Lecture 8 - Digital Craft Render Details

Concepts covered in class today:
Global Illumination and Final Gather in Mental Ray

• avoiding long render times for outdoor renders by enclosing the whole scene in a hemisphere
• making the hemsiphere normals face inward so it is visible
  
• using a map on the hemisphere as a background - improvement over an environment background
• Final Gather as a means of producing quick outdoor renders
• 10,000 minimum photons may produce blotchiness which may be 'solved' by FG but may not
• creating a light that ONLY shines on selected objects to illuminate the background sky...
  

HDR images

• what are they?
• Debevec and Ward websites as resources for their work on HDRI
• use of HDR as output that is flexible from LightStudio
• Use of HDR images as a source of light in a scene
• (as an aside - use of a map in a light definition in Viz as a means of cheaply creating shadows)
• requirement to include an HDR image in the final hand in
• 
  

Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended: AECbytes Product Review

Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended: AECbytes Product Review

Photoshop in 3D! This review makes for interesting reading - but I am unsure how anything offered adds as much as other pieces of dedicated software offer in greater depth. The only advantage seems to be that it's Photoshop! Familiarity with the interface offering 3D image manipulation functionality that is comprehensive because it offers more than Photoshop used to, not because it is comprehensive...

Animation Class lecture - editing

Today we watched the end (New York onwards) of the magnificent 'Vision of light' DVD about Cinematography.

Then we discussed editing by contrasting the editing efforts in the car chase scenes of The Italian Job (1968), Bullitt (1969), The French Connection and Ronin.

Next week we will compare a scene from Luc Bresson's La Femme Nikita with the exact same scene from Assassin (Point of no return) by John Badham.

We concluded by examining how backburner can be of assistance in speeding up rendering.