One of the tutorial requests I received in my post HERE was for state sets. I saw this free nine part video tutorial series posted this morning and wanted to pass it along as it does a pretty thorough job of explaining the state set options.
Also, I’m building my own tutorials based off your requests. I’ve combined several requests that seemed to flow together well into one comprehensive tutorial. It’ll have to be broken up into parts because it’s going to be rather lengthy. Anyway, I wanted to chime in with an update here and let you guys know I’m working on your requests as time allows and will start posting the first videos soon.
Dec 19
Tutorial topics for 2013?
I’m trying to form a game plan for 2013 and wanted your thoughts on topics you’d like to see discussed here. Comment below if there’s something specific that you’d like to see discussed. I’ll try to cover any provided topics with written tutorials or I’m also considering video tutorials via a youtube channel or vimeo, etc.. NOTE: If you have a preference between vimeo or youtube let me know that as well.
If you request a topic that I’m not familiar with or efficient with then I’ll try to locate a resource or person that can provide some insight.
I’ve been named an Autodesk Master for the 2012 award year! I’d like to give a huge thanks to this wonderful community for this honor, thank you all very much! I’d also like to thank my family for enduring my career path. Without their love and support on this journey I wouldn’t be working in CG today. A big thank you also goes to the people I get to work with at MBUSA.com. Thanks for helping me look like I know what I’m doing! 
I sincerely thank you all again and will continue to try and serve this great community as best I can!
The other day I was working on a project where I needed to add some camera distortion. I wasn’t having much luck with my usual method of lens distortions. I was getting close, but my client wasn’t feeling it 100%. I knew that the VRay physical camera had some built-in distortion options, but I was using iray. Figured I’d throw caution to the wind and try the VRay camera with iray. It worked! Now, not all the features of the VRay physical camera work with iray, for example things like DOF/motion blur settings since those have specific controls in iray. However many of the other Vray camera options do.
That led me to wonder about other features. So this morning I tried using the VRay Lens Effects with iray since iray doesn’t provide any built-in lens glow/glare features. Blammo, it worked too.
I used overly intense effects to help illustrate the result. These are renders straight from 3dsmax using iray and the VRay Lens Effects.
NOTE: Keep in mind the VRay Lens Effect is a post render effect so you won’t see it until the render is complete.
Bottom line: If you use iray (or possibly other render engines) and also have VRay you can now have some built-in glare/glow effects. Unfortunately it’s a one sided relationship since iray doesn’t offer any special features for Vray. 
Oh well, thanks good guy vray!
Sep 05
Server Update
Due to the traffic and amount of graphical content on the site here I have outgrown the shared hosting package I’ve been using. I have put in a request for an upgrade to the next server level which is a VPS. That should kick in sometime in the next couple of days. I believe this upgrade will prevent the site from going down from heavy traffic spikes, which is what happened yesterday.
Hopefully this update will be performed without much downtime. However, I wanted to mention what’s going on in case the site has a few hiccups in the following days.