Slowing Down Mental Ray

First, here is the obligatory line: sorry for not posting recently, have been busy.

Yesterday I pestered Mental Ray a bit, using many things known to slow it down: Global Illumination, Caustics, light radius....

With just a single object on a floor plane and one spotlight, this took over ten minutes to render. And you know what? I and seriously considering adding real depth of field. Oh, and then maybe animate it and add motion blur. While I'm at it, I should then also up the resolution from 720p to 1080p. Still, that will probably not half as bad as the radiosity render a fellow student of mine at ACCAD had running for a couple of weeks before it finally produced a very grainy image.

Why am I messing with GI? I took over a course at PRATT this semester: 3D lighting and rendering.

Chess.set

It should not have surprised me that this took me a bit longer to build than I had hoped for as this prop will be featured prominently in my upcoming animation Scattered Brain Matter. But here it is, all six pieces and the board, available in two trendy colours.

[Geek Alert!] Recently I started to like the new node editor in Maya, taking me back to the time when I enjoyed working in Softimage XSI. Today I was painfully reminded of why I had previously abandoned its use. It totally froze my computer three times this morning. When I finally got the Task Manager open (the first crash was so bad that Windoze did not even respond to CTRL-ALT-DEL) I saw it rapidly filling up all available RAM for no good reason. Bad Maya!

I have my three models, rigger and all. On to Animation soon!

More Blob

Progress on my animation has been rather slow. It is kind of hard to work on a computer animation when a tropical system formerly known as Sandy knocks out your power for a couple of days, immediately followed by a Nor'easter. Oh well. I made some progress today on the blob.

 

[Geek Alert!] Allow me to rant about Autodesk® Maya a bit. I don't think I'm the only one doing some UV editing after rigging and it would be nice if that history could just be deleted, just like normal modeling history. But that would be too easy. Finally found a workaround with a MEL command (polyTransfer) which is of course quite different from the very similar menu reachable "Transfer Attributes" I got the result I wanted in the end luckily.

Blobber Mouth

Just in time for Halloween, I created a first render/animation test of the Fleshy Blob character for my upcoming feature length animation:

 

It needs a lot of work, obviously. But it is the last main character I need to complete!

Reel Time

I updated my animation demo reel:

Animation Demo Reel 2012 from Wobbe on Vimeo.

Now why would I be doing that?:^}

It contains a sneak preview of "Scattered Brain Matter" but don't tell anyone!