Power to the Cores!

If you think the machines in the lab are rendering slowly, look at the task manager. You will see that Metal Ray is only using about a maximum of 25&perc; of the power: two out of four CPU cores

Googled for a solution, found one on Creative Cow: Go to the Batch Render Options (hit the box) and under Parallellism, turn off Auto Render Threads and set Render Threads to 8. Turning off Render on network machines may also be needed.

Happy Rendering

Where is Mental Ray?

Some of you have complained about Mental Ray not being available as rederer. If you cannot select Mental Ray, the plugin is not loaded.

To load Mental Ray: go to Window → Settings/Preferences → Plug-in Manager. In the window that opens, find Mayatomr.mll (may be at the bottom under C:/Program Files/Autodesk/Maya2013/mentalray/plug-ins) and check loaded and Auto load

Happy rendering!

Ambient Occluded Kitchen

In class today I quickly showed how to create Ambient Occlusion passes, referring to this tutorial. Building upon that, here is how to use photoshop to composite the passes, giving you more control that simply multiplying them directly in Maya
To the right you see the basic lit black and white kitchen

 

Here is the Ambient Occlusion pass, using the default settings

 

Simply multiplied on top, the way too dark ambient occlusion pass makes the entire image black. Not quite, but close

 

In Photoshop, I brightened the Ambient Occlusion render using curves. This clearly reveals the noisiness (click on the image to see that in a larger picture)

 

So next I apply a smart blur to the image

 

Multiplying the images was still making it to dark, so I added the Ambient Occlusion image to the normal render. Add is called Screen in Photoshop, and I set the Ambient Occlusion layer to 22%

 

Finishing touch: changed the outside color, using the alpha channel that was saved with the tiff images

Dynamics

This movie is brought to you by Remembrance of Drinks Past. I rendered the particles interacting with geometry example I showed in class. Note how as the sphere starts rotating the particles no longer bounce off straight but get deflected in the direction of the turn. That's friction for ya!

I also rendered the simple rigid body example:

Extreme Makeover

Here is Jane again. Not hard to guess what Mondays lecture is about, right? Did something similar in LightWave last year.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention that while creating this I discovered that GIMP has a function I have not seen in PhotoShop: Filters → Map → Make Seamless. And it works!

Turbulent Ball

A Mental Ray displacement test, animated using expressions.

Point Animation

After the family left I found an hour or so to play with Maya, and found out it is actually possible to animate every single point on a Mesh individually. I tried it on a polygonal sphere, messed a bit with the shader and rendered it using Mental Ray. No Bones, deformers or blend shapes!

Hairy Sleasel

We got fur to render on Sleasel in class. On the instruction station in the lab this took 12 minutes and 37 seconds :(

mental ray gone wild!

woo! actually What this guy does with mentalray shaders, procedural textures (all of them!) and displacement are unholy haha. Check it out: link