BBSC 303 Lecture, 19 May 2009

We spent a good chunk of the lecture reviewing the structure of a good web site that responded to the brief for the web project. The key was that the navigation should be simple, clear and focus on issues to do with making the model of the museum, not on the "assignments" or "tutorials" completed.

This is not to say that the requirements of the course are not to complete the assignments, but rather the brief of the web assignment shold be read and followed. 

In addition we covered efficient rendering in Max: mentalray and lightstudio have great similarities in terms of: 

• saving a map of the final gather / ambient light in a file (both renderers can be made much faster by saving this general light map; only to be used where the lighting conditins are the same, but capable of reducing the second and thirds render in a set for the same light condition by 40-50%.
• both programs support creating your own named settings files for the render process which remember all the settings in Final Gather or Light Studio from one computer session to the next. 
• both Light Studio and mental ray also support excluding the smaller objects from the render.  
• allowing the saving of image files in .hdr format to allow greatest flexibility in final processing of the render in photoshop (by adjusting the exposure).
  

Finaly, it was noted with respect to Light Studio:

• the 'simpleLS ' interface should not be used to generate any final hand ins as its picture quality is very poor; 
• the so-called 'expert' LS interface provides may settings for controlling the quality of the final render, including the ability to set a standard (local on the D:\drive for speed of renders) project file location.
• as noted in the online tutorial - and already mentioned in an April 11 2009 blog entry - the LS materials are to be found in a library on the P-drive. They are adjusted by the actual physical scalw parameters: e.g. 0.1m width planks for timber flooring. This requires the user to think carefully about the scale of the model imported.