About
I'll know what it is when I have finished. And then I will probably start again. I dont mind where it goes or how it ends but I need to do it.
My name is David Johnson and I enjoy making art with a computer. I work for an animation company where we create television commercials in a variety of styles. At home I compose music and pretend to be an artist. This blog is somewhere I can share ideas and I welcome any feedback so feel free to comment.
Hi to djx (and sorry about my english).
I' m new in render passes with mental ray.
in maya 2008 i saw that it is possible to render with mia_X multiple outputs passes
but in the documentation there is no info.
can somebody explain to me all the workflow ,step by step of the peoces to render multiple passes
in maya mental ray 2008 ?
thank
roni
Comment by ronigew — December 16, 2007 @ 6:57 pm
Hi Roni, I will try to write up something about mia_material_x outputs in the next few weeks. Depending on what you want, it might be easier or harder than you expect - the render buffer methods are not well supported, but it is easy to create render layers and output the different mia passes to each layer. More on this coming soon...
Comment by david — December 16, 2007 @ 10:59 pm
Hi,
your blog is great, Thanks a lot for sharing such precious knowledge.
I have a question for you:
if we need to plug a phisical light to an area light to behave correctly, what would happen if we need that area light to be used as a portal light?
thanks
lluis
Comment by lluis — February 2, 2008 @ 1:17 pm
lluis, thanks for the compliments and welcome.
To be honest I have not tried that setup, but I will have a look into in and let you know. Maybe you should post the same question at CGTalk. You may even get a reply from Master Zap. He would know.
...a few hours later...
Ok, I loaded up maya and straight away I see what you mean - I think.
When used with the portal light, an area light serves a different purpose, which is to improve the final gather solution by converting the indirect illumination from the environment (physical sky for example) into direct light. I think for what you are asking you would use a 2nd area light.
Comment by david — February 3, 2008 @ 5:16 pm
thanks a lot david,
sound logical all your thoughts.
Lluis
Comment by lluis — February 4, 2008 @ 11:41 am
Hello David
Thanks for the help posted in this blog. Def- def- definitely a keeper!
I must abide to roni's request and ask to please write a simple step by step workflow on getting render passes out of mental ray (maya and mia_material_x). I've been trying to figure this out with absolutely no luck (I'm still wondering if this ctrl_buffers thing actually works in maya 2008 x64 at all!).
Cheers!
Comment by menso — February 16, 2008 @ 2:49 pm
Hi David, I really appreciate what you're doing for the community. You shared a lot of useful scripts and templates that makes me work easily with Maya.
Trusting in your knowledge, I'm asking if you can take a look at this thread I opened at CGTalk.
Maybe you can help me and other Maya users.
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=87&t=687373
Hope I'm not bothering you.
Salut
Comment by fabergambis — October 24, 2008 @ 3:26 am
fabergambis, no bother, and I appreciate your kind words. I have been keeping an eye onyour thread. Some really interesting opinions and experiences are coming out of that. I don't have much experience with the type of real world physics that this involves, so there is probably nothing I can add. All my lightingis done "by eye", even when I am integrating my cg elements with live-action, and it has only been in recent times that physical accuracy has been on the agenda. However I think the discussion you have started at cgtalk is both timely and valuable as we continue to evolve our workflows.
Comment by david — October 24, 2008 @ 10:32 pm