Hi!
We are looking for someone who might be interested in helping us with a short movie we are doing. We are finishing animation now, but since we are having loads of trouble with render, specially with one character with hair, we are looking for different alternatives to optimize the render times and allow to achieve a nice result.
We are animating with Maya 2009, and have tried rendering with Mental Ray, Maxwell render (we are using Maxwell for the rest of the render), 3DLight and Renderman, stumbling upon severe problems with each one 
We are seriously considering Blender as an alternative to render the hair, and have done several tests to explore the possibility of exporting the animated mesh from Maya to Blender, and using Blender´s render to do a hair layer.
We think this can be a viable pipeline, but we need a Technical Director (not necessarily a pro) to help us plan and optimize the pipeline to do it, as we have never used Blender so I think it would be a bit unrealistical to try and do it all by ourselves.
Where we have reached so far, and the basic problem we are facing right now is:
- We can transfer the camera position and an OBJ with a vertex-cache animation from Maya to Blender using Ani-sculpt (2.49 only, so far):
- Anisculpt generates an OBJ of the mesh in the first frame of the animation and a vertex position cache file for each frame.
- The Maya Mesh we are using is always the same, it is a referenced model
- We can apply hair, and render that imported model with animation.
- The problem is that there is a big number of shots involved (around 75) and so far the hair would have to be combed for every new shot, since for every shot we have effectively a new mesh and hence the hair cannot be re-used. The material and texture of course can, but the haircut, weights and vertex-groups have to be created from scratch every time you import a new animation.
We are not that familiar with AniSculpt, so maybe it can actually be changed to work more like a modifier so that we can use 1 mesh including hairs, vertex-groups and materials and apply the different deforming animation to it just like a modifier, but this doesn´t seem to be the case for what I´ve read: - From Anisculpt 0.7 (for blender 4.9) readme file: “a script the allow import a export vertex cache between 3D apps. it¥s based in “.PC2” vertex cache format and “.OBJ” for import the mesh.”
- In a thread regarding Anisculpt for blender 2.5 .py file Daniel the author of the script wrote: “I´m waiting for a .pc2 or .mc (Maya Cache) import/export script to make the workflow and UI, by the moment Blender 2.5 only support .MDD files. In the horizon i´m thinking on to contact with a developer to make a real cache modifier not just a simple list of ShapeKeys.”
What we would need now is to apply different point-cached animations from Maya/Anisculpt to the same Blender-model, in order to preserve vertexgroups, materials and hair-comb in the blendfile that is used to render the hair-pass.
A possible partial workaround would be to insert one frame in (the same) neutral position at the beginning or end of each animation, and perform the operations in that frame. For instance:
- In Maya, adding a neutral position to the animation before exporting
- Or appending it into the vertex cache file itself through programming / scripting
Anyway we still need to apply this to a prepared blender file, not to a different OBJ every time.
Please let me make clear that this is not a commercial project so we have very little money available for this, it is not comparable to a commercial freelance, although we offer a symbolic payment plus a share of the profits, and of course credits.
If you want to know more about the project, please reply to this thread with your email or write to gerardo A T evipc D O T com and I´ll send you more info privately so you can make a decision.
Thanks for your time