Maya 2011 crashes loading file from new version

Maya 2010 has been very buggy the last few days just as Im ready to render every time it crashes, I've looked far and wide for a solution and couldn't clear the errors even re-installing didn't seem to work so the great news is I installed maya 2011 for free from there education community site. Problems occured there as well, fur rendered fine in this version but as soon as I imported my scene from maya 2010 or maya 2012 (yes I have all three versions, mainly because my different plugins are only licensed for older versions!)

so rather than bog things down in rendering Ive created a unique and rather crazy workaround (hey its about getting the job done right?) I've rendered my scenes with all the layers in maya 2012 and then exported the camera and lighting data as an fbx to maya 2011 (where I have shave and a haircut installed.) Then I've rendered the fur separately from there and I am in the process of compositing now. Below are some pics.

The basic horse head render (maya 2012)

the hair/fur render with its alpha channel (maya 2011)

A test composite in photoshop adding the fur on as a screen blend layer with adjustment to levels etc.

Lighting Set Up

Iv'e been working on this project solidly for a few days and Ive had to scale back the fur a bit as the render times are too long. I've also been working on the lighting for the scene. Here it is, because fur hates raytracing I've got just one raytrace shadow light above and behind the glass to create the caustics this light will be switched to depth map shadows for the fur pass. I've parented a single spot light to the eyes to give that reflective quality and another light to illuminate the horses innards. The three light panels are just planes with the incandescence turned up and a glow effect. Because they are in the same location as the spot it looks like they are illuminating the horse.

The glow effect will be added in post because in Maya it tends to flicker on animated objects.

Render passes

After adding fur to the rest of the model render times jumped to almost 20 minutes a frame, an unacceptably expensive render. To reduce it I decided to render the fur separately without raytrace shadows I did this and it reduced the render time to twelve minutes, the problem was the reflection pass was empty for the glass cases. I created a new simple scene and practised with some different materials and discovered the mistake was an oversight on my part I was using the mia_material_x and to enable render passes it needed to be a mia_material_x_passes. Duh! a bit obvious now. Heres some pics of my 'practice'.

Diffuse no shadows

Shadows (in maya they render inverted.)

Ambient Occlusion

Z-depth (for post production depth of field in AE)

Reflection pass, the left column was also reflective but is missing because it was a mia_material_x not the mia_material_x_passes material.

All layers composited (I went back and rendered the column correctly.)

There are plenty of tutorials out there. Quite a clear one can be found here: Maya Render Pass Tutorial  http://www.pixelcg.com/blog/?p=924

Shave and haircut fur not rendering in glass material

Here are some pics of the problem I was having with explanations.

With the hair settings as they were, the moment the glass was added the fur failed to render. I played around with a lot of settings and had no luck. Then I found the tutorial I link to in my earlier post.

After following the steps I turn the hair into hair primatives I get the above, its fur but its grey. At least this time it renders in the glass case. to fix the problem I asign the same head material.

This is the result with caustics, final gather and raytracing, it looks good and this time took only a few minutes to render at HD. 

I also wanted to increase the glasses refractive attributes to create this disjointed look. The shader I had was great for thin glass but to get the effect I wanted I would need to go back to a mia material but the black edges were still an issue. I fortunately found a great tutorial that explained the issue perfectly, it was written for 3ds max but the principles were the same. the issue was that the refraction rays in mental ray and the trace depth didnt match the same attributes in the glass material meaning that light entered the glass but didn't bounce back out causing the blackness. With that issue addressed the mia material glass rendered beautifully. Heres a link to that tutorial. http://www.mrmaterials.com/jeffs-blog/67-fix-the-black-edges-on-your-glass-material-and-other-stuff.html

The only problem is if you save the scene while the hairs are as hair primatives when you reopen the scene the fur is missing and rendering crashes maya! So the workaround is switch to hair primatives to render but switch back to buffer in the shave globals before saving and closing.

Problems rendering fur in maya

So, Ive been having real problems with the fur just when I thought I had mastered it, if I change angle or dolly out or put the glass back into the scene the render time hits 9 minutes and the fur is gone or is patchy, I've attached an image to show you. The lighting is really nice now but this is becoming a nightmare to work on, ipr causes crashes so I have to keep rendering low resolution tests and each of those 320x240 images is still taking 5 minutes to render. A lot of time wasted waiting to check stuff. If only I had upgraded my ram before starting this thing.

Just when I thought I had mastered the fur! spent all night last night and all morning looking for a solution, think I may have found it heres the link. I'm following that tutorial now wish my luck.   http://kiryha.blogspot.com/2010/06/rendering-fur-with-mental-ray.html

Using shave and a haircut

I ditched maya fur for shave and a haircut a great intuitive plugin for maya from www.joealter.com/  That being said it isnt without its problems which Im planning to post about with hopeful workarounds.

Modelling the scene and glass cases

I created the temporary scene hopefully the beginning of this week I will film a background plate at an actual gallery and create an hdri image to add to the lighting of the scene. I need to up the final gather in this image to clean up the blotchiness in the shadows and render it with the fur. The background plate and the HDRI should add some realism to the scene.

