Animation Update

I took a lot of feedback and felt it really helped push the animation closer to where I wanted it. Spent a few minutes on lighting and gave it a render. Total time, 2 days.

Sync Animation

Here is some sync animation after a few passes. Still have some more tweaks and polishing i want to do with it thou.

Blitz Cinematics

While in crunch mode we originally were not going to handle these, but at the last second we took them over. This is a taste of what we did for a few of the cut scenes. This image I took from start to finish. In game models, animation, and camera where supplied. I brought it all together and rendered 3 passes, a Beauty shot, Z Depth pass, and Occlusion pass.

Euro Box Art

After we finished up the cut scenes on Blitz, I started to work on the European box art for the game. Here is the finished product with the fancy logos and PS3 branding, and here is an early test render i did. This is all done with the in game character and in game textures has well. No fancy high res models, and Final Gather lighting. Had only a few hours to finish it so I used a simple 4 light setup with Maya's default renderer. In the end i had a 2k image that could render out in less then 30 seconds. Good ol' lighting fundamentals and concepts can bring an image a long way =)

Floze Light & Shade

Floze has produced some incredible tutorials covering the Mia material and lighting with the new daylight system for mental ray.

Light and Shade Part I

I did not have time to make textures, but i was mainly interested in the lighting aspect. A lot can be taken away from these tutorials so take a look if your interested in mental ray. Here are some of my results

MIA_SSS_Material

I've been thinking about a shader for a long time now and finally sat down to flesh it out. The idea goes like this. The SSS (subsurface scattering) shader in mental ray is very powerful and provides fantastic scattering effects. Mental ray also has a very powerful all encompassing material has well called the Mia_Material. This is great for real world application because it can mimic practically any surface and has a lot of control. The thing is that is isn't good at SSS. So i wanted to combined the two so i could have even more control with the SSS shader for things like Fresnel reflections and a overall more accurate surface.

Here is a default SSS material with the back scatter turned up to make it a little more noticeable.

And here is the default mia_material.

And the two combined together has a shader with a simple bump.

I'll be testing it out to see if it has any practical application (things like Skin, Eyes, Teeth since it can be easily tweaked) It can be combined with a bunch of stuff to give it even more detail, Mia_roundcorners, Built in AO, and Displacement to name a few.

Animation

Here is some rough animation on a clip i'm working on from Oceans Eleven.

Composite

Rough Textures

Here is a rough texture pass

Alien Sculpt

Started Sculpting my Alien