Doktor Gonzo

There's a 50k size limit. Are the pics less than that? Otherwise send 'em to me at peter.birdsall@nyu.edu and I can post 'em to temp webspace....

Thanks, that'll work!

Brian, Ed, beautiful as always. More! Now, a request: I seem to have misplaced a lot of my files. I need a Macross Kite, big as you've got - anybody help a brother in need out?

Chronocidal: Who cares if it's off-topic - let's see some renders of that model!

Best part: Looks like both "Withnail" *AND* "I" are in the running for the role of the Doctor!

It's a true beaut, Brian. I want one!

I don't know about easier, but Combustion is definitely more powerful. If you have access to a copy, then go with it. AE's stuff would more properly be called 2.5D - it's actaully almost exactly like working with layers and filters in photoshop, and that's how you'd do this - define a "mask" within which you want to see engine wash, keyframe-animate the shape of the mask, and apply within it something juicy from the Filters menu. As for MEL tutorials, I actually got started with the one that comes with Maya, it's not bad. Access it by looking up MEL in the Maya help. Good luck!

Right, back, sorry for the delay, the Other Half had to pull an allnighter writing a paper on the machine. Where were we? Oh right, exhaust... Okay, here's what I'd do for a simple solution: Just make a "bulb" shape, like an onion, a candle flame, or a minaret top. parent this to the feet. Create a shader for it. Use MEL (only a little, I promise!) to introduce a random jitter to the following channels: scale, opacity, glow, and the R and G color channels (so that color fluctuates between blue and white). For slightly more advanced fun, hook up a SamplerInfo node to the transparency channel, specifically map it to the "Facing Ratio" channel of the sampler info node. This will cause the fire-shape to be more transparent at its edges, where it is viewed nearly edge-on, and more opaque in its middle, where we see it front-on. For further adventurousness, also map facing ratio to color R and G channels - now we have a flame that is white in its core, blue towards its fringes.... Dok Gonzo, do you happen to know how to produce a transparent distortion effect? Like jet wash or matrix style bullet trail? i been thinking about it and i can't get too far. i think you can do it with a glass tube, no specular, with facing ratio. For jet wash, attach an animated noise to the displacement node. For bullet trail, a black/white/black/white smooth ramp with value linked to displacement. And maybe augment the offset value of the ramp with a MEL that produces random values between 0.5 and 1.5? also, i think the way you do the jet exhaust sound pretty cool. It all works in theory but i wanna try it out and see it in action, but how do you create basic MEL scripts like randomizing values and such? i'm a total noob when it comes to MEL X_X Macross Fanboy: I have no idea where to find that mod now. I had it like 2 years ago and i just went on google and searched Freespace Macross Mod SR, Your ideas for jet wash and bullet trails sound good and would likely work. But I would tend to do "random/unstructured" distortion in 2D post, using a program like Shake or After Effects and the appropriate filter. Much easier and likely better looking. Air channels left by slow-mo bullets, tho, show regular structure (or at least they did in the Matrix, and dammit that's good enough for me) and are best represented as actual 3D geometry. (Also note that the Matrix effect at least DOES have specular highlights - it almost looks like glass, or that water tentacle from THE ABYSS...) Only thing is, the ripple distortion is a bit more random/noisy than the bump map you describe. I would suggest using a second-order trig function of some sort for a lot of variation and unlimited repetition, or maybe just map the node to something else "noisy" (I found a maya node online once that let you map the waveforms of audio samples, for purposes of simple lip synching - I bet that could be put to use here...) As for writing scripts, it's a fairly complicated business. But to get started, all you do is right-click in whatever channel box in the Attribute Editor, then select Create New Expression. Expressions are then of the basic format foo = rand(); or whatever you've got in mind. rand() gives you values between 0 and 1, so modify with artithmetic to yield the range you need...

Right, back, sorry for the delay, the Other Half had to pull an allnighter writing a paper on the machine. Where were we? Oh right, exhaust... Okay, here's what I'd do for a simple solution: Just make a "bulb" shape, like an onion, a candle flame, or a minaret top. parent this to the feet. Create a shader for it. Use MEL (only a little, I promise!) to introduce a random jitter to the following channels: scale, opacity, glow, and the R and G color channels (so that color fluctuates between blue and white). For slightly more advanced fun, hook up a SamplerInfo node to the transparency channel, specifically map it to the "Facing Ratio" channel of the sampler info node. This will cause the fire-shape to be more transparent at its edges, where it is viewed nearly edge-on, and more opaque in its middle, where we see it front-on. For further adventurousness, also map facing ratio to color R and G channels - now we have a flame that is white in its core, blue towards its fringes....

