The Backstage Experience |
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1 |
The Storytellers |
Brief information about the company / the 3D artist, who realized the project. |
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2 |
The inspiration |
Project information, people involved, workflow, reasons to choose V-Ray. |
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3 |
The backtage experience |
Technical knowledge base and experience, challenges, problems and advantages. |
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4 |
Customer benefits |
Lessons learned, favorable moments, possible features to be added to V-Ray. |
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Any other V-Ray features useful for
the working process of the movie?
One very useful feature that I don’t give
enough credit to is the spherical camera
for rendering a 360 degree latlong. It was
nice to hand something over quick for other
artists to use for mixing renderers and
assets from Houdini/Renderman to
Maya/V-Ray. Render elements from V-Ray
are also another fantastic feature that made
a difference and will make a difference for
anyone, anywhere, at any time. After using
render passes in Mental Ray for Maya with
contribution maps, I do have to wonder what
they were smoking when they came up with
that process. V-Ray has a very logical
approach. |
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Did you use the distr ibuted
rendering or the network rendering
abilities that V-Ray has? What was
the average render time per frame
of the animated shots in the movie?
I was hoping to actually keep this a secret.
But since you brought it up, I guess we can
talk about it. But first I just wanted to say
that Distributed RT is going to piss off a lot
of people. The speed improvements are
soo great that it really does raise the bar
for artist time and expectations. Instead of
spending a few days to look dev, it can take
a few hours with RT and it only gets better
from here on. There will be people who
hate V-Ray for this one reason. Sitting in a
Flame bay with a V-Ray station loaded with
juice will now become a reality for hourly
Flame work for commercial clients. This
would not have been possible with before.
What renders out of RT matches non
interactive renders on the farm 100 percent.
How did you achieve so flawless
combination between real footage
and CG elements and environments ?
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Well I work with a great group of talented
artists, and supervisors. Dan Glass has
an impeccable eye, along with Matt
Dessero pushing all the right compositing
buttons. Dan Seddon was a fantastic CG
supervisor who actually being a
Renderman guru helped shape a lot of
the feature requests that are now placed
in V-Ray. Masa Narita did the Norble 6
Zbrush modeling and is by far one of the
best modelers I have ever had the chance
of working with. The other V-Ray artists
stepping up to the plate on Halo were Alex
Lee and Kerry Graham who have much
love for V-Ray.
Did you take adv antage of the V-Ray
st ereoscopic abilities?
While Halo was not required in stereo we
made a stereo version including rendering
stereo V-Ray and it looks awesome!
I couldn’t stop bringing every artist into
the 3D stereo area of Method to witness
this. Everyone at Method is very passionate
about stereo rendering, and good
conversion. Like a good steak cooked right |