The new RIS mode introduced in RenderMan 19 is a completely new render-engine that is very different from REYES. Being a brute force path tracer (uni- and bidirectional modes) it works much more like other renderers that follow a similar approach (e.g. Arnold). That approach aims to make the render process more simple and interactive. And while I personally don’t like it completely yet it seems to get widely adopted in the film industry and we all have to adjust to it sooner or later :)
During the last year I luckily had some time to spend on digging a bit deeper into Katana. From working on assets and shots I experienced some moments where I thought it’d be great to have some basic tools to help get the job done just a little bit quicker. So whenever I had a bit of spare time I was developing some Macros/Gizmos/Tools to help artists on some common problems.
In the process of trying to streamline things a bit more in my day-to-day workflow I have recently been working on a hand-full of small helper tools. One of them is a small set of scripts that handle the conversion of a selection of files to Arnold & RenderMan’s native .tx/.tex files from the filebrowser… because people like the GUI, right? :)
New stuff – Marvel once again. The title should say enough :)
Currently enjoying working on this very exciting project, doing mainly lookdev and lighting. I also helped comping a few shots for the trailer.
One of the great things about Katana is the ability to have a simple compositor right within your lighting/lookdev environment. I have been using its 2D features more or less extensively throughout the last couple of projects. It’s quite handy to tweak your HDR that you’re using right before you plug it into an environment light, without the need to go into Nuke again if you’re doing just smaller tweaks. Unfortunately Katana’s 2D interface lacks quite a few things that would make it a valueable alternative to Nuke for preparation tasks, because you have to wire more things together. So I was working on a few ‘gizmos’ to make the process a bit less cumbersome.
Integrating CG into uneven soil is an interesting challenge. On a recent show we had to integrate CG characters into plates which often had a grassy ground. For Comp it’s benefitial if you get masks from Rendering to aid the blending of the CG elements into the grass. If the ground the characters are walking on is flat this can easily be achieved with a standard PWorld AOV. It get’s a bit trickier though if the characters are walking up a hill or a similarly uneven surface, because the coordinates at which the character comes in contact with the ground are constantly changing. I’ve been trying to come up with a system to make a Comper’s life easier and found a relatively simple solution.
Image based lighting often times simplifies getting started with a good lighting setup when trying to integrate CG into life action. Often times it’s beneficial to have the IBL sphere to just contain the ambient lights from the environment and therefore to paint out any actual light sources from the set. Those can then be used on separate lights to give the main illumination from the set lights, while the IBL sphere contributes ambient environment light. Now, if you have a lot of different environments and consequently a lot of different HDR’s it can be tedious to paint out the lights and output them after that…
2 weeks ago Marvel released the first Trailer for Captain America 2: The Winter Soldier. It was yet another project I had the pleasure to work on. I’ve been comping a couple of greenscreen shots for the Trailer and there will be more stuff coming. But for now, enjoy the Trailer:
For everyone who doesn’t like reading all that much, there now is a video online as well that shows the work that we did on Iron Man 3.
There’s not a lot to say, it was just a huge amount of fun and I think it payed of :)
Primitive Variables are a really cool way to get variation in Renderman Shading Networks. As it requires adding Attributes to your Shape Nodes within Maya to control the variation it can be quite time consuming to set it up. So I was trying an attempt to build an interface that helps a bit with the set up.