zap's repository of mental ray tips and tricks, frequent questions and their answers, and some smoke and mirror mental ray trickery you may not find elsewhere...
I'll be one of the speakers at the EUE in Utrecht (25 minutes by direct train from Amsterdam Schiphol Airport). I'll be talking about the new shaders and other mental ray 3.6 stuff.
More info, registration instructions and schedule on eue.3dstudio.eu
Also speaking will be Ted Boardman, Rune Spaans, Jamie Gwilliam, and a truckload of more people.
Pop over if you want to see some fun stuff or just have a word or three. I've been known to talk a word... or three. ;)
Since I wrote the below post "Doing BIG renders in max 9" I have been drowned in the question "so how about Maya"?
Well, this is most easily done from your command line, i.e. your windows command line.
Basically, if you want to render the scene "lion.mb" to a 5000x3000 pixel image, you can do that in tiles or stripes or whatever, from the command line. For example you can split it into five 1000x3000 pixel renders that you save in "c:\foo" directory, like so: render -x 5000 -y 3000 -reg 0 999 0 3000 -rd c:\foo -im part1 lion.mb render -x 5000 -y 3000 -reg 1000 1999 0 3000 -rd c:\foo -im part2 lion.mb render -x 5000 -y 3000 -reg 2000 2999 0 3000 -rd c:\foo -im part3 lion.mb render -x 5000 -y 3000 -reg 3000 3999 0 3000 -rd c:\foo -im part4 lion.mb render -x 5000 -y 3000 -reg 4000 4999 0 3000 -rd c:\foo -im part5 lion.mb
Again, remember, if you are doing FG, to avoid seams between the parts, follow the procedure outlined in the original post, i.e. in brief, speaking "Maya language"
Reduce Resolution
Render to finalgather file by setting Rebuild to "On" and specify a filename
Never did I know attending SigGRAPH would make me so busy I wouldn't have time to make a post post SigGRAPH! Oh well, now I finally take five minutes to post a post.
Secondly, SigGRAPH was a blast, although I missed much due to, as always, lots of meetings. One of the funniest events happened when some random straggler (apparently not completely awake) wandered into one of our meetings and grabbed a coffee and sat down.... after some investigation we figured out the guy was in the wrong room.... he staggered out mumbling "at least I got free coffee". He had no pants on, for some reason. ;)
Thirdly, I can finally talk about mental ray 3.6 and the new toys that come with it. As shown in various posted demos, there are some new architectural stuff, like the portal lights, which allows a really quick set up for perfect quality skylight coming in through small windows.... as well as other things.
Also included is my own little "baby", the production shader library. I promise that you'll read a lot more about that in this blog as things get released. A lot.
I made a twitter account which I'll try to keep updated with my "whereabouts" so that anyone wanting to run into me knows approximately where I am. Be warned, I'm pretty filled up schedule-wise, but there are gaps....
There will also be some nifty posts here, methinks... stay tuned.... *grin*
