Blur goes "mental"

Check out this new "Warhammer: Age of Reckoning" cinematic the insanely talanted guys at Blur Studios did:



It's done in mental ray (except some certain passes like particle work done in 3ds Max Scanline renderer (& maybe other renderers as well*)), and I even had the opportunity to render some of these characters myself, which was fun.

It's a suitably epic piece of work, I'd say.

What may interest people is that this is largely lit by physical sun&sky, and is using final gathering for indirect light. Clearly, the era of "fake everything" and "you can't use GI in production" is coming to a much needed close.

/Z

* = A ton of Particle work was done in FumeFX, which isn't available for mental ray quite yet. But a little bird has told me that this isn't too far into the future....

The Post SIGGRAPH 2008 Post

Aaah, another SIGGRAPH done. This year was busier than ever, with both a course, masterclass and... stuff.

I'm still Jetlagged out of my head, even a week later, so this will just be a short post to say "I survived"... even the Blur party. :)

As you noticed (in previous post) the amount of QiK coverage I was able to do from the show was near nil - this was mostly due to lack of time but also rather shaky WiFi connectivity in the exhibition hall (it was fine in the conference areas, but who wants to see corridors? ;) ).

I must, however, take this opportunity to thank the guys of mymentalray.com who extended their hospitality quite extraordinarily to make me feel at home, especially Juan who gave me a little "tour".


mymentalray.com Maestro and Myself

While I was there I also visited my friends Colin & Greg at Hydraulx, in their new facility which I hadn't seen before. Verrry nice, their new screening room is sweeeeeeeeeeet. Me want ;)


Hydraulx screening room


/Z

Leaving, on a jet plane....

So I'm pretty much at the airport, about to embark on the god-knows-how-many-hours flight to L.A, arriving, nice and toally jetlagged out of my head at about 4 PM saturday.

More stuff on Twitter & Qik, and sometimes I may appearn int he "fring" thingamabob on the right. Maybe. If that works. Who knows w. technology. :)

/Z

mrMaterials.com & The Floze Tutorials

mrMaterials.com

Last week, the site mrmaterials.com opened officially to the public, so you can actually up- and download materials there as well as (like I mentioned in my last post) mymentalray.com. So don't be shy, up & download those nice mental ray materials as much as you like!

The Floze Tutorials

Florian Wild, most known as "Floze" online, has put together an outstanding set of tutorials for mental ray about rendering various types of environments. These are, in order:



Sunny Afternoon

Twilight

Moonlight

Electrical

Candle Light

Underwater

Florian has undoubtedly done a great job on these, and they are very good reading, and even though they are written for Maya, mental ray is mental ray, so the basic techniques can be transported to XSI, 3ds Max etc. just as well.

Luckily, Floze has already done the thinking for you here as well, and this is available in eBook format from www.3dTotal.com for £8.55 (which I think he is well worth).

Enjoy

Stuff

Siggraph is closing in. I plan to do a bit of "reporting" from it on twitter, (so follow me there), and I may even, if I get extra crazy, do some QiK coverage. We'll see....

...until next time - keep tracing. ;)

/Z