Very late, been hard at work

Woah, this update is somewhat late. But in my defense, I've been insanely busy at RJDM. In order to get our project done for the client for Monday (well, technically last Friday...) we have all been on a mad one to get scenes to match up, and for renders to be consistent. Apparently ambient occlusion nodes are somewhat unpredictable when you attach them to objects that have been scaled up, even if you keep the attributes to the same level. Some clever camera trickery had to be performed there, along with many other places to bodge out the bugs.

I've also had a good old play in my old friend Combustion yesterday, where I learnt the benefit of Mattes and contribution passes in Maya. It seems that a render layer will render out, say just the floor and shadows that are cast on it, but contribution passes literally cut out patches of the floor where anything would normally be rendered over it. Although this would generally be handy as you can recolourise sections of a render without adding time to render areas you'd never see, you are then prone to getting some ugly black outlines round each pass where the Matte does a poor job of masking everything. Luckily you can shrink this in Combustion to minimise it, but personally I find render layers are much better to control the compositing of your shot. Still, either are very easy to set up in Maya 2009 and 2010 compared with older versions, with the help of material overrides and surface shaders.

I've been invited back to RJDM for another week or 2, so expect late updates again, as I don't tend to get home til 8pm and I'm usually too frazzled to type, but I'll keep everyone posted.

Also, keep an eye out for our video online soon. I'll post a link when it's released!