Beer glass scene creation
This course contains a little bit of everything with modeling, UVing, texturing and dynamics in Maya, as well as compositing multilayered EXR's in Photoshop.
# 1 12-05-2010 , 12:30 PM
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Character Animation

Has anyone used Mental Ray for character animation and is it considered a viable option say over vray?
Thanks


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# 2 12-05-2010 , 03:36 PM
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is your question back to front? i don't know anyone who has used vray for a character animation.

# 3 12-05-2010 , 05:14 PM
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Well I have been looking for tutorials for character animation setup in mental ray and there doesnt seem to be anything about.
So I take it you can save out the calculated light maps per frame, then load these up to render the final animation as you do in Vray.

Whats your work flow?


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# 4 12-05-2010 , 06:03 PM
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ummm... light maps, i'm not sure what those are. Is it a low poly game thing, like baking lights?

my workflow... well, if i was animating a character (lets say a robot walking around on a table.) I would film a move around a desk. then matchmove the plate.
using a grey ball and chrome ball for reference i would create lights to match the lighting in the scene. i would then create some proxy geometry of the table and whatever else was needed. then i would import my rigged character and animate the walk.
Next i would work on shading and texturing. once i was happy with that i would render various passes and try to comp the robot onto the backplate adding things like dof, motion blur, pixelate bits and bobs etc etc.
i would do it in mental ray... i've never used vray but i guess it would all be the same process but with different buttons.

# 5 13-05-2010 , 12:36 AM
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when using gi, definitely bake out gi maps or fg maps. this way it will be flicker free.
thre is an option in the render setting tabs to write out lightmap files.

and use .map format for textures if you can.


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# 6 13-05-2010 , 11:40 AM
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I wouldn't light an anim with fg. you can use and occlusion pass for the contact shadows and you will have much more control over the lights if you do it manually. HDRI can give you artifacts that are not wanted.

# 7 13-05-2010 , 01:16 PM
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Thanks guys for the hints, now I need to get testing..


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