2005 Meeting Summaries

January 2005

On February 1, at Klasky Csupo, we covered two plugins that have mental ray shaders built into them: Wavegen Texture Loader and Joe Alter's Shave and a Haircut. The former deals with big textures, the latter, big hair.

In the first part, Jorg Mohnen of WaveGen presented WavGen Texture Loader Pro^TM, recently renamed from WavGen Terrashader Pro^TM. He demonstrated some extremely large textures and displacement maps, we mean downright humongous, coming in at great speeds. The attendees definitely saw the potential of this compression technology. Some were currently testing it in projects. Since this technology came somewhat out of a different industry, We could use more examples of production use, concentrating on super high quality film size renderings, rather than the real time super huge geophysical images for which this technology has been typically used.

After the break, Bart Gawboy gave a presentation on how to use mental ray rendering with Joe Alter's Shave and a Haircut plugin for Maya. It should also be noted that this technology is licensed by Softimage for XSI. Also, since Joe moved to Paris, and its harder to get a hold of him, so the Maya plugin can now be purchased from RFX.

On March 1, we anticipated on getting hardware from Angstrom Microcomputers to show off satellite rendering. With Maya 6.5, this feature is incorporated using mental ray 3.4.

In the first part, we discussed the variety of ways to render from Maya, using workflow based on differing pipelines. We talked about the differences of rendering based on ma/mb files (Maya scenes), and rendering based on mi files (mental ray scenes). We explained the difference between network and distributed rendering, including a review of the various terms used. We noted that satellite rendering is aimed at those working in Lighting and Look Development.

In the breakout Q&A, we learned that people are confused about how the licenses spread across CPUs. In summary, Maya 6.5 enables 4 CPUs on the machine running Maya, called the master. Satellite CPUs are additional processors that run on physically separate machines, running the satellite server. Maya Complete allows 2 additional CPUs, and Maya Unlimited allows 8 additional CPUs. These all use the license from the master Maya app from which you are running. Please note that this does not necesarily limit the number of distributed rendering CPUs if you have more monetary resources, because one can always add more standalones to the satellites to increase the speed of interactive rendering.

In fact, in the second part, we demonstrated a mix of satellites and distributed standalones all rendering interactively with Maya. We used the scene from the fast sss tutorial called globulous-after.mb to show how lightmap based rendering can be shared in 3.4. Because our original shipment of satellite CPUs got stuck in the Miami airport, we coddled together a windows dual CPU satellite, a linux laptop and dual CPU distributed standalones. These supported the Maya6.5 running on Angstrom's dual CPU Opteron. We set the verbosity on the renders to Progress level, so that you can see which CPU worked on each tile as it rendered. The one thing we did notice is that lightmaps do not distribute well if you deselect rendering on the master machine.

On March 29, at Digital Dimension, we focused on Final Gathering and Ambient Occlusion in mental ray 3.4. For those attending this meeting, at the beginning we introduced our special guest, Rolf Herken, who is President, CEO and CTO of mental images.

In the first part of the meeting, Bart Gawboy gave a presentation on Final Gathering, with an emphasis on what is different about Final Gathering in mental ray 3.4. After a review of how FG fits in with rendering and illumination, we covered the new features, like diffuse FG rays, FG scale, and new recommendations for settings. We also talked about Ambient Occlusion, how it relates to Final Gathering, and the various uses of the new mib_amb_occlusion shader. This first presentation on FG and AO is now available

Then, in a second presentation after our pizza break, Andy Kopra showed us how to make an Ambient Occlusion shader in mental ray. Using an example he constructed for clarity, he made his usual entertaining, and informative presentation.

On April 26, at Klasky Csupo Studios, we continued our focus on Final Gathering and Ambient Occlusion in mental ray 3.4. At the beginning we spent some time discussing NAB, noting the new product from Autodesk/Discreet called Toxik. This film-oriented product works with HDR image formats and boasts a unique integration with 3ds max. For example, you can load a normal map from 3ds max into Toxik for use in lighting. Also, of note, the April release of 3ds max 7.5 is scheduled for April 28. This contains mental ray 3.4, and it will be interesting to see how they integrate the FG/AO features we're talking about here.

In this presentation, Bart Gawboy continued with information gained since the last presentation on Final Gathering, with an emphasis on practical tips for reducing flicker caused by FG. We tried to keep this presentation a bit more interactive, answering questions people had about where to find the various FG controls in Maya6.5. This presentation is available immediately as a PDF download:

Toward the end, we broke into several discussion groups, and showed how to use the mib_amb_occlusion shader within Maya. In this vein, we brought up the aspect of rendering in multiple passes, where an indirect or an occlusion pass may be mixed into a final composite. In that case, the mib_amb_occlusion shader could be attached directly to the SG/material, instead of the usual location as an ambient input to a normal illumination shader.

On Tuesday, May 24, at Digital Domain in Venice, we made a presentation on Phenemona. We've always talked about getting people more used to these shader building blocks, because we feel they are underutilized. As they are defined in mi scene description language, we feel they could be a solution for shops wanting to customize shaders, without having to write them. Andy Kopra presented how they fit into the scheme of things, giving all the mi scene file context to understand how they can be created across platforms. We decided to do a more application specific follow up in the next LAmrUG meeting. However, we did want to point out that Brendan McCaffrey's site had some nice Phenomena to download for reference.

On Monday, June 27, at the Griffith Observatory Satellite office, we showed examples of how to use Phenomena from within Maya. We showed Phenomena built on top of mental images base shaders as well as mayabase shaders. And we showed a shading network using both.

[October note]: Because we seem to be repeating this a lot in class, we hope to put up examples of simple Phenomena which you can load into Maya on the LAmrUG resources/forum soon.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to mental images for giving their full support to the formation of a locally-based group dedicated to mental ray users.
Thank you to Ray Feeney, Cliff Edson, Kath and Eric at RFX for our frequent use of their space.
Thank you to both Softimage, and Joe Alter for providing their resources for the January meeting.