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Found an issue with mental ray subdivision tessellation causing texture problems (blurring, stretching, ect.). Likely some issue with zbrush .ma export, but I’m not entirely sure. I’m actually kind of wondering why it’s outputting a subdivision surface back to maya, probably trying to respect how it was input. Mental Ray has just recently added support for subdivisions, so I’ll look into how it deals with it at rendertime. After the project is done and I have free time of course!
Cheers!
Rough cut finished with sound, enjoy!
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Although the project is not finished, it’s breakdown time! This project is primarily based on lighting–where a lot of the energy and mood comes from. I will breakdown the layers (show individual pieces) through images and buildup (show their implementation) in a movie.
Diffuse Layer:
It all starts here, this layer is the textures that will be multiplied by the lights and imagery ahead.
Lights Layer:
The top image is the color information needed to multiply the image appropriately, while the two images following it are separated in Shake and used as masks to manipulate the lights.
Think of the top one as the wheels to a bike and the bottom two are the handlebars. The masks enable me to quickly split the lights up in Maya and quickly grab them again once brought into Shake.
Final Gather Fill:
This is just the final gather map by itself. Before I haven’t thought to use it isolated, but it actually proves useful to have your ‘bounce/fill’ by itself in compositing.
Specular + Reflection:
Since reflection is a property of specularity, this is rendered together. I also did a pass of specularity by itself for further adjustment later in the comp.
Shadows:
The shadow passes are reordered in Shake (R, G, B) to give a mask, and darkened and color corrected to create a shadow.
Occlusion:
I invert this to create a mask and darken/color correct that to create the contact shadow/light occlusion phenomenon.
These volume lights are created with mental ray physical lights in combination with a participating volume light. Further adjustment will be done on the final, but the technique is in place.
Synapse Mask:
A mask for the synapses to be able to manipulate them by themselves. Pretty simple.
Depth Pass:
I used a shader solution to create the z depth pass. The ‘find distance’ tool is used to measure the distance between a locator and the camera, which is fed into a shader applied to the objects. Basically, the locator acts as a ‘focus here’ for the shader, everything else gets varying levels of defocus.
Below is the buildup of the elements being applied. Download the full resolution mov here (6.1mb)
