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....

DOF and Sun & Sky issue

There is a known issue when using the Sun & Sky in max 9 together with depth of field. Objects turn out like odd wireframe-looking... things.

The cause for this is actually the long list of lens shaders that gets added by the "Aerial Pespective" feature built into Sun & Sky.

For now there is a workaround.

Proceed as follows:

1. Create a Sun & Sky system as normal, by creating a daylight system and choosing "mr Sun" and "mr Sky", affirming the pop up question of "do you want to ad a 'mr Physical Sky' environment" with a resounding YES.
2. Then, change the skylight option from "mr Sky" to "Skylight"
3. Change the Skylights option to "Use Scene Environment"

Now a nearly identical rendering (but without any Aerial Perspective) will result, since the standard mad Skylight will pick up the "mr Physical Sky" environment shader for the lighting. The net result is nearly identical to the normal rendering using a "mr Sky" and the depth of field will now work.

The difference is that now one needs to do any "tweaks" to the sky strictly in the "mr Physical Sky" shader, and to do this, one needs to "drag-and-drop" it (as an "instance") from the "Environment" dialog into a free slot of the material editor, then tweak away.

/Z