Maya Mental Ray Flicker Free

I've been documenting about how to handle Vray flicker free and completely forgot about the process that helped me do flicker free work in MentalRay. It is quite sad given how much time I invested and how confident I got.

Well, the industry has moved on and seem to have built on that whole concept with write ups and all so I'll just tap on that to relearn. Flicker free, perfect for architecture visualization renders and now with the subset node, to handle the dynamic stuff. Awesome

Maya MR Flicker Free

A chunck of really helpful info from the above link so I can get my renders going quick

"To create a Frozen FG map, define a map first in the Final Gather File field (an extension name doesn't matter, though I use .fgmap), then enable the Preview Animation mode in the Preview section of the Options tab of the Render Settings. Preview Animation will render out your scene but won't save files in this case. You'll ONLY be calculating the FG map for your main rendering camera. To set the renderer to render only the FG pass, under the Features tab, set the Render Mode to Final Gathering Only. Image sampling (anti-aliasing and such) settings don't matter and will have no effect, since FG is being rendered only. Then under the Common tab, set the By frame attribute to a setting such as 10, or 5, there usually isn't a need to render every frame for the FG map, unless the camera view is covering a massive change per frame. Keep in mind that the pixel resolution of the image does matter, so you'll need to set that to your target output pixel resolution, also under the Common tab. Now render the current frame and Mental Ray will calculate the FG data for the length of the animation. Remember to switch Rebuild to Freeze and unhide any objects (such as your characters/creatures) you didn't want in the frozen FG solution when you're ready to render again. Here's a quick explanation on the Rebuild modes in Final Gather:

Rebuild On: Overwrites the FG map on every render, and with each frame advance at render-time.
Rebuild Off: Appends (adds) FG points to the map, as needed, without overwriting it.
Rebuild Freeze: Reads from the FG map, doesn't overwrite nor append anything to it.

Amnesia

I am a fucking moron, and each time I am lazy and do not take notes here. Whatever I learnt will be as if it never happened. *I've completely wiped from my head how to deal with flicker free animation in MentalRay

*note to self.

DO NOT FUCKING FORGET TO TAKE NOTES AGAIN, AND DON'T BE LAZY.

Applying Aim Constraint to multiple groups at once

string $sel[] = `ls -sl`;

for ($tmp in $sel) {

aimConstraint -offset 0 0 0 -weight 1 -aimVector 0 1 0 -upVector 0 1 0 -worldUpType "vector" -worldUpVector 0 1 0 Locator $tmp;

};

items in italics can be edited to suit requirement. "Locator" = name of target to orient towards.

Import Maya Camera to After Effects

To import Maya information from Maya to After Effects.

Be sure to set the frame rate to be identical to the After Effects Scene file.
Camera1 seems to work and I am sure the basic names work but no perspective & orthographic cameras.
To bake camera animation go to Edit -> Keys -> Bake Simulation and make sure the camera is not under any group nodes. If not use the constraint keys and bake the new camera.

Nulls can be named NULL, null or Null.

Upon export, select on the camera and relevant nulls that are to be used and export that as a .ma file.

Maya 2010, After Effects CS5

Linear Workflow for Vray

Discussions about linear workflow specifically for V-ray.

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?p=6931633#post6931633

MR AO pass respecting opacity maps

I found this thing I drew up for someone and thought I better junk it here incase I forget too.

Normalmaps

Since I am a Zbrush lover now I decided to do more research on when I can use normal maps and displacement maps. Normal maps don't seem to be used in full animations and more often in games due to the in-ability to render AO passes properly but I figured using it for low level details like fabrics and generating a normalmap for that would be awesome.

Best tip of the day in that tutorial -

[Implementation] Obtaining Clean Results Using Hybrid maps

Baking - hybrid smooth/unsmoothed tangents using vertex normals (xNormal, maya) / smoothing groups. (max)

1. UV borders should generally be converted to hard edges, this dramatically reduces smoothing errors. (with no seam problems)

2. To reduce smoothing errors in an area, you can either split the uv map and introduce more hard edges - or manually round the geometry.

3. Experiment with your baking package to see how far you can push it - xNormal bakes for example have less smoothing errors than 3ds max bakes.

Here is a link to a good tutorial and a snippet I think I should keep in mind.

Area Autodesk Normal Map Tutorial