This used to be in my tutorials section, but there are so many tutorials out there, I didn’t see the need to write one up again. So instead, here is a wireframe script for maya and Mental Ray. It creates a beauty render using the sun and sky and an MIA material with contour rendering enabled. Super fast to render, and is a good starting base for wire framing rendering.

BealsJ_MR_Wireframe

This is one shot of a spot that my company did as an internal project to display our abilities in other areas other than character work. I modeled, lit, textured, shaded, rendered, and composited this shot. This shot was about a week and a half turnaround. I didn’t get a chance to get some of the imperfections and grunge/dust that I wanted to, but I’m still fairly happy with the outcome.

I didn’t use an hdr at all for this. I instead used 5 area lights that were visible and connected with portal lights to light the scenes. I also had a spot light casting GI photons in combination with fg. Maya and  Mental Ray was used to render with.

Untitled from Jonathan Beals on Vimeo.

This was my first project for Hinge Digital. My task was to texture, shade, light, and render a photo realistic shoe in one week using Maya and Mental Ray. I had just come from being an assistant td over at Adidas and so shoes were a familiar territory for me. I wanted to focus on my abilities inside Maya and Mental Ray and rely less on compositing. The final render is just the beauty render with a couple color corrections done in post.

I started with your basic studio setup. I have one area light on either side and one above the shoe. Each is a portal light with a blackbody connected  to it’s custom env. All materials used were the MIA material. The fabric was the most challenging aspect of this shoe. I had to use ramps with facing ratio connected to additional color and diffuse color as well as define a pretty severe brdf reflection curve. I also ended up using displacement for the laces, tongue, and the yellow bit on the back of the shoe because bump wasn’t giving me what I wanted. The most complex material by far was the one with the Nike swoosh on it. This took by far the most time to get right, and I am still not happy with it. I had to put a texture in the diffuse weight, reflection, glossiness, transparency, and cutout. It was very render intensive. Each frame was just south of an hour at full 1080p.

Final Gather was used as the GI solution and had to be cranked high so we wouldn’t get flicker due to the slow movement of the shoe.

I had fun with this project because I really got to get into the details, such as texturing in the glue between the different fabrics, and the tiny imperfections in the rubber of the sole.

It has been well over a year since I have posted anything, and as anyone in the industry knows, it is hard to find time to do anything outside of work. I planned on just nuking my site and blog because it was in such a disastrous state, but I was asked by friends not do that and instead do an overhaul. And every time I would move my mouse over to the self destruct button, I would get a comment saying something like “thanks for the tutorial, it helped me.” And that is what this is about. So I have completely revamped my website AND my blog and am replacing with this one. I am going to make a point to try and post something at least once a month. I have learned a lot over the last year and have a lot to share.

I am not going to post any of my old work and only a few of my old tutorials because they are all heavily outdated and I can do much better now. I will continue to update with new works and hopefully a few tutorials here and there. Thanks for all the support, I really appreciate it.

Jonathan

Untitled from Jonathan Beals on Vimeo.