For workflow tips and more on using mental ray, be sure to check out the “Rendering with Autodesk 3ds Max Design and mental ray” youtube channel with Marion Landry.
The kind folks over at SMC have posted another HDR/backplate package. Be sure to check it out.
In addition to it being some neat work I thought the Britney Spears Big Fat Bass Backdrop Making Of article had some great tips for mental ray users. Be sure to check it out.
May 22
Sharing a few more HDRs
I went out the other afternoon to practice 360 HDR captures with a nodal ninja. I used my fisheye lens so the resolution on these isn’t terribly high (4k), but they may be useful in some situations (GPU rendering/lighting/product vis/etc.). Anyway, thought I’d share ‘em. Read on for images and download link.
Provided it’s true, I’m really digging the specifications on the upcoming (2013?) nvidia GPUs.
- 2880 CUDA Cores
- 15 SMX Clusters
- 384-bit Memory Controller
- Up to 24GB of GDDR5 memory
- 2nd Gen ECC
- Hardware GPU Silicon Virtualization
- Hyper-Q (Slashes CPU idle time by allowing multiple CPU cores to simultaneously utilize a single Kepler GPU, dramatically advancing programmability and efficiency)
- Dynamic Parallelism (Simplifies GPU programming by allowing programmers to easily accelerate all parallel nested loops – resulting in a GPU dynamically spawning new threads on its own without going back to the CPU)
- 50-85% Double Precision Rate to Single Precision
- At least 1.5 TFLOPS DP FP64
- Target: 250 GB/s bandwidth
I get pretty good render times on the type of scenes I work on with the 1344 CUDA cores I have access to now (3 GPU’s x 448 cores each). I can only imagine what it would be like to render with 2880 cores x 3 GPUs = 8640 CUDA cores! That may be getting close to real time. Not to mention the memory footprint increase for more complex scenes.
Fingers crossed that it won’t require a second mortgage on a home to purchase!