Glass in maya has black sides and edges !

One of the issues Ive come across is the glass I was using was a mia material preset and I was rendering it and it came up completely black, i messed with the settings and got it to look partly transparent but the edges were black still! Getting very frustrated about it my good friend James http://shortshorts-skyarts.blogspot.com sorted me out with his glass shader. It worked first time without any issues. Check out his musical themed entry in the link above. 

Creating an Eye shader in maya

I've just textured the eye and created a shader for it. For this horse its quite simple, ive just created two spheres and the outer one has the mia_material_x applied to it with the thin glass preset. I then turned the refraction colour down to 25% grey and then added a simple texture map to the sphere inside it.

The reflection was also turned way up because from all the reference photos of horse eyes the pupil is very large and the sclera is very reflective. Of course this image doesnt reflect much but it will when i shoot the background plate. For now I created a spotlight and light linked it to the eye and the Gunky stuff arond it etc so it lights the eye but doesnt effect the actual head.

Fur Mastered?

So after plenty of messing around with settings and functions in maya I finally got the fur looking pretty sweet, heres the test render, it took over four minutes. Im not going to render fur again until I have everything else ready I cant waste 4 minutes a time to test render. I hope that I have the fur under wraps now but we'll have to see when I try and recreate the same effect for the other body parts!

Texturing the horse finished

I finished texturing the horse and I'm happy with the look of it. I created a spec map and a bump map to increase the gooey look of the internal organs.

Textured horse head render in mental ray

So here is the horse head with the texture applied, the material is a blinn and ive scaled back the specularity for the fur but maintained it for the internal slices etc by using a specularity map.I'm quite happy with the result of this just several more body slices to go.

Hand painted horse head texture map

The Maya fur system hasn't been working the way I hoped it would to avoid further problems and wasted  time I started texturing the horse with hand painted maps. I made a start on the head today using reference photos as a guide only. I rendered out an ambient occlusion pass as a guide for painting as the uvs dont always help in the placing of shades and details. Below is a link to a useful tutorial on that.

http://www.game-artist.net/forums/spotlight-articles/1317-tutorial-ambient-occlusion-maya-alchemist101.html

Zebra what Zebra? Or how a zebra becomes a horse

For my opening shot of the sting I planned on having a closeup of the zebras eye, we wouldnt know it was dead or infact gruesomely divided up into slices. I thought it would be quite haunting to have the sound of a zebra calling but faded and distant before the music kicked in. I searched the internet for a royalty free public domain zebra sound, have you ever heard a zebra? Check out this link then ... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n332ObBv3cU&feature=youtube_gdata_player

Hardly haunting hey? So its a horse now ;-).

I started playinng with maya fur to try and recreate those fine hairs on a horses coat. It didnt go to plan this is the closest I could get in maya without it crashing. I just couldnt get the fur to look fine enough. Ill try again tomorrow and see what happens.

Dissecting a model in maya

After spending that time modelling the zebra it was time to slice him up. I felt this would be an easier approach rather than modelling each section seperatly. To achieve the gruesome result I put the camera into orthographic view of the side and used the cut faces tool to make several incisions. I then used fill hole to create end faces and the interactive split tool to ensure it was all quads. I selected the end faces and extruded them in to create slight cavities. The plan is to later sculpt a bit of detail into them either using zbrush or the maya sculpt tool (we wont see much of the innards so too much detail wont be neccesary.) next step is to uv map it and texture it.

Here's a pic of of him all sliced up, im going to use textures for the innards as the camera wont get to close to them for it to show as geometry.

Zebra modelling complete

So the main model is done now, I poly modelled him from reference photos, now I just need to slice him up and texture him. I'll do that today with any luck.

Zebra modelling

here are some pics of the model in progress.

Dead Zebra in Progress

Just started this model for the original idea of the hirst inspired ident.

Meeting Sky Creative Art Director

Hi guys, so the other day we had an art director from Sky Creative come by to present the competition brief to us. Turned out to be very useful to have the meeting afterwards she listened to our ideas and gave us all feedback, I explained my previous idea of the damien hirst style sting and she was interested and suggested that if it was made to look different in someway it would be acceptable and considered a nod to damien hirst rather than a copy, she also explained the need for living holds at the end of the sting so it got me thinking I'm going to go back to my first idea but with some drastic changes.

Idea number 2

I did a bit of research on Damien Hirst and read that he was pretty quick to sue people for imitating his work, so In the interest of avoiding copyright infringement I've come up with another idea, there was a news article a while back about a German cleaner who mopped up an art exhibit worth over a million quid. Whether the installation is worth that at all goes back to my previous question. The piece of art was a bunch of wooden posts attached to each other with some paint dripping off it onto the floor. The cleaner couldn't distinguish the art from trash so cleaned it up. It reminds of how much I wanted to go and make Tracy Emin's bed for her.




I thought I'd create a similar piece and have a cleaner mop up the spillage leaving the word arts in the smear. I've quickly modelled it and its titled, 'tea at grandmas.' theres a pot of tea pouring into a bedpan overflowing onto the table and down to the floor. I even created an artist style justification for the 'sculpture.'