This course will look at the fundamentals of modeling in Maya with an emphasis on creating good topology. We'll look at what makes a good model in Maya and why objects are modeled in the way they are.
Thanks dave & Jay. The 190 is on the back burner until my shipment of memory arrives. @dave, the grass paint effects converted to polygons works great.
The simple scene I created to experiment with DOF. An "infinite" plane with lots of spheres spaced equally.
Without depth of field and a sampling level of 32 gives reasonably soft shadows (Shadow softness set to 3). With depth of field turned on and even with a sampling level of 512 I still see graininess on the out of focus spheres.
I suspected as much as well as the only way I could eliminate it was to increase the min/max sample levels under Raytrace/Scanline Quality section in the render options.
Thanks stwert. I actually want to try both methods.
Edit: While experimenting with DOF I encountered something that at the time made me say WTF but after thinking about it, it actually makes sense. The plane I use has only 4 vertices. On on each corner. When all the vertices fell outside the camera far clipping plane, the plane did not appear in the render.
Instead of using DoF on the camera, your best bet is to render out Zdepth passes and use those in comp instead then you can blur to your hearts content.
Also try using maya Hair for grass too not fur, you'll be surprised!!
I just did a test too with maya Hair for you....the results after 5minutes were great...
see what you think. You can flood a polyplane with with a hair system and then overide the clump width to spread the clumps out, saves using loads of hair.....less is more as they say
An evening of creating some punked out hair. It definitely has possibilities. (Thanks Jay)
Couple of questions:
[1] How can I vary the length?
[2] Is it possible to drive the "Hairs per clump" as a function of the distance from the camera? Thinking of creating a bunch of grass tiles so that I can decrease the "hair" density the farther away it is from the camera.
[3] How do I keep the hair inside the bounds of the plane on which it is created when I increase the clump width? For what I want to do it does not really matter. I can use this for overlap.
Thanks dave, I have tried it as well. I just did not post it here. I have tried paintFX, fur and hair. I prefer the paintFX, the only drawback is that one has to convert it to polygons for mentalray. As you pointed out with fur it is very easy to get good results. I found that hair a little bit more finicky to configure. It's not as intuitive as paintFX and fur (Had to go back to the manual a couple of times).
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