Alexander Kucera

As so many people from the MentalRay community seem to have a big problem with my motion blur test - and only that is seems, they don’t even see the parts, where I said good things about MentalRay - here is a small update with new images and the supposedly faster Rapid Motion Blur of MentalRay. Well, yes, I give you that Rapid Motion Blur is faster. But 19 minutes is still kind of slow in my book, especially with these artifacts Rapid Motion Blur introduced.

Well, guess what? As I already thought it would happen, some people don’t seem to like the conclusions of my test. Zealots are so easy to predict and so hard to please. ####“You cannot do it like this. Testing the renderers with a simple teapot in the scene is totally unfair!” Well, huh? How can a teapot be unfair? It is a simple geometry for crying out loud! If I had used a sphere or a torus (something not obviously produced by Pixar) it wouldn’t have made a difference.

Finally I found the time to do my little Renderman - MentalRay comparison. I used Maya 6.5 on a Mac OS X - which comes with MentalRay 3.4.1.5 and the Pixar Renderman for Maya plugin version 1.2 evaluation. As test scenes, I used the tutorial scenes that come with the Renderman for Maya plugin. I am aware, that this might be a bit unfair to MentalRay, but my reasoning is that the features I tested should work in both renderers and the test scenes where not specifially pro Renderman anyway.

The [Doncaster Road End] 1 blog has posted about the Infernal video we re-did for the world cup (you can read about it in one of my older posts). In [their post] 2 they review several songs that were… er… well… mutilated to make a quick buck of the world cup. “From London to Berlin” actually made a reasonable standing. Thanks guys! I am aware that this was no high quality piece, but believe me, it was at least a challenge from the technical side.

Is CG dull and boring. I asked this question in my last post. Well, since then I have seen a recent production called [“Elephants Dream“] 1, it is the first big project released, completely done with open source software, in particular [Blender] 2, the open source 3D suite. It shows that Blender is able to produce nice stuff, but it also validates my thoughts concerning dull CG. First, I didn’t get the story.

I thought it is time to show a little of the work we have done so far. All videos should play fine in Quicktime player version 7, but might also run in earlier versions, I didn’t test that. The first project or a thing that is still in development, but is already used in production, Monika and I are developing a template for magazine commercials. This short clip shows a render test I did, which was also used to show off to potential customers.

There are a lot of nice rendering choices out there. The range goes from free - like Aqsis, Blender or Yafray - to bundled renderers that come with the 3D package of choice - Maya software renderer or Lightwave come to mind - to seperate high-end renderers - like MentalRay (although that comes bundled with a lot of big players nowadays) or Renderman. Which one to choose? And which one is actually affordable?

Last week we spoke about naming conventions, which got inspired by a topic covered on [Lifehacker] 1 and [43 Folders] 2. A great start to a more streamlined workflow. But what good is a great filename, when you are unable to find your files in the chaotic folder structure you might have? For exactly this reason we will talk about how to get an optimized folder structure for multi-media projects. I will obviously have a bias to look at it from a compositors/3D guys/VFX supervisors view, but I am also able to accommodate you editors and other departments.

[Keith Lango] 1 has an interesting article on his blog concerning [CG pictures/movies and how they have become boring] 2. Keith is of the opinion that the CG look has kind of worn of. We no longer have the “wow” moments when watching a nice full CG movie. And I must say I know what he means. Nowadays every guy in the backrow knows about 3D and VFX and that it isn’t a secret art.

I was on set last week and I felt like back in school again. People preparing lamps and set pieces, just like preparing for a school dance. I have this feeling more often lately when talking to my colleagues. A feeling like a teenager at play. Like me and my buddy writing a script and discussing how we solve this issue and approach that scene. A feeling of adventure, of doing something like the big guys.