3DS MAX Huey P Long Bridge

[loydg]

I thought I ought to join in the fray. This rendering is of the Huey P Long Bridge retro-fit in New Orleans. The old (current) configuration has two 10' lanes with no shoulder. Apparently this is now under construction. We (Brian Peterson and myself) ended up doing several renderings and an animation that is up on their site: http://www.timedla.com/bridge/long/overview/

The file started in MR and then we finished it in V-Ray. The steelwork is a primarily opacity maps. I'd love to throw are new car library in this. The old LP3D just don't cut it anymore...

[dellis]

Great image!

[loydg]

Great image!

Thanks, Dwayne. It was certainly a bugger to build. I only had PDFs of the "as-builts" available. A good challenge, for sure.

[craigbennett]

I like it. That looks like a whole lot of work. I think that the cars are fine for the picture.
Craig

[Steve_Bennett]

A great example of opacity maps put to good use! Thanks for sharing. :beer:

[rmejia]

I checked out the animation, wow, was everything 3d models? Must have taken a while to do, came out great, nice music too.

[loydg]

I checked out the animation, wow, was everything 3d models? Must have taken a while to do, came out great, nice music too.

Yes, everything is modeled. This was our first use of v-ray meshes for the trees. Somehow the 3D trees just look better than the opacity/plane trees.

It was a project that a few of us worked on for a few months. The first version (just the bridge and some of the approaches) we used MR, and then converted the file over to v-ray. The main reason for the switch in renderers was to reduce the render times. MR=1hour/frame V-Ray=10min/frame. If it was a short animation, we probably would have kept it in MR. But with that many frames, we are talking about "days" difference in completing, even with the render farm.

[Filipe Francisco]

Nice Work, Good Job

Cheers :beer:

[rmejia]

Yes, everything is modeled. This was our first use of v-ray meshes for the trees. Somehow the 3D trees just look better than the opacity/plane trees.

I use VRay also, and the VRay proxies are something I could not live with ought. Every new version of Max (Viz) I test out Mental Ray, but always end up going back to VRay.

[loydg]

I use VRay also, and the VRay proxies are something I could not live with ought. Every new version of Max (Viz) I test out Mental Ray, but always end up going back to VRay.

I have to admit that I'm impressed with the new MR in 2008. It has Proxy objects similar to v-ray's v-ray meshes, but these support animation. So in essence, you could loop animate your trees (wind) and then instance them. Just think of the possibilities...