Cities in Maya / mental ray

[m0z]

m0z, you just saved me 40 billion hours of waiting! Thanks so much, can’t believe I didn’t try that myself but you’ve saved the day, once again! Ed, we can consider the texturing-replacement issue… well, a non-issue, now. I’m happy for once that I was doing things the longest, wrongest way possible!

glad I could help.

@EdtheHobbit:
http://kiryha.blogspot.com/2011/04/userdata.html

[republicavfx]

mm that data shader is interesting…isnt it kind of replicating the behaviour of a 3 way switch? im sure its more flexible but does MR recognize swicth nodes? just wondering

[Bitter]

user data is more native to mental ray and more flexible for data types. With a little python script you can assign it and connect things easily through selection. (I’ve always hated the switch nodes in Maya for some reason, possibly irrational.)

I expect more of these tools will begin floating around soon, it’s not exposed so it takes some time.

[EdtheHobbit]

user data is more native to mental ray and more flexible for data types. With a little python script you can assign it and connect things easily through selection. (I’ve always hated the switch nodes in Maya for some reason, possibly irrational.)

I expect more of these tools will begin floating around soon, it’s not exposed so it takes some time.

Thanks man! I’m going to put together a bit of a test with this soon, and probably make a couple of MEL scripts to go along with it. And switch nodes are a pain in my a$$ – probably just because of the DAG…

[EdtheHobbit]

The project I’m currently on (my “day” job) is in crunch time right now, so I haven’t had much time to play with this concept.

I have a scene set up for a playground that I’ll be sharing soon, along with the scripts I’m writing. I’m just too swamped!

[EdtheHobbit]

Crunch time is over (as is my employment, alas), so I’ll be working on this problem again. For now, I’m focusing on creating a viable layout of city blocks that I can use to generate or place structures, roads, etc. according to whatever rules I determine. This is what I have so far, created by deleting interior edges from a higher-polygon primitive:

This layout has 700 blocks, which I figure can accommodate an average of five to seven structures apiece. This would give me a total of about 4,200 structures. Manhattan has about 70,000, but this is a good enough start for me.

At this point, I have no earthly idea what I’m going to do with this, but I’ll figure something out!

[EdtheHobbit]

Just keepin’ the thread alive. I’m going to be looking at this again soon! I promise!

[rip3rs]

Interesting idea! and can be VERY powerful!

[stooch]

All this said, with a city you won’t be dealing with quite the geometry polycounts you would be with trees and flora. So it might be much faster indeed. And like I said, I’d love to know I’m reassigning materials the wrong or slowest way. Any input would be appreciated.

i wrote scripts that simply swap the connection to the shading group instead of selecting all faces then doing the shading assignment. you can do it also via hypershade, just plug the new shader into the surface shader/mr shader slots.

[Oddgit]

@EdtheHobbit
Hi! i just wanted to chime in on the LOD stuff. Renderman has a pretty cool LOD and Delayed Read Archive set up similar to the render proxy in MentalRay, but much much cooler. You had mentioned cost, i know full priced renderman is soem serious $Texas for non studio type people but they have student price for server and studio for 200 bucks, its a year license but its better then nothing. But back to the LOD and read archive. Before some bad personal life and medical issues i was working on a masters thesis with a bunch of LOD tools for PRMan. Im pretty sure it applies to all Renderman compliant renderers.
So the LoD and Read Archives can be set up based on a bounding box. You can have as many levels of detail as you want . But the slick thing is their level of detail load in is based on how much pixel space they take up rather then distance so it is not tied to a specific camera. Along with the neat screen space load out, it does a opacity ramp crossfade between the two levels of detail to reduce/eliminate the pop that happens between load outs. Also you can make the objects completely unload if you set the bottom level of detail to 1, so objects behind a building would just not be in memory. The bounding box is calculated when rays and the render bucket hits it. It was very very cool.
Oh and as a side perk, it made the scenes very tiny because everything was just basic cubes or super low poly standins and that also made the RIB out sequence for animation fly by.

[EdtheHobbit]

I wish it was that easy, Oddgit. I really do. Ribboxing LODs are definitely cool, but again… mental ray is what we have with Autodesk. Alas.

[Oddgit]

Yeah, that is why I had to go to renderman. I would have liked to use MentalRay.
I checked out your city Mel work, very cool!

[DutchDimension]

You guys should check out this little beauty from Eric Bruneton, called Rama.

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