Prepping for a new 2012 showreel piece which will feature the man in iron, rigged with HumanIk in maya with optical mocap data applied in Motionbuilder. He still needs to be skinned properly for the final animation etc etc.

Here is my first video tutorial covering compositing 32bit Linear OpenEXR multichannel files in photoshop, without altering the values and blowing out the images when stepping down to 16bit or 8 bit modes.

I hope it helps, as Photoshop is not really geared towards working with 32bit images, if you are rendering out linear images from your 3D package this is useful.

(DISCLAIMER – Download and install at your own risk)

Download the Linear RGB ICC profile used in this video here -http://bit.ly/sxn6gI

How to create your own Linear ICC profile -http://fnordware.blogspot.com/2008/05/making-linear-icc-profile.html

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

Been playing around with Mental ray’s sss_fastSimple in maya 2012 and came across something that everyone should know about when making sss shaders.

The option “SCREEN COMPOSITE” is very important option to try turning off if you are finding your SSS shader is coming out grey instead of full color. This option effectively CLAMPS the color values during the render, and is ON by default. I really dont understand why this is on by default, but as you can see from the image above, the left side represents the OFF function, with full red saturation. While the right side you can clearly see a lot of grey clips…

So remember, if your render is turning out weird, try switching this off. Also another option to keep an eye out on is the SALE CONVERSION. You can read more about it from this great collection of Maya tips

Memory Dump

• Track, Shift C Cleanup
• Calculate lens distortion
• lens workflow, undistort
• save seq
• export to ma
• open in maya
• check scale
• set film gate to “horizontal“
• set nulls and parent
• bake nulls
• dup camera
• move camera out of grp
• parent to camera
• BAKE ALL
• export