Archive for March, 2009
GDC In T minus 4 days
Yay!Finals are almost over, there are only 3 more days left of this term and I will be done! Sweeet. Also on the plus side in 4 days, I will be attending the amazing GDC conference (Game developers conference). Besides being able to be on the up and up with all the new technologies and amazingess that is the game industry, there will be an open bar on wed. where I will be able to frolic and drink with fellow colleagues and make the whole “Hey my name is Jonathan, I would like to work for a company like yours, what should I do” a little less drual and a little more… interesting. At the very least I will be able to see how secure security is. :) There will be a lot of BIG names there such as Sony, Intel, Microsoft, any and all game companies.. the list goes on. How will I even get through there? There are going to be thousands of people there shoving business cards in every one’s faces, how will I be able to stick out? I need to figure something out, which reminds me I need to print out said business cards. GDC is going to be held in San Fransisco this year. W00000000, I’ve never been there, but am totally stoked on being able to do so. I Will be sharing one hotel room with about 7 geeky college gamers… yea not so fun. Fortunately, I’m only geeky well am in college too, but I don’t remember the last time I played through a game. I’ll join in with friends, but usually I get lost rather quickly. So why am i going? Well I was asked to go by my school, so there’s no way I’m going to pass up a free ticket, right? Secondly it is a great experience, and one that I might not get in a while. So it works out for me. I will be driving my baby, Lucy (my car, if you had any doubt) full of college students. We will be apart of a caravan of 2 other cars road tripping to San Fran. The drive should last about 12 hours. I’m not quite sure how this will go. The quirks and the idiosyncrasies of fellow classmates can… well make me a bit crazed. It should be fun. I’m looking forward to it.
On the flip side, I am learning about the hidden gems, production shaders of Mental Ray created in part by Master Zap (Creator of sss) and is freaking amazing. Looooks so good. I’ll post later for sure about this and maybe a couple images somewhere on the web.
~Cheers
HDRI implementation in Maya
So right now, I am having to place this 3D snail into a 2D footage. *Pain in the wazoo.* Stills are one thing, fairly simple. Do a couple simple shaders, add a couple key lights along with a rim and you’re pretty much done. If you want to go for realism, pop in an HDR image, add a rim light and bam almost instant goodness. The problem here is not the getting realism part-getting something to look halfway decent is not hard, but getting the hdri is painstakingly tedious. Especially if one does not have a probe, or a reflective ball. If this is the case, it’s been my experience that one must then place the camera where the subject will be which can be its own project and then proceed to take 3 separate exposes in all directions to get. As in pose the camera, bracket 3 exposers, turn the camera a little, bracket the 3 exposures, and then do this all the way around, then angle it up and down and repeat. Horrible experience. You could always just take 1 exposure all over the place and then up and lower the exposure in photoshop, but then you can get graininess and some hot spots which is always ideal-fine for a single image, but not so fine in an image sequence. After you get these sometimes hundreds of photos, you have to try and COMPOSITE them all exactly the same in photoshop or a similar application. I suppose you could always use hdr shop, but it won’t help your cause in anyway, it will still get confused when you place that final image in that links the first and last image together. What image will it attach to? Even if you are able to get all of this done and get it into Maya, or a similar application, there will be that constant flickering in any image sequence.
So lesson learned, spend the money on an HDR probe. If doing an image sequence, really think hard if you want to deal with that hdr image.
Fog Light with Mental Ray in Maya
Alright so I have created my first tutorial at my webpage here: It deals with the use of fog light in Mental Ray in Maya. If anyone has ever had to deal with this, they will know that it is much more than just a pain in the butt. In fact most companies create it using a basic software renderer and the comp it in post. I’ve finally managed to figure out how to deal with this beast in mental ray. It’s not too bad on render time, but it could easily get there. Check it out if you’ve ever had any trouble with graniness, bad ant-aliasing, no shadow, or just bad overal quality.
Hello World!
Welp, it looks like someone finally convinced me to blog *Cough* travis *cough.* This is in the testing phase, trying to get my feet wet here and trying to figure out just how the hell to use one of these thinsg.
Testing
Testing one two three testing testing