Importons/Irradiance Particles

For another personal tutorial, I did this tutorial about Importons and Irradiance Particles. Basically, Importons and Irradiance Particles are another form of indirect lighting, like global illumination and final gather, and they work together to create indirect lighting effects that can be high quality and take less time to render. The importons and irradiance particles only look at what the camera sees to render things out, so it doesn't spend a lot of time rendering things that won't be seen. Anyway, here's some pictures.

Here's an image rendered with final gather. You can see it looks pretty good, but it took about 21 minutes to render the image... which is a pretty long time.

And here's the same image rendered with importons and irradiance particles. It looks pretty similar to the final gather picture, but it only took about 8 minutes to render. As you can see, importons and irradiance particles allow you to get very good results with a lot less time. Also, you could probably turn up the render settings to get an even higher quality image. Anyway, I guess it's just good to know multiple techniques for adding indirect lighting to your scene.

Luminance Depth Render Pass

For a personal tutorial, I decided to do this tutorial about creating a luminance depth render pass to use in an alpha channel to get a realistic depth of field effect in Photoshop (a similar technique could probably be used for After Effects, too). Also, I used this forum post to figure out how to make an alpha channel in Photoshop, because I wasn't sure how to make one. Anyway, the tutorial was not too difficult to follow once I figured out what I was doing. Below, I included images with the two techniques, the Maya Software method and the mental ray method.

Maya Software method luminance alpha channel pass thing

Maya Software method luminance alpha channel thing applied to the image.

Mental ray method luminance alpha channel thing.

Mental ray method luminance alpha channel thing applied to image.

In the end I ended up using the mental ray method, because I felt like the software method did not blur the background enough (ie. the sink and the paper towels). However, I'm sure there is a way to get the Maya Software method to have a darker background on the alpha channel. Anyway, this tutorial was definitely helpful because it enables a realistic depth of field effect sans super long renders and lower quality with the Maya built-in depth of field on the camera.

Displacement Mapping

For my next personal tutorial, I decided that I wanted to learn more about displacement mapping and how it differs from bump mapping. I read about displacement mapping here (pg. 235 in the Google book if the link doesn't take you directly there). The pages in this book taught be about bump mapping and how it differs from displacement mapping. Displacement mapping is more realistic, however it is more processor intensive (as is the case with everything in Maya). Thus, displacement mapping is something I would use sparingly. I used this tutorial to learn about how to create a displacement map.

The above image is of a bump map with a noise texture. As you can see, it creates a pretty good effect, but the edges of the polygon mesh are still completely smooth, which is not totally realistic.

In the picture above, the sphere on the left still has the bump map. The sphere on the right as a displacement map with a noise texture. You can see that the edges here are actually rough, like they should be. However, it is pretty obvious that the displacement is way too strong.

So, all I did was lower the alpha gain value for the noise texture file to reduce the intensity of the displacement. However, the displacement still looks a little bit blocky and low resolution.

To fix this problem, I just increased the number of subdivisions on the sphere. However, by increasing the number of faces it makes this displacement method even more resource intensive.

Another cool thing that I learned is that you can go to Modify>Convert>Displacement to Polygons to make the displacement into an actual polygon mesh. Below is a picture of the wireframe of this new mesh; it is obvious that this method can create a very high poly mesh and will slow down Maya.

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All in all, this tutorial taught me a new way to make objects look bumpy in a way that is a bit more realistic than bump mapping. I would definitely like to practice more with this technique and use it more if my computer will be able to handle it.

Klein's Choice Tutorial

Here is my Klein's choice tutorial. Not much to explain, just a bunch of extruding and tweaking vertices. I didn't have too many problems other than some weird stuff with the normals and just trying to make it look good. Also, the guy on the video goes really fast.

Images:

Wireframes:

Mental Ray Light Fog Tutorial

Here is a tutorial I did on making light fog in mental ray. This is something I've wanted to do for a while, since light fog seemed to always be one of the few things mental ray couldn't do. However, I found out that mental ray can do light fog... it's just a little bit complicated. Overall, I didn't have too much trouble with the tutorial, I just had to tweak settings like the extinction, nonuniformness, and min and max step. It's not quite as simple as the maya software option of just clicking the create light fog button, but it does work and can be customized more than maya software light fog.