Digital Rendering & Compositing Workflow Montage | Maya, Photoshop, Mari, Nuke

READ: This project was mostly a short rendering stress test for my new computer build. The set was modeled in Maya, textures were done in Photoshop & Mari, and the final images were rendered with Mental Ray and composited with Nuke. I spent a little over a week and a half on it including rendering.

THE SYSTEM:
CoolerMaster HAF 922 w/ Asus M4A88TD-V motherboard.
AMD 1090T @ Stock 3.2Ghz on 6 physical cores.
16GB of DDR3 G.Skill RAM
Nvidia GeForce GTX 460 w/ 2GB of video memory.
WD 640GB main drive. 1500, 2000 (3.5 Terabytes) of storage/backup drives.
Windows 7 Professional 64-bit. I may run a dual boot with Linux (Fedora) later.

Benchmark Scores after OS install and drivers:
Maxon's CINEBENCH v11.5
CPU: 5.64
OpenGL: 38.94 FPS

Unigine's Heaven - DirectX11 video card test:
1280x720 windowed.
Everything on highest settings, anti-aliasing disabled.
Tessellation on the "extreme" preset. (About half of maxed)
Average FPS: 33.1
Scores: 829


MODELING:
As you can see in the video the overall modeling is basic at best- I didn't even open up zBrush or Mudbox for sculpting detail or really do any kind of UV layouts. This is because I wanted to get to the rendering stage as quickly as possible. I payed little if no attention to scaling, units or generating any kind of reasonable detail here because I'm saving such intensive workloads for the much bigger, full-scale kind of projects. There's four kinds of trees in the final shot and each one was created by Maya's built-in Paint Effects L-system. OnyