So like in Stephen King’s “Sometimes They Come Back”, here I’m back again checking if anybody bothered to go through the previously uploaded assets…
If the anwer is yes, how comes that this thread is so idle…?
Back to the main topic… For anybody interested the good news is that I just bring to completion this insane “jigsaw” and that this 3 years long journey, is officially over…
I will need a few days to go through hundreds of screenshots (no kidding…) which will be collected in the pdf Acrobat Portfolios, that will display in a step by step fashion…
Every single Maya and MR lighting, texturing, rendering, Dynamics and nDynamics, Hairs, camera Motion Path animation feature etc. etc…
Link to the high rez version:
http://www.samui3d.com/Cool_1.jpg
Link to the high rez version:
http://www.samui3d.com/Cool_2.jpg
Used in conjunction to the MR Unified Sampling, Iray and the “Full” 3D Motion Blur features found under the "Quality tab of the Render Settings panel as well as the 2.5 Motion Blur workflow…
Using the “mip_motionblur” node connected to the (2) main cameras as a “Legacy Output Shader” as suggested by Zap on his Blog…
Link to the high rez version:
http://www.samui3d.com/Cool_10.jpg
If you just check the “outrageously” high render times, displayed by the previous screenshot… Yep you did see correctly…!
18 hrs. for an 800 by 600 px. render output just because I wanted to see what happened, when you combine both of the Motion Blur features using MR…!
Link to the high rez version:
http://www.samui3d.com/Limit_3.jpg
Average time for the other shots was btw 1 and 5 hrs., btw they could be reduced drastically of course…!
Link to the high rez version:
http://www.samui3d.com/Cool_4.jpg
Link to the high rez version:
http://www.samui3d.com/Cool_6.jpg
Link to the high rez version:
http://www.samui3d.com/Cool_8.jpg
For the creation of the (12) recently refined Maya 2011 “3 giga” as well as the (22) Maya 2012 production scenes “8 giga” for a total size of roughly (11) giga…!
And even I pushed both Maya and MR as well as my old Quad processor with just 8 giga of Ram, to the very limit and that I had to go through the ordeal of debugging…
Every single scene to ensure that the user will not experience crashes or even the infamous “NAN” pixels, everything worked out just fine and even if perfection doesn’t exist in this world…
Link to the high rez version:
http://www.samui3d.com/Nan_2.jpg
Link to the high rez version:
http://www.samui3d.com/Nan_3.jpg
Now I can finally confirm that on a technical aspect, these new assets get quite close to it…!
And again I will remind you that these are extremely huge and complex scenes with hundred of features that works in sync, created for learning purposes…
So please refrain from judging the “aesthetics” or the level of “photorealism” displayed by the final render output, which btw is not that bad after all as you can see from the pics posted above…
Since my job with this Guide was to provide you with the most accurate technical “know how” as well as several workarounds and workflows, to avoid the extremely annoying bugs caused by the poor MR implemetation in Maya…
The job to add that extra “photorealistic” touch using your artistic skills and your personal taste, will finally be yours and not mine…
And finally…
A little blast to the guys @ AD since that few months ago I started to create and refine the Maya 2012 production scenes, using the Maya 2012 Hotfix1 or 2 release… Now I don’t remember exactly, but it really doesn’t matter…
With my great surprise I found out that everytime I tried to open a scene previously created with the very stable Maya 2011 SP1A version, Maya 2012 Hotfix kept crashing…
I reverted to the original Maya 2012 version and voila’… Everything by magic went smoothly, so I decided to use the original version for the (22) scenes “390 mb. each” which compose the Maya 2012 section of the Guide…
Waiting to test the scenes using the more stable and final SP1A version instead of relying on intermediate Hotfix releases and yesterday, I finally tested the scenes with the latest Maya 2012 SP1A version and guess what…
Maya 2012 SP1A started to crash again on me, so finally my choice to use the original version turned out to be a wise one and since that by now… Guess I start to know the software like my own pockets…
And that somehow I expected something like this to happen, since that as the Italian farmers in the good old times used to say: “I start to know my chickens”…
Now I’m absolutely positive that I found the “culprit” causing these crashes and which btw, is one of the most basic feature in the Tutorial Guide…
The culprit are the “IVYPOLYS” PFX Strokes converted to poly’s instanced in the scenes and with the PFX “IVY” Brush node “Stroke Time” and “Time Clip” attributes, enabled in the “Flow Animation” section of the Attribute Editor panel…
To conclude… This is not a bug, this is an extremely annoying and outrageous “cockroach” and I will revert again to the Maya 2012 original version, removing the SP1A version which for my personal needs is completely useless…
Guess Duncan Brinsmead or Zap should give a good look at it, since this whole thing starts to get pretty frustrating… One bug solved and a few more, appears out of nothing…!
I do understand that to refine and improve an insanely huge and complex “Open Source” software like Maya is an incredible task, since that all the features are so interconnected…
A bit like this Guide in a much wider scale of course… Where if you attempt to refine a feature in the main production scenes, you risk to completely jeopardize the final result…!
Now after all the work I put into this project and considering that I finally accomplished my goal, by creating almost flawless “monster” Maya scenes…
Just to make a quick comparison… There are plenty of surfers very skilled @ surfing 20 ft. waves, but just a few dare to surf “monsters” like this one:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/video/2011/nov/11/garrett-mcnamara-surfs-90ft-wave-video?fb=native
Or this one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlPqL7IUT6M
Just kidding of course… Since I don’t dare to compare myself while sitting in front of a screen, to guys with “balls of steel” like Garrett McNamara or Mike Parsons…
But I will defenetely allow my beautiful self, the right to give a little advice to the guys @ AD:
Pretty please guys stop adding new features with “archaic” and “cryptic” naming conventions, to a software which is already insanely complex…
And please make sure that the Maya and MR lighting, texturing, rendering and Dynamics features already implemented, just work as expected…
Do you feel me…?:curious:
Ciao…!
PS. Dont worry this will likely be my final online rant, since that from now on the screenshots will speak for me…!
“I rather die young then die old and broke, that’s why I stay drunk and I constantly smoke”
