Linear workflow (LWF) is a concept that I try to explain to others when dealing with realistic lighting and rendering. LWF has to do with how we are perceiving the light intensity of our images calculated by our rendering application and it being applied to our screens. (more…)

I’m a big fan of the class of ‘unbiased’ render engines, the look of them is just something cool. The caveat as we know is the render times can be huge but the concept is the setup time is where you’ve saved and won. Meindbender has done a bunch of work for Cartoon Network and while their pieces are witty on their own the use of Maxwell to simulate plasticine models is extraordinary. Very cool stuff and story.

Rendering is pretty straight forward, you pick a resolution and make your textures and render. Voila it looks great on the screen. Heck you may even take your masterpiece and print it on your inkjet on some photo paper and it still looks great. For the most part, rendering is done for the screen and in a lot of cases printing looks after itself by the inherent nature that rendering to 2K (2000 pixel, or 2K x 2K) is pretty typical, but what do you do when you actually have a client that needs your artwork printed big… I mean big like 10 feet big (or bigger)?

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I was going to write a big article and have some fancy images to describe the difference between a straight RGBA (rgb+alpha) (unmultiplied) and a premultiplied RGBA image. As it turns out I found a good video over on tv.adobe.com that explains it quite well from the point of view of using a compositor package like After Effects. What this video won’t tell is how to configure your rendering application, but suffice to say there is usually an option that will indicate if the alpha is premultiplied or not.

Generally for many of you, if you’re rendering on black, blue or green and you’ve been using a premultiplied RGBA image, you haven’t really noticed much an issue especially if you’ve been using AE. However, if you are doing full backdrop integration, then an unmulitplied RGBA image is the way to go.

I may still provide an example of using a package like Cinema 4D and rendering out alpha at later date but I hope this video clears it up. If not, leave a comment and I’ll help you out.

In a quest for realism, we often put too much emphasis in the rendering engine. While a good render engine is good to have, let’s face facts that it is still expensive to go the distance in the render engine alone. So, let’s say hello to the post process and my first in a series of battling sterility in our rendered images.

First up, film grain. If what we are trying to do is be photo realistic then we should consider the medium of film. (more…)

In an article appearing in Studio Monthly by Philip Dobree of Jellyfish Pictures you’ll find 10 good hints at making animations more cinematic. Albeit generalized in nature, the steps are worth sharing and keeping at the forefront of the thinking process.

To paraphrase, high quality content be it models or textures and don’t reinvent the wheel when it comes to these. If you can afford it, buy the assets.

Use real world references and if you can build them into your renders.

Passes. Lots of them. In fact, rendering to passes can really help you in the end because you gain such an ability to tweak in post that it can save you a pile of work from doing it in your render application. Philip talks about the ‘wet’ look and that how one can duplicate specular or reflection passes can go along way to making things appear, well, wet.

Gamma and tone mapping introduce the issue of colour calibrating, tone control and lighting exposure. This post is a quick overview of what Gamma and Tone mapping can offer.

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A first in a series, the CAD files to Rendering is a documentation of issues and thoughts of how I recommend moving from a CAD application (I’ll be using Pro/ENGINEER) to a rendering application (I’ll be referencing Softimage XSI, Cinema 4D, PolyTrans).

To move our CAD files to a rendering application you will want to flavour the solutions based on the end use intent. Some examples:

1. Visualization (i.e. real-time) or gaming centric type applications you will be aiming for high polygon efficiency (low poly count) and good visual accuracy.
2. Photoreal rendering (stills) will require polygon precision (high poly count) and high visual accuracy. You will want to preserve features like fillets and chamfers, but this can drive poly counts insanely high.
3. Animation will typically require medium to high polygon precision (medium to high poly count) and high visual accuracy. If we are doing simulations it is important that we are trying to establish the proper ‘mass’ or body topology of the object(s) so that we can properly apply gravity, fluid and other physical effects.

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Bernard (aka Atyss) posted a long ago written document on the ways of BSP and how it relates to optimizing your renders.