Progressive Rendering with Mental Ray for Maya

Hey everyone it seems that MR has been hiding the progressive rendering for Maya. Thanks to Kobayashi and his script which you can download here. You are able to utilize progressive rendering with some ease. The script is only for Maya 2010 but I’m using 2011 and it seems to be working fine with utilizing IPR with it.

No more IPR and Maya crashing. So I decided to give it a shot with the subsurface scattering material. I began setting the lightmap locally and did a render to write the map. After the render completed I then turned off writable and started progressive render.

I was able to make changes on the fly tweaking all parameters within the SSS. You can turn writable back on, but I did run into issues where the lightmap would not read anymore sometimes. Could be a bit buggy so I just kept writable off while making my tweaks and turned it back on when I was done.

Happy Rendering!

Slow Ride

FlintstoneRide.

Wanted to share the render of the Flintstones ride. A small asset demonstrating the believability that can be achieved using just procedural textures for the students. Procedurals are a bit cumbersome due to the complexity of the texture you are trying to achieve.

If you are looking to get more into realism using procedurals. I definitely recommend purchasing “Procedural Plums in Sunlight with Procedural Water Drops with Jeremy Engleman”

Completed only textures and lighting

Don’t be sad.

HiTechiTech

Hey guys a good friend came up to me asking if I could create a logo for their small start up business. After a few suggestions this was the one they liked. Click on the logo for a introduction video they have on you tube.

Loving his day

A guy I sketched during my break at Starbucks the other day.

Sketches

Testing out my new phone and its camera. Here are a few of my sketches I wanted to share wit you all. The colored images are done with Prismacolor sticks and I used a Pilot 90010 pen.  Enjoy!

tempStudy

Here are some color temperature studies I did on break.

 

Core Skills of VFX

A informative handbook for everything VFX for students and tutors. If you haven’t already read this, you should.

 

Adding decals using projections

There are other nodes you can setup to achieve the same look, but I will be using the mib_color_mix node in this example.  The best part about this node is that it acts a little like the layers in Photoshop. With 8 layers available you can add more if needed.

Start by creating two projection nodes and within one of their attributes select interactive placement. This will provide a window letting you know to create a 3dplacement node. You can then shift+drop this 3dplacement onto the second projection which in return will bring up the connection editor. Connect worldInverseMatrix to placementMatrix so we can have both projections controlled by this one placement node.

Connect your decal texture to one projection and your mask texture to the other. In this example my mask texture has black for the title and white for the background, so I
checked on invert in its attributes. (Black = transparent, White = opaque). Now create a mib_color_mix node located under mental ray/Data Conversion. Now connect the following; decal projection > Color 0, mask projection > weight 0 and change Mode 0 > mix. The color base will be your base paint at the bottom of the mib_color_mix node. You can now connect the mib_color_mix to your base color of the mi_car_paint shader.

Here is a screen shot of the connections:

mia_lens_bokeh and scaling your camera

Avoid selecting and scaling your camera for it will cause issues when combined with the mia_lens_bokeh. Solution is to go to your camera attributes>object display>Locator Scale.  Here you can change the units to your camera. I would suggest always scaling your camera this way to avoid potential problems.

Of course you are wondering why even use this since it is a huge hit on rendering. I totally agree and will always do this effect in post, but I always like to give new things a test. You never know what you  might benefit from it.

alienFruit

Using the sssShader for other uses other than skin.

Optimizing Memory Usage

A friend brought to my attention of how much memory is being used by Firefox. Especially when I have multiple tabs running. I’m not so much worried about it though. Since our hardware now a days can clearly handle it. But that doesn’t mean I want a browser hogging all my resources. So I did some research on optimizing not only for Firefox but also for performance in general.

I came across a lot of sites.  Below is what works for me. I was able to optimize Firefox hunger by half.  Also being
able to do the same for specific applications running. I have gained a significant increase in response.  The steps are simple to follow and the rest are things to download. I hope this helps.

Follow the steps located here:
7 Hacks to Reduce Firefox Memory Usage

Download
BarTab (Firefox Add-on)
You can put all the tabs you don’t need on your bar tab, and only pay for the load when you actually want to visit them. It also allows you to free memory by unloading already loaded tabs, either manually or automatically.

Minemem
Memory optimization tools that allow you to choose which programs to optimize and how to do so, and Minimem takes care of the rest, running silently in your tray bar.

Optional Download
StatusbarEx
Useful information on status bar of Firefox, such as the memory usage of system & firefox itself, network speed, system power status, etc.

Tree Style Tabs

Things to come

We have a small personal project brewing. That consists of two cars. Here is a test render for one. Setting up the lighting and materials for this and another car. Then to breaking into passes for Dustin http://www.dseltzer.com/ who is doing the compositing. Looking forward to posting more as the we progress.
Model: Evermotion
Software: Maya
Render: Mental Ray

Basketball

Simple scene setup for quick texture practice. Added maps.

Falling Leaves

Wanted to paint the landscape of trees here in Alabama

Kitchen Scene

For larger view click images.

Ambient Occlusion

Textures from some objects in scene

Bump

Spec

Diffuse

Color

Lighting Tests

Nieuport 17

Also a Nieuport 17  inspired after watching the movie “Flyboys”.  Getting the engine and cockpit roughed out and soon to start texturing.

medBox

 

My good friend had given me a old med box. I was quickly inspired to recreate it. This was the outcome.

PunchBuggy

My friend had asked if I could create a concept of a VW bug with large scissors  for a class project, I said sure. Below was the turn out after a week. Since I haven’t modeled in a while this was a good challenge for me. Can’t wait to do another car soon.