Merry Christmas Post

My render from Jeremy Birn's lighting challenge

'ello 'everybody, and merry christmas, and all that Jazz!

Yes, I'm back from SIGGRAPH ASIA in Singapore. I couldn't get so much net connection so there wasn't much of the promised "reporting"; I apologize profusely. For the totally curious, there are some random pictures here and some cellphone video here.

SIGGRAPH ASIA was overall a very nice experience. It was small (Pixars Tony Apocada compared it to "US Siggraph 10 years ago") which was a good thing - the US SIGGRAPH's tend to overwhelm. Only drawback of Singapore; drinks way too expensive ;)

And there was an Electronic Theatre (see last post)!

The Masterclass went very well, many special thanks to Mike Seymour from FXGuide who not only was my MC for the Masterclass, but also kept up with my 175 page powerpoint, and knew which page I had to return to when Powerpoint decided to crash yet-another-time. Note to Self: Keynote, pre-prepared DVD, or anything... ANYTHING but Powerpoints next time!

Speaking of next time, unless the economy implodes further, I'm tentatively signed up for doing a class next year in New Orleans. Nothing signed up for next SIGGRAPH ASIA in Yokohama, Japan, though.

For me, I will be trying to spend the remaining shivering pieces of the year w. my family, enjoy the festivities, eat the stuff we Swedes eat, and celebrate the most holy thing on Swedish Christmas: Donald Duck.

I part with a little Christmas Gift from (again) my friends at Blur Studios (who I must add was a great help in providing me with eyecandy for my Siggie presentations); you may recall I posted a while back about an event where they talked about their Warhammer cinematic. Well, this event was filmed and is now available online, clikety here and enjoy over 2 hours of rendering, animation, crowd/hair/cloth sim, modelling and rigging geekiness!

With that, I bid adieu for 2008.

Marry X-mas and a happy new year!

/Z

Doing BIG renders in Maya

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
  
• Set the finalgather file to "Freeze"
  
• Do the actual renders
  

/Z

Doing BIG renders in max 9

I have received several questions on how to make very very high res renders in 3ds max with mental ray.

When you do this, there is a memory issue (worse on 32 bits) which makes some tiles turn black, and you get poor results. mental ray actually renders the image fine, but the individual image tiles get lost due to memory being full when sent over to max.

To help you solve this issue, I wrote this very simple script (Warning: I am not a MaxScript expert, this may cause your computer to catch fire and your wife to move to Iowa, use at your own risk) that allows you to split a render into "tiles".

You simply run the script, and a dialog pops up asking you how many "tiles" you want to break the image into. Pretty simple and self-explanatory. The render is broken into pieces, and saved as separate files, which you then can assemble in, say, Photoshop or similar.

There is one important point, though;

If you are using final gathering in the scene, you must do this from a saved final gather map, or you may get artifacts in the joints between the pieces.

In theory, I could add this to the script, but since I am no MaxScript expert (see above) and since I am not made out of time... I didn't.

To do this yourself:

1. Temporarily reduce the resolution of your render to something that renders withouth memory issues.
2. Turn on FG and tell it to write to file.
3. Set your min/max sampling temporarily to 1/64 and 1/64 for a really fast render (FG quality will not be affected by this!)
4. Render.
5. Set back original sampling (and resolution).
6. Set the FG map to "Read Only"
7. Run the script to do your "split render".

Hope this helps anyone stuck in "cannot lender large resolutions" land.



Enjoy.

/Z