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.

Props to my friend Policarpo (an amazing artist) for posting me on this one. Blur has released some beta tools (no warranties implied) to make life easier for Max and XSI users.

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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.

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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