YPGTTO: The Overture. More Render and Shot Tests

Shots 20, 21, 29, 30, 31, 32

These render tests don't feature any effects (such as lights turning on).

YPGTTO: The Overture. More Render and Shot Tests

Shots 15, 16, 18, and 19

A few more rendered tests. Shot 16 is still rendering.

YPGTTO: The Overture. More Render and Shot Tests

Shots 11, 12, 13, 14

More render tests for four shots. Shot 12 is a static shot (at least in the pre-viz) and may need to 

be animated.

YPGTTO: The Overture. Render and Shot Tests

Shots: 02,04,05,06,07,and 08

Here are few render tests for the Overture shots. In most cases these have been a successful (beyond play-blasting), to perhaps see in more detail how the shaders and colours work in motion.  I've not added any compositing to these shots, they are straight out of Maya, and they include an extra 48 frames bleed.

Did someone say crowds?

OK, I was enjoying a pleasant walk in the Oboe district when suddenly out of nowhere this huge crowd of people appeared!

( Unfortunately Youtube's compression does't do the picture any justice )

So here are some stills with less compression:

If you study the picture more closely you may see characters intersecting each other (especially in the third example because I made it too dense), however most of the time it's completely unnoticeable due to the flat line art nature of the characters.

And no, I don't have a render farm up my sleeve. This is thousands of 3D characters in a scene rendered in a matter of minutes rather than hours.

So in the first example we have:

• just 1 mental ray rendered background (less than a minute)
• 200 frames of characters rendered in the viewport (another couple of minutes)
• 200 frames of shadow pass rendered in mental ray at half the resolution (20 to 25 minutes)

As you can see, it was only the shadow pass that took longer to render. However, for some shots you may get away without casting any shadows at all. And rendering shadows at half resolution seemed to work well, without loosing much quality.

At some point soon I will write up exactly how to do this.

Ethan Shilling

YPGTTO: Overture Compositing Motion Tests

Clean render (Watch in HD)

Compositing test (Watch in HD)

Compositing with colour correction test (Watch in HD)

R&D outcome:
In the short motion / render tests above  a few things were solved regarding viewport feedback, rendering, and memory usage in Mental Ray:

1) Mental Ray needs extra memory allocation to render / batch render.

2) Models should not be smoothed (smooth preview) in the viewport to improve feedback and loading.

3) Smoothing for rendering should be implemented using an 'approximation node' instead of smooth preview (to help with viewport manipulation)

Rendering: Render solution adjustments

A few small adjustments:

Red (body): Colour adjustments

Red (outline): Colour added / lightened

Noise: Reduced

YPGTTO / Alan's Rendering Test #1

The Trumpet District render test / Alan Postings

Just sharing a really quick texturing test from CAA's senior lecturer and Maya maestro, Alan Postings, who's been looking at Emily Clarkson's YPGTTO production art and investigating the ways and means of translating it into 3D models.

The Trumpet District concept paintings / Emily Clarkson