Anim Bizz

FOG LIGHT/GOD RAYS IN MENTAL RAY Of course, it's not easy as with most things in MR but here it is. 1. Create a poly object (cube) which will act as a 'container for your fog. The smaller the container the less calculations Maya has to make. 2. Create a light that will be your fog light. Turn on raytrace shadows with trace depth 5. (use MR lights for cooler results, i.e. attach a physical light to a spotlight) 3. Make sure your objects are within your container. 4. Create a shader (lambert) that you will apply to your container. 5. Open the lamberts 2sg node and hook a transmat node to it's MR custom shaders -material shader and shadow shader. This will make the container's geometry invisible to the renderer. 6.Connect a parti_volume node to the volume shader slot. 7. Turn up the parti_volume's scatter a bit. 8. In the parti_volumes attributes, link your light to it through the light linking drop down. 9. In your render globals, Features...turn on auto volume volume...

EDIT EDIT EDIT ** ALTERNATE VECTOR BLUR METHOD Sure enough bloody Mental Ray lack of integration has done it again...and MAYA HAS IT'S OWN LM2DV SHADER ---- HELLO 64 BIT VECTOR RENDERING Well the geniuses at Autodesk have hidden some very good shaders called MIP. shaders the one we want is called mip_motion_vector. http://www.pixelcg.com/blog/?p=528 To enable them in the mental ray shaders GUI under materials and output shaders go into your mentalrayCustomNodeClass.mel file in (in ../scripts/others) http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=87&t=541718&page=1&pp=15 Edit: It came to my attention there is an easier way of exposing these shaders in your script editor type optionVar – iv “MIP_SHD_EXPOSE” 1; restart Maya and the shaders will appear ! VOILA your own shader group that you paid Autodesk for but they didn't want you to have it. NOW In the mip_ node Connect the message to mental ray miOutputShader node of whichever camera you are using via the connection...

MUDBOX TIPPAGE Always have trouble extracting displacement maps from Mudbox. * Always model quads. Mudbox calculations hate ngons & Tris. * Check for non-manifold faces. Destroy them. * Make sure UVs are clean and that shells have some distance from eachother. * Use as few UV shells as possible. Map extraction is slow with many shells.

WIREFRAMING A SUBD OBJECT This one is a bit of a hack because it's hard to render a subD wire object with backface culling. Contour shader only wires polys and the the hardware buffer sux at culling. Basically we create the wires by saving a playbast. 1. Apply a black shader to your object. 2. Turn on 'wireframe on shaded under shading. 3. Turn on 'smooth lines 4. Adjust 'thicker lines 5. Playblast out your animation and save it to whatever resolution you need. MAYA WIREFRAME RENDERING VIA MR CONTOURS Here's a cool wirefframe render technique. 1. Apply a shading map shader to an object. 2. In the SG material node, check enable contour rendering under the mental ray tab. 3. Enable contour rendering under the Render Settings/Features/Contours. 4. Crank over sample. 5. check "Around All Poly Faces" under Draw By Property Difference http://img261.imageshack.us/img261/9059/contour.jpg OR http://ashutoshjha.org/tutorial/wireframe-render-in-maya.html