Mental Ray Part 6: Mia Material X Shader

During the progress of this tutorial I was struck by just how malleable the presets on these materials can be, and began to experiment with mixing different ratios to see what materials I could come up with. 

Mental Ray Part 5: Portal Lights

This rendering tutorial expanded on the physical sun and sky tools present in the last tutorial and made them applicable for an interior through the use of two area lights placed at either window to maximise the light getting inside the structure. 

Although my computer took a while with the render it was worth the wait.

First Render

Intermediary Render

Final Render

Mental Ray Part 4: Physical Sun & Sky

It was really interesting learning about this tool, especially with how versatile it ends up being. Above are two of the final renders created during the completion of this tutorial.

Mental Ray Part 2: Final Gather

I had a much better time with this tutorial, and found it went mostly smoothly. Though I had to play with the lighting settings in order to be able to see the model clearly as it ended up a bit too dark for my liking. 

Below is the final render and the settings used in the Final Gather section in the render settings. 

Lighting And Rendering 2: Samples & Quality Control

I experienced some difficulty with this tutorial as I was either using the wrong version of Mental Ray or Maya. Ultimately I had to be creative towards the end of the tutorial as I wasn't getting the same results as Alan, despite triple checking everything.

I settled on lowering the Anti-aliasing contrast in order to achieve a greater amount of blurring on the raytraced shadows as it seemed to be the only thing I could do to make them look less grainy. Below is the final render of this tutorial. 

End of Year 2 Crit reflection

Phew.

Well, I think I expected it to go a lot worse in all honestly. I am glad that there seems to be a light at the end of the 'tunnel' I'm in.

I am most pleased that I was able to demonstrate skill in draughtsmanship as well as my technical skills in maya. I think conceptually is where my work was weakest and I can only attribute that to being torn between a few directions within the course of this project. In some ways, I wish I had stayed true to my original idea of formulating a toy campaign around a character because I was at least certain to some extent with that idea. Nonetheless, I am proud of the character I have created, and I'm really looking forward to finishing the model, including texturing and sorting out the issues I experienced with the foot controls later on in the process. There were moments during the modeling, rigging and skinning process that bore a lot of tedium and late nights, but seeing Olga come to life in front of my eyes was worth all the toil.

Adaptation B has been challenging for me, definitely in terms of putting my drawing skills into the light, and although I attested that I'm not scared of drawing, I think that simply because I am much more comfortable with other things, writing for instance, I tell myself that I will prioritize those things first. I recognize that this is a mistake. I find it almost paradoxical to be able to say "I am pleased with the amount of effort I put in to my model" because the timing was all wrong, and ideally, I should have been near completion a few weeks back. So I feel ambivalent towards today, and ambivalent towards this year in general. Though I have seen my skills increase, as well as my grades, so...in general...ambivalent.

I definitely take the comments from Phil and Alan seriously, frustratingly these are issues I see happening as they occur and yet I continue to let things like this happen, i.e. only getting my backside in gear towards the tail end of a project.

I also realise that it's a self fulfilling prophecy in not posting my work because I fear being ignored, in fact, writing that down here makes it seem all that much trite. My baggage is tripping me up on the way to the airport.

So, moving forward I'll be further pushing into the areas I feel that my skills are particularly lacking in, and trying to work on my enthusiasm, which, I must admit, after the interim crit and to an extent, the first term, has been on the wane. I am conscious of it, I am working on it. And I will continue to work on it.

Crit Post 11/05/17