Rendering frames the hard way

If you think the current group animation is taking forever to render, compare it to this process:

The making of 'The Tapestry' - BBC World Cup 2018 from Xander Hart on Vimeo.

Here is the result:

The Tapestry - BBC World Cup 2018 from Xander Hart on Vimeo.

Worth the effort?

Substance Anyone?

If any of you are using substance, and want to use some nice materials on your objects, you can find a huge collection here: https://source.substance3d.com/

Real Time GI?

We have come a long way from 16 bit arcade games. After (screen space) Ambient Occlusion first appeared in games a decade ago, now Global Illumination is being rendered in real time.

Read more on the One Bonsai site

Need a Texture, Mate?

Reviewing some MetroCAF 2015 entries I came accross this resource: TextureMate.com

All free to use!

RenderMan

RenderMan 21 Non Commercial is finally out, so I tested it with Maya 2017. The image below took almost 8 minutes to render - that is not promising. RenderMan comes with many great material presents, setting up this scene for rendering was a breeze. Saved as openEXR and adjusted in Photoshop.

I rendered the same scene with the now default Arnold Renderer. It does not come with many materials and those have no presets. I used Batch render, which does work but places a watermark in the image. That is barely visible in this image, which was also rendered to openEXR and adjusted in Photoshop. Was a bit more involved to set up and took at least as long render

Fur Grass

Posted it finally, but only part 3 so far:

Render Farming

Just in time for the Fall semester render frenzy, we got Backburner back up and running in the labs. Needed something to test it with, so this is what I farmed out.

Soft Shadows

As you know, you can render soft shadows from a spotlight using shadow maps in stead of ray traced shadows. By increasing the filter size you can blur the shadow.

The downside to shadow maps is that they do not support transparency, as only a single depth value can be stored per pixel (the distance to the closest object). Here is a rendering with a single spotlight using shadow mapped shadows, rendered using Maya 2015 (Metal Ray version 3.12.1.18)

Image my surprise when in class last week, when explaining how shadow maps work, they seemed to support transparency. Here is the same scene rendered with the same settings in Maya 2016 (Mental Ray version 3.13.1.9):

It turns out that if you switch the shadow map format to Detailed Shadow Map you get the same result in Maya 2015. From the Mental Ray manual:

Mental ray also supports an advanced detail shadowmap algorithm that collects and stores more information about shadow-casting objects. It combines features of standard shadow maps and ray traced shadows. It will call shadow shaders if present, thus capturing even custom shadowing effects. Since shadow shaders return transparencies, detail shadowmaps do not store a single depth value, but a sequence of depth values together with the light transmission coefficients at each depth.

So you can have the best of both worlds! Well, it seems you currently cannot use regular shadow maps in Maya 2016, changing the shadow map type setting has no effect…

Ptex

I have been talking about pTex in class but have not been able to show it. I have it working at home on my PC no problem but not have been able to get anything but a black render on my Mac. Here is a movie explaining the technique developed as Disney Animation.

Flocking Particles

nParticles, Pointlights and a simple expression to combine the two:

Renderman Anyone?

HyperShade Ball

I posted an instruction video to explain the basics of Hypershade. Some may recognize it as a condensed version of a demo I gave in class last week. If you do, it means you were awake early: kudos to you!

Maya / Mental Ray not batch rendering blendShapes

There seems to be a bug in the currently installed version of Maya 2015 (SP2) that causes Mental Ray to ignore blendShapes when batch rendering (or even mess them up?). But there is a workaround!

• Select the object that has blendshape animation on it
• From the animation menu, choose

  Geometry Cache → Create New Cache

• The default settings should work is you have your entire animation visible on your timeline, if you only use blendShapes for a small part of your animation you may explore the options
• Repeat for each mesh with blendShapes

How does this fix things? It creates files in your project directory (yes, you do need to set your project!) with the correct vertex (=point) positions of the deformed mesh. These vertex positions are then directly used for rendering, ignoring all deformers.