(preview render) – First Zbrush project using full maya – zbrush pipeline. First attempt at poly painting with Zbrush. Mental ray render in the works. ♥ Zbrush.

A quick study tonight, started off as a simple anatomy stidu, but ended up an alien creature reaching for the stars.

A short compilation of what went into the creation of the CG / Live Action short film Anomaly. This was the companion video for the 2011 VES awards which Anomaly was entered for the student VFX category. . sorry its a bit short I couldnt show all the breakdowns as there was a time limit of 1 minute… WATCH FULL MOVIE HERE – http://vimeo.com/26189826

1. Create a new render layer with the geomtry
2. right click on render layer and select attributes
3. click the presets button and select luminance depth 
4. click on the shader assigned to the layer if not selected and you should see settings like figure 1
5. IMPORTANT – You need to Break Connection on old min and old max ( this is so you can adjust the depth, by default it is going to render a pretty flat image, not usuable if you want to use it for detailed DOF )
6. Select maya software as your renderer and test a render, its going to look flat, go to next step
7. Adjust the old min and old max numbers, each time testing a render to get a nice even step from white to black. These numbers are dependent on your scene size and camera, so trial and error is the key here. ( figure 2 )
8. Once your happy with it, set your anti-aliasing to high and render out the final output.

figure 1

figure 2