Overcomming Rendering and Compositng Hurdles

So I would like to take some time to further talk about the important work being done on the Rendering/Compositing front. I am developing us a very professional approach similar to what is used at studios like Luma Pictures in Santa Monica, and by one particular Cal State Fullerton Alumni working in the Special FX industry. It is not just the FX studios either, here is an example from this Disney Film.

I would like to start by having a look at the artwork and pass breakdown by CSUF and Gnomon grad Sanjay Chand.

Visit Sanjay Chand's Website Here
(Again this is a sample of Sanjay work. He is an industry professional and is not in any way affiliated with our project.)

Breaking down a scene into Render Passes gives us a tremendous amount of freedom with rendering, lighting, and making color correction to our film. In simple terms, it puts the control back into the artists hands, where it belongs. I have been lucky enough to get in contact with Sanjay and get some reassurance that the way I handle passes is indeed a professional practice. We are on the right track.

Unfortunately, I have the duty of fighting through the technical barriers to ensure our approach is as streamlined and efficient as possible. This is where the DeexRenderTool I mentioned in an earlier post comes into play. Maya's own Render Pass system is extremely limited in nature and has some major bugs, so I am helping out Damien Battielle, a script writer in France, develop passes for his tool that cover our needs and work around the problems.


*Warning! I am about to get technical!*

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Here is a breakdown of the Current Progress
Orange Passes are my contributions

Necessary passes supported
-Color
-Lighting
-Specular
-Reflections
-Refractions
-Occlusion
-Fresnel
-Zdepth
+ many more

Necessary passes Not Yet Supported
-Non Final Gather Indirect Light
-Skin
-Blinn/Phong Specular
-Material Matte Passes (needed for control over individual scene elements)

Additional Issues to Overcome
- Currently there is a 10 Pass maximum.
- Interface that incorporates more than 10 passes.
- Assigning the skin pass to a material.
- Compiling special shaders need for Maya 2010 Mac OS X.


A lot of what I have developed for him to add is difficult to implement, but I have strong faith in Damien. Thus far he has been extremely active with updating the script. The rest of the work rests in his hands, though I'm trying to help as much as I can. I'll keep us posted as the tool develops over the winter.


To conclude, here is an image of what our compositing network will look like, only done in Toxik and not Fusion. All renders from previous posts use this same work flow with Toxik:


(The model is from 3DTotal's free model section I used for testing purposes)

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Edit: What I coincidence,I mention Sanjay yesterday and today an interview with him is released on 3Dtotal:


Good read.