‘Round and ’round we go
Feb 6th, 2010 by Jared
Daisy’s shoes and socks are finally skinned, which means that now the only things left are little odds and ends. A lot of them. One of those things is the buttons on her shirt, attached with rivets -
I also modeled a tongue, though I’m curious how far I might be able to get without having to skin it.
My biggest annoyance right now is shading. Since she’s gone through so many revisions, some of her shaders had to be pulled from older files. Everything seemed to be going well, until I did a test render with the output passes enabled.
The beauty pass turned looked fine, until I saw the alpha channel -
Even with custom alpha channels enabled in the render settings, Mental Ray refuses to render a transparent alpha for her lenses. Searching for a solution online didn’t turn up anything, either.
Things got a little weirder and a lot more frustrating when I loaded the passes into Photoshop -
First of all, I have no idea why her hair is yellow in the ambient occlusion image. Her glasses are a bigger problem, though.
The only layers I wanted her lenses to render out were specular, reflection, and refraction. But I didn’t expect them to render black in all the other layers… I was expecting everything behind them to be visible. Since I prefer to adjust the layer blending in post, having her eyes only visible in the refractions kinda throws things off. Even if I get rid of the lenses, this could still be an issue, because I use the same shader for the out layer of her eyes.
Once again, her pupils are causing me problems. Because of the modeled pupils, I added extra, slightly larger spheres to handly the reflections. But because of the issues I ran into with the glass shader, now I’m back to experimenting with projected pupils.
the beauty pass looks fantastic. is it megaTK you use? what happened to your hardware renderer experiments? i remember you trying to achieve an SSS look with multiple passes which i thought was interesting.
Yeah, it’s megaTK. Aside from the weird issues with transparent objects, the shader’s just awesome!
The hardware renderer had its share of weird problems, just like anything else. I think around the same time that I was experimenting with it, I was also looking into rendering in sections, for print-quality images. I don’t think the hardware renderer supported that, though.
Another unexpected issue was that once I’d rendered out several different shader passes, the total render time didn’t seem to be much faster than mental ray.