The Writer: Trailer

Here's the trailer for the film in the form of the first shots . . . now just the rest to make :)

Environment: final look

Here are some stills showing the textured environment with contour outlines comped on and integrated with background artwork from David Fleck

LRC - some images from my comped shots

An update on lighting, rendering and compositing . . . here are some stills from my comps:

Lighting: Lighting Sandbox, nighttime scene

Some early tests for the lighting in my night time shots . . .





. . . and here's what you tube had to say about my lighting skills!

Photon Colour

This is not so much a tech tip as a tech question. I've found that with one point light and one area light in my scene if I set them both to emit photons I can't get them to emit photons of different colours.

They either default back to white, or back to the colour that I set for the first light.

In the attribute editor I'm able to edit the colour and it looks as though it's changed - but the next time I go into the AO for the relevant light the colour has defaulted back to one of the scenarios described above.

Either I'm missing something really obvious or it's a bug in maya so if anyone has any answers please let me know.

Tech Tips: frame offset with mental ray mv2DToxik pass

I've been having all sorts of problems whereby passes from any render layers which aren't my "main" layer (in this case AO and mattes) didn't line up with the passes from my main layer. They appeared to have a temporal offset of a fraction of a frame.

I've read a few forum threads and this is what I think was happening . . . 

In order to calculate vector information the motion vector pass renders with a 1/2 frame shutter offset (I think it's 1/2 a frame but don't quote me on that - I'm going to read up on the maths behind this when I have more time). All the other passes in that layer are rendered with the same offset (in my case that was beauty, spec, reflection, shadow etc etc). However, any layers without an MV pass associated still render on whole frames (my AO and matte passes). Hence the offset in my comp!

The solution:

Number 1:

In render globals under the Quality Tab turn on Motion Blur (temporarily). Go to the "Motion Offsets" tab. Check "Custom Motion Offsets" ON. From there set the "Motion Back Offset" to 0.00. Finally, just turn off Motion Blur. This disables the 1/2 frame offset on any layers with the mv2d render pass.

Number 2:
Under the Options Tab, expand the "Mental Ray Overrides" tab. Scroll down to the "Performance" Tab. If you check "Force Motion Vector Computation" ON, it forces that offset on all your render layers, even if you don't have that mv2d pass associated with that render layer.

Thanks to the following for helping me figure this one out:

http://forums.cgsociety.org/archive/index.php/t-971568.html

http://aloedesign.com/2008/12/maya-2d-motion-vectors-tutorial/3/

Comping: sample Nuke script

Now that I've finally fixed my rendering problems and have some frames to play with I'm LOVING using Nuke.

With less than two weeks to learn Nuke from scratch and comp my shots I've (obviously) barely scratched the surface, but it's clearly a genius software (and whoever thought of the tab function deserves a knighthood, or at least a pint).

Really all I've had time for in Nuke is to realise how much functionality there is which I'm not going to get my head around in time for my masters hand-in ;) but below is a sample script from one of my shots which has the basics (grades, colour correction, depth, DoF, motion blur etc) plus a few dust particles, god rays and a contour line overlay for good measure.