Vray Textures with alpha in one

I need to remember this.

To have a single image which contains Color as well as the alpha channel. One must create the mask and invert the mask in the channels segment in photoshop. Save that out as a tiff with layers and alpha and it will hook it up automatically without any reverse nodes.

Please remember to add the gamma input to de-gamma the color texture for linear workflow.

Facing Ratio for Ramp falloff reflection

I am surprised at how many times in my life I've forgotten something so simple. Throwing an image up so I have a place to look at this silly node layout.

Cloth Galore - SYOG

Okay so we just almost wrapped up the Singapore Youth Olympic Games project. We provided quite a bit of the actual game day graphics and there was a big part of cloth, clouds and after effects involved. I will post the results but there are a lot of questions I have about cloth that has been left un-answered. Leaving this post here for me to remember and fill it up.

Most of the problems came from caching, projection of UV's after the fact and also the use of the animate along path. I think there is a bug somewhere in the process. SOMEWHERE!.

Cel Shading in Maya Software Renderer

Given my recent foray into V-ray. I better put this tutorial I found up that reminds me it ain't about the software but the user. ;) Pretty damned good results

Tutorial: Cel Shading in Maya with Christophe Desse

Cherry Blossom Drop

Had a project involving cherry blossoms. Couldn't help but do this.

Maya 2010 and Mia_x_passes Materials

Attaching Cherry Blossom Geometry to a Tree with Tree Wind turned on -

Paint Effects Objects UV changes over time and thus will prevent the use of "djRivet" Script.

Solution. Cached out the Geometry of the paint effects tree after conversion to polygons. UV unwrapped object followed by deleting history and then reapplying the geometry cache information.

After this, we used the "spPaint3d" script to paint instances of the CherryBlossom geometry to litter the branches with the flowers.

note to self

- Since we will not be able to edit the geometry as it has been combined, the best way to help randomize the flowers would be to include a shader for each flower petal thus by editing the colors slightly we are able to introduce randomness without touching the geometry.

- I had to separate the paint effects polygon tree and recombine in order to make it a paintable surface for "spPaint3d". Just one of those things ;)

Lastly unhide the PaintEffects Polygon Geo with geometry cache and then select all CherryBlossom instances and then select the tree and execute djRivet.

Another Intern will live to see another day

Just recently, we had a 600 frame scene that required an Ambient Occlusion Pass. We used the MentalRay AO Texture and got optimized the frame to a decent 1min per frame. We were all happy and dandy till we found out that during batch renders...this 1min became 6min per frame.

Do a little math and we couldn't finish it in time. It would take way too long. So we called an Intern and gave him sugar money, and he sat down and rendered using a script in a batch of 10 frames. 14 hours later and loads of movies and coffee...the deed was done.

Then I come along this damned script...might have saved him those 14 hours. Might have been 2 hours but hey, he wouldn't have seen 8 movies that night.

http://www.djx.com.au/blog/2010/02/17/frame-by-frame-command-line-rendering/

Personal Note to self
Maya 2010 - batch render function was attempted and did not work in this case, please try the above .bat file in future.

Geometry Random Rotation on Particles

How to create particle instancing with random rotation -

1. create object to be instanced
2. create particles using particle tool
3. in particleShape1 node create two PerParticle (Array) Attributes using the "Add Dynamic Attributes" button under general. They are rotChoose (which is a float) & rot (which is a vector).
4. Be sure to create these attributes under PerParticle(Array) under creation in the expression editor. Use "All Data Types".

particleShape1.rotChoose = rand(360); (float)
particleShape1.rot = <<0,particleshape1.rotchoose,0>>; (vector)

particleShape1.rotChoose = rand(360);
particleShape1.rot = <<0,particleshape1.rotchoose,0>>;

5. Then plug the rotChoose into rot under the rotation options -> rotation

CGTalk Discussion
Rotation Random

Maya 2010 and Maya 2009

Cities - First QTown, now KludgeCity

Okay so for the Sel*etar project (name space is so that when client google up this project they don't find these posts). Anyway during the project...we were looking for ways to break the horizon line with cities. My friend Chia Choon looked into QTown which was one hack of a fantastic Mel Script.

Lately this guy named Ed Whetstone released something called KludgeCity. It is bloody impressive. Please do check it out and he was nice enough to release it for free. Kind intelligent people, gotta love em.

I think Qtown makes good suburbia whilst kludgecity really holds up to close detail with good UVs to boot! Love it!

CGTalk

Ed Whetstone's KludgeCity

Download KludgeCity

Tutorial for KludgeCity

Both scripts used on Maya 2010 and Windows 7

Mia_RoundCorners

Been a big fan of Mental Ray nodes. Especially those that speed up render time and save me polygons. I haven't tried this in production as I am always worried what it would do to my mattes for compositing.

Mental note - please do test how the mattes work as I can see this used in my productions pretty often.

Mia_RoundCorners - Add bevels without adding more geometry

Backburner Baby

Alright. Also after this project which personally was a little ridiculous given the time frame and number of frames. Totaling 3200 in 20 days including weekends was a little extreme.

So I've got two machines setup on Backburner and it looks like it works quite well. I am hoping the emailing function works as that would really give me peace of mind.

Note to self.

Backburner Manager - Manages All Rendernodes

Backburner Monitor - Allows us to view all available Rendernodes and manages jobs

Backburner Server - Considered a render node

Start Backburner Manager, then Server then Monitor on main machine and Backburner Server on all other machines.

Testing being done on Maya 2010 and Backburner with Windows 7