Whoa - LOTTA different ways to do this. The hardcore way would be to use particles, with forces to shape the exhaust, and a shader tree to produce the color grading - uh oh - got to abandon the computer to a needy grad student More in a bit...

Well, I guess it's a better character name than "Lame-Ass Repaint Unicron"....

Looks right so far, man.... keep it up!

If you use mostly the default shader library and/or download them, shouldn't take long at all. If you want to roll your own, mostly depends on how comfortable you are with scripting, and how well you understand what a shader does, in broad strokes...

ooo, competition for Doc Gonzo. Naah, it's not a competition, it's cooperative (Aztek, you're excluded - I'm gunnin' for you man )

Naah, photorealistic renderman for Maya was always a plugin. RAT is Renderman Artist Tools, the supporting suite of modules for the renderman renderer. The programming I spoke of was specifically for shader creation - renderman shaders tend to be much more procedural in nature than maya shaders, and typically are created in a proprietary scripting language (which was in large part the model for MEL) - you need to become conversant in this language to get the most out of renderman. There are a number of good tutorials out there to get started (check out highend3d.com)

Don't remember the version # - but it was whatever version would've been current in Fall 2000. As for PRman - it was difficult to use, produced amazing results, seemed to require deep knowledge of RAT to really make it worthwhile (unlike Maya, where good shader results can be achieved by total MEL illiterates via the GUI builder tools). It was also kind of schizophrenic at the time I was introduced to it - there WAS a GUI alternative to the shader language, but it was newish and not all that full-featured...

Yes! Chalk one up for the good guys, kids!

I've used it, it's not too bad to get started with. But Pixar shaders are completely separate from Maya shaders, so you will have to completely reshade/retexture any models you wish to use with it.

Unfortunately, the shader he supplies for producing the ambience map is in Renderman RAT format, as is his instruction for coupling the resultant map to a light - so to get this working, you'd have to reproduce this from scratch in Maya. If you manage it, be sure to share with the rest of us Maya users!

From what I gather from the page, it pretty much uses a preliminary depth-map shadow casting pass to drive ambient intensity - an initial render using an omnidirectional light source and a sampler-tweaked shader for all geometry produces a map indicating approximated ambient strength - which is then passed through to the ambient intensity parameter for the final render. Very cool....

Here's a random texturing progress shot

It's not a question of scariness or modeling skill, it's simply a question of using the right tool for the right job. For a single image, you can afford to render it "to the nines" and make it look as best as possible. But in a production environment, as I'm sure you know, one must always balance quality against performance. Using more renderer features than are required for the type of scene you're looking to generate could mean the difference between making a deadline and blowing it - consequently, knowing how to get "the most with the least" is in my opinion a good skill to cultivate....

'cuz it's REALLY costly in terms of render time - easily an order-of-magnitude difference. I use MR for large still-renders and beauty shots, but try to shy away from it for animation. Hell, I try to avoid even using the Maya raytracer for animation, and there's nothing unorthodox in that - WETA Digital, for example, did a lot of hackworthy shader programming tricks so that they could render Gollum using raycasting, to avoid the render overhead of ray tracing. Mental Ray with all the trimmings is especially time-consumptive for animation, as the settings actually have to be turned up higher than they would be for single frames - techniques such as global illum., final gathering and caustic simulation are stochastic in nature - they produce realistcally real-world pseudorandom effects which have the nasty side effect of showing flicker/discontinuities across multiple frames. So to use these for animation, the settings (esp. # of photons) have to be turned up high enough to minimize the flicker. And that can take all day, all night and then some....

Dat: I am at your disposal for any questions, but I couldn't find that post on the earlier board. One possible place to start for ya: Assign a material to a piece of your model. Create a "blank" texture map, likely a grid or other marked-up image. Assign the image to the color channel of the material, then use the predefined mapping of your choice (from the Edit Polygons >> Texture >> ..... menu) to create a UV mapping. Then, you can use Maya's 3D painting tool (accessed by hitting either 7 or F7, I forget) to mark up the image whilst it's right there on the model, to indicate where various intended features fall on the texture. Then save the texture, take it into Photoshop, and massage it to get your final map...

Looks good guys. Brian, URL of that IBL/DRI script please?