Archive for June, 2009
Mental Ray Wireframe MEL script
In case anyone has been paying attention to what I have promised, I have finally uploaded my wireframe MEL script that I used on my demo reel. It has only been tested on 2008 and 2009. It uses the Physical Sun and Sky to light. It is not used for compositing, there are loads of other scripts for that and is quite easy to set up. This is only for beauty wireframe renders. You can check out examples of what this looks like on my reel. The link to the wireframe script is right here:
http://www.jdbeals.com/tutorials_wires.html
~Cheers!
Demo Reel!
Oh, finally! I have finished my demo reel. Such a relief. You can check it out here: (http://www.jdbeals.com/home.html) Hope you all like!
Rendering Engines Galore
Rendering Engine seem to be as big of a deal as what program one uses. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been asked “Why would you ever use that?! What is wrong with you?! Such and such is so much better” I’m not completely innocent… oh no-I have definitely been the instigator to quite a few “conversations” concerning anything about 3D. So before I get any further off topic, let’s deal with the one at hand. I know 2 Render Engines well enough to be able to use them at a commercial studio. I know 1 well enough for a film studio, and the third I know well enough to make some pretty cool stuff at home. These Render programs include in order of Knowledge:
1.) Mental Ray
2.) Renderman
3.)Vray
Now I know that what you can do in one, you can do in the other. However, I admit that I am completely biased towards Mental Ray, some of it’s capabilities are just incredible. The Production Shader Library is simply b-e-a-utiful. It is getting so much support, I belong to at least a half dozen Mental Ray sites. It may be because of this that I know-by name-creators of MR, Masters of MR, and film houses that use MR but not many for Renderman or Vray. It is very-for lack of a better term-physically accurate-which I absolutely love. I continuously run into people that claim you have to be a scientist to use this program. I have no idea where they get this thought process, but numbers definitely play a pivotal role in being able to tame this beast. Vray also is pretty physically accurate-it tends to “fake it” more often, but it is familiar with terms such as physical lights and materials. It has yet to implement full SSS, but it’s getting closer.
Renderman is such a beast. No wonder every film house implements this monster in their movies. It is incredibly fast, it calculates displacement maps much quicker and more accurately, and it’s deep Shadow Maps are tear worthy. Relatively speaking, it’s stable (but then again what render engine really is?). It’s almost worth dropping the many thousand G’s just so you can use its motion blur capabilities. I think I might have cried when I saw how painless it could be after using Mental Ray’s. Same story with DOF.
I’ve had access to learning Renderman for about a year now, so why haven’t I taken every second to learn this amazing program? Well for one it’s incredibly hard to get installed right and working with Maya and it’s always a version or so behind. Two-I’ve been going to college overtime for the past year, and three even though it solves most of my problems, it doesn’t do everything that I want. I Really enjoy getting as close to “physically accurate” as I can. I like just sitting down, eating my bowl of Ramen and reading Mental Ray Documentation on Physically Correct attributes. You should have seen me when I found out about the Mia_Material a year back. Oh boy it was Christmas in the summer. I’d stay up for hours just reading about the material, or reading about tone mapping and gamma correction. I have a list of Mental Ray Master blogs that I check on a weekly basis (Master Zap is King). It’s almost relaxing.
Renderman is fast, but lacks pretty heavily in the physically accurate department. Don’t get me wrong you can fake it just as well-and that’s what it’s great at doing, but for doing a photoreal interior-Mental Ray is King. RM’s “Global Illumination” and “Final Gather” is pretty pitiful at the present time. Their version of SSS still needs some work. I recently saw Pixar’s latest movie “UP” and was considerably let down with their skin shading. It kept distracting me throughout the entire movie, I could not look away and ended up miss a lot. It felt like every time there was a far away shot of a character, they would have crazy SSS on their ears. We get it, good for you Pixar. They looked like giant candles walking around. Don’t get me wrong, still a great movie, the story was amazing-had some issues (flying baron dogs wth). However, it doesn’t even come close to comparing with the shading skill of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. And you guessed it, Mental Ray SSS. I have no idea how they did it, but it’s beautiful.
Looking back, I haven’t made a point. All I have to say is each renderer is great at doing certain things, it all depends what your needs are. Whatever your opinion is…Mental Ray is King.. haha jk jk. No no, whatever your opinions are you shouldn’t try to kill the person your talking with over what your preferred render engine or 3D app is (it’s much more fun to find out where they live and slowly play havoc upon their daily living).
Don’t forget to check out my sight, I’ve updated the tutorials and I will be putting up a Mental Ray Wireframe Beauty MEL script soon… I want to wait till graduation gets close so no one will use it for that. (How akward would that be to have 10 people with the same style wireframe rendering… don’t get me wrong the render is so beautiful… but still). *anticipation*
SSS and Final Gathering Flickering
I have recently come across the biggest headache that I’ve had for… well I guess it’s been less than a week since my last big issue-nevertheless this one was big. Sub Surface scattering used with Final Gathering produces crazy flickering problems. I’m fairly new to the sss. I’ve used it in a few projects, but that photoreal skin that so many people seem to be able to achieve has still eluded me.
I’ve been revamping an old elephant project of mine that I did a while ago for my soon to be released demo reel. I put sss on him, did my lighting, put in final gather for that sweet color bleeding, was able to get the sss on the ears to look *beautiful* and then I batch rendered. It took around 2 minutes a frame, so not bad at all. After it finished rendering I watched the .tga sequence and to my great dismay every part looked really good… except for the underbelly of the elephant. It looked like there was a concert going on there, spots of light were dancing all over. This was the only place it was noticeable to say an average viewer. There was some on the head, but it was tolerable. However the belly… that was a completely different monster. I tried everything. I upped the light map of the sss to a 2k map… that’s right 2 freaking k. I upped my final gather points to 1024, upped my density to a crazy 2, turned on and off radius control, messed with the flicker… fall off, nothing made a lick of difference. Frustrated is an understatement. I had no more time or patience to try anything else with final gather. My render times had skyrocketed to 10 minutes. I scrapped final gather and continued using straight lights. It’s much trickier to get believable color bleed with just using lights. However, I was able to get close to what the final gather was giving me. The only thing it lacked was the beautiful sss on the ears, its visible-just not as pretty, a big blow for sure, but nothing I can do. Render times went up extensively with each new light and each new shadow.
Render times per frame:
FG render times beginning: 2 minutes
FG render times end: 12 minutes
Lights Solo Beginning: 1 min. 30
Lights Solo End: 10 minutes
Ambient Occlusion: 2 minutes
Total man hours to figure out I can’t use Final Gather with SSS: ~20 hours
My website will soon be fully updated with all new images by June 19th. w00t