Elemental Ray

[Remydrh]

Some of us have started a blog where we will post useful information related to mental ray and Maya.


http://elementalray.wordpress.com/


The blog will focus not only on the artist's needs but on some tips from developers as well.


This will provide you with easily understood concepts. The aim is to provide better understanding of rendering methods, tools, and actual studio practices. For now this will lean towards VFX work (since the thrust is Maya) but we hope it will be useful to everyone.


Any suggestions you have are welcome as well as ideas for concepts to cover or integrate into other topics.

[Remydrh]

Some more commercial work using mental ray and Unified Sampling:

http://elementalray.wordpress.com/20...els-immersion/

[Braiz]

Great blog Remydrh... The subjects are very well explained
I'm really interested in the FG shooter. You wouldn't by any chance know if there is any equivalent in 3ds max?

[Remydrh]

3ds Max should have the fgshooter as well. It's part of the production package. A quick search online should bring up some examples from Max.

The complexity lies in how the parameters for the camera are embedded in the scale parameters of the transform for the virtual camera. We had to do some reverse engineering to get the correct settings based on aperture, focal length, etc to match what Maya exports.

This is also why you want to use virtual and not actual render cameras, because it uses the scale parameters to pass data that otherwise might give you strange effects from a render camera.

Extra thanks to Zap and Bart for helping us get this figured out and to Brenton for engineering the script and actual conversions.

[moulder6]

I'm really interested in the FG shooter. You wouldn't by any chance know if there is any equivalent in 3ds max?

Nothing to be that excited about. Here's the actual max implementation. Pretty str8foward, i'd say:

FGS.png

[Braiz]

Arh yes of course... I've already tried it out, but with some weird result, my render cam will stay stationary, not folowing the keyframes, wich is stranged...

I guess the "divide cam Path by num. segment" option is simular to the amount of virtual cams in the maya implemention?

[moulder6]

Well, i find it to work as expected. when in "Project points from positions along camera path" mode It actually creates a second, render time only, camera used for FG n then renders the beauty trough the actual in scene camera.

[Remydrh]

The way we implemented it in Maya is so you can use that feature, a path, or arbitrary virtual camera positions not on the path.

[Zxx]

i'm so frustrated right now. i'm from Russia and our ISP have banned your blog.
on attached screenshot you can see that they apologizes for restricting access and give two possible reasons for this:
1. this address got in the list of russian internet blacklist
you can read more about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Internet_blacklist

2. access restricted by decision of court of law.

ISP's website: http://www.rostelecom.ru/en

------------

by the way, wordpress.com is not blocked. if your address made the list of russian internet blacklist than EVERY ISP is obligated to restrict access to it.

[Zxx]

well, found some info...
http://sto-strategy.com/blog/2013/3/...cked-in-russia