages. If there is a statement which is returning an error, it should be very possible and trackable to report the data in question, to help the user correct the problem. I would consider this pro-active customer service. Instead of spending hours trying to unravel the mystery of the rats nest, I could just get back to work correcting the issue with a well reported error message. I did find some information on this, but there was none available on Autodesk website(s). View Here: http://www.gameartisans.org/forums/threads/11946-Rats-Nest-warning-in-Max

– Jeckert

Adobe has fixed the Bridge EXR file handling error that I reported back as part of the January NFTFD where a sequence of EXR files would be prompted on every frame for how to handle the alpha channel. As an animator spitting out EXR files, this was intolerable. Fortunately, they took care after several public releases. So v6.2.0.179 x64 broke it, and version 6.3.0.177 x64 fixes it.
– Jeckert

Emilee, I’m a crow as well! Let’s form a murder!
– Kelly