Latest Den + composites

With the crash of my last save, this project has officially become a monster. Arg!

I'll need to revert back to an earlier version then do some serious compositing.

My, Oh Maya: The Den

And finally...

I spent the past few days trying to get a decent bear-skin rug, but couldn't negotiate around an ugly masking job. I don't know if anyone else has any luck, but I'm here to say that mental ray and even ray-tracing will--in one way or another--force maya to crash an already taxed processor when trying to merge fur.

That said, I'm saving my pennies for a Mac, since my days of futzing with pc hardware (and even knowing about it) need to be over. What kind of professional needs futz??

No Mental Ray (Software Render)

I finally did a software render using Raytracing alone... (sigh)

I've concluded that mental ray is really a daylight rendering engine, and doesn't lend itself to any sort of 'dramatic' or warm set lighting... thought??

look of shock

Ugh--I think that I might have to bag the mental ray on this particular scene. There's way too much bleed and aliasing going on here. But I'm liking the worried unicorn better...

...and here it is:

(remember to click on the image to get a higher-res picture)

the den---final touches!

This is the unadulterated (no photoshop / no compositing) final version. Hoo-ray! Now to super-impose a better looking bearskin rug (NO MENTAL RAY--only software render!) and replace the photo in the frame with something tighter and straight. Again, mental ray is not ideal in this particular way, since it gives it a 'painterly' feel at the sacrifise of crystal-clarity.

This was rendered in multiple passes:
1.) everything minus the chandeliers and bear - 2.5 hours
2.) the bear - 1.75 hours
3.) chandelier 1 - 30 minutes
4.) chandelier 2 -30 minutes

I found that turning off the layers that won't appear in the 'red box' segment greatly reduces my rendering time. The fur was the ultimate liability, crashing Maya as well as my computer system multiple times.

But as my French-Canadian ex boyfriend would say, "I will sleep less stupid!" And I discovered an incredible trick to pull Maya out of an seemingly inevitable crash on my pc: CTRL + ALT + DEL, Processes tab, then start closing down superfluous programs (anything that doesn't directly run Maya), like your anti-virus, etc. Like magic, I kept Maya from crashing and losing a bunch of work. It was incredible...

Alright! Now I think I'm getting a little warmer...

This particular image is a Photoshop composite of three different renders. The first was with the unicorn head, the second was the polar bear rug, and the third was the chandeliers. Each 480 X640 took between 1.5 to 2.5 hours. The bear's fur amassed the most time, and I quickly discovered that fur and mental ray not only do not play well together--they will crash your computer in almost every scenario unless you're working with a very little amount of hair, like on my unicorn. He was rendered with Maya software, begrudgingly. I'm telling you--it's hard to go back!

Changes:
1.) the unicorn's head will be turned, and the mouth will be opened
2.) I would loooove to find a photoshop plug-in that will allow me to cast prisms from the chandelier
3.) clock-face, fire, frame will have new and improved jpegs
4.) I might try and experiment with getting that dark wood lighter
5.) the bear's head needs to be smoothed, mouth rigged and opened for a nice 'GARRRRR!'
6.) a couple more chairs will be added
7.) mouse-over objects will be added

After all this, the animation will be started! Let's hope our web developer has a good sense of humor...