Archive for September, 2009
The first draft of Chapter 6 is done.
The first draft of Chapter 6, “Global Illumination and Caustics” is done. As usual I’ll probably find a few things I missed in the draft, but that is why it is called a ‘draft’, right? And that is why I have great Technical and Development Editors.
GI Photon Path
Books, it seems, have a number of things that affect their content. The author, certainly, and their ideas for what should and should not be there, but also the real limitations of what can fit into the space you have allocated. The list of things I’d like to cover certainly far exceeds both my time to write and the pages I have allocated to the book. Six chapters down, at least for first run-troughs, and four to go. The way things are tracking I’ll have considerably more pages that I will be able to use, and some things may get put onto the DVD as bonus material for each chapter, or even the last couple chapters that were more about using other applications with Max and mental ray, may get turned into bonus content, which will work well. That may let me add more back into the earlier chapters without having to be concerned about hitting the top-end early.
Sponza Visual Diagnostics Image
The Wiley’s Acquisitions Editor once said to me that authors tend to over-write, and they have certainly pushed for me to keep it to-the-point and “tight”. I think about that a lot as I am working, and will often revisit paragraphs and reword them, sometimes reducing things considerably. Often times the feedback from the editors has been to add additional explanations and examples, and that has certainly helped improve the content. Overworking paragraphs and having too much time to write can have a negative effect, too, as I used to jump into a paragraph and rework it to later find that I had done the same thing and added similar thoughts elsewhere. Being conscience of those issues, and printing out the entire chapter and putting it up on your wall or spread out on the floor to get the ‘big picture’ certainly helps with the process. And having good editors. :)
Caustics Demo
Fast, Cheap, and Good
This is a book about rendering, and rendering takes two basic commodities: Time, and computing Horsepower. Although every effort was made to keep settings to a minimum, if your goal is to learn and use mental ray then it will take you time to learn, time to render, and sufficient memory and computing power to make the journey enjoyable.
The first chapter is about the Essentials, and in there I look at some typical settings for mental ray, both for production and draft settings. If your computer can handle larger settings, and you have the time to let the machine run, then by all means tweak things up a bit. If you have limited resources, every effort was made to give you the knowledge you need to turn down settings where appropriate.
There are few things as frustrating as waiting for a render to finish as a deadline looms, so much of the focus of the book is examining the factors that go into how quick a render takes, and what affects the quality of your images. The old joke is that a client can have things Fast, Cheap, and Good, but can only pick two of the three. The same goes with rendering. If you need it fast, then quality will suffer or you need to spend some cash on additional hardware. If you want it cheap, then it will take some time but you may have quality you need. Untill all the computers in the world are one big parallel processor, fast and good will come at a price. The good news is that faster always gets cheaper day by day.
Chapter 5′s 1st draft done, and revising 2, 3, and 4…
I just completed the first draft of Chapter 5, “Indirect Illumination and Final Gather”. and just completed the latest revisions (tweaks) for Chapter 2, “Materials and Maps”. Mark Gerhard has been terrific on feedback to help improve the workability of the scenes, and my Development Editor, Jen, is certainly keeping me on my toes.
Cornell Box with confetti-like settings for GI
One of the big challenges is to provide a variety of scenes for the reader to play with, but not make them so complex that they will never be able to render them except on production-ready machines. There are the settings I use for final scene, and then there is what may be practical in a school environment. My college just upgraded the CAD labs to brand new AMD quad and triple-core computers, with lots of RAM and NVISIA Quadro video cards. Prior to that we had little 1.gHz single-core machines with 1gb of RAM. Painful. You literally could not do a decent rendering let alone load and edit a large file, and it was frustrating to both me and the students. I want to give them something interesting to render and to produce a great image, but the machines could not handle the more involved scenes. Now it is a whole new world, and we can do a lot more.
So that issue is certainly something I’ve been struggling with as I work with the sample scenes. Providing pre-computed FG and GI data is really the key. Those that can compute the indirect illumination and use the higher Image Precision settings certainly can, but for those that cannot, the pre-computed FG/GI files and lots of direction for adjusting the mr settings should help. And I’m making sure that scenes have completed renderings in the .\renderoutput folder, too.
Chapter 2 focus primarily on a few features of the A&D and ProMaterials that can affect the quality and speed of your renderings. As a Mastering book, I’m not covering all the individual settings of the materials, as you can get that from the Max Bible, Mark Gerhard’s new Mastering Max 2010 book (available now), or from Max’s Help facility. One of the challenges for this book is to provide useful examples, and get it all to fit into the 400 pages that they have alloted for the book. It sounds like a lot, when comparable books are are between 250 and 330 pages.
Chapter 5, Indirect Illumination and Final Gather, provides a general overview of II techniques available in mental ray, and then moves on to using FG in a variety of scenes, both indoor and outdoor. There are some short examples, such as for an Outdoor scene, and for that I look at the use of the Falloff feature. For Indoor examples I picked a couple tough-to-render examples. No sense looking at easy examples, right?
Karina Bay FG Example Scene
One featured example is the Sponza Palace Atrium, a model by Marko Dabrovic. Marko has kindly given permission to use this model in the book, along with his photographs of the actual palace. He has also given some feedback on some of the in-process renderings. I wanted to use this scene because it is highly recognizable in the 3D community, and has become a standard of sorts for testing II techniques. It is a difficult scene because it relies heavily on II to illuminate the courtyard, and under the walkways on either side. In some ways it is an outdoor scene, and in many more ways it is an indoor scene.
Sponza Scene with FG
I also take a look at a medium-sized bathroom scene from our Karina Bay project, and examine some of the process of setting up this scene. The strong daylight through the windows makes it a bit more difficult to smooth out the FG, and we step through the process of adjusting settings and seeing the result.
Final Bath Scene
Have a great day! Jenni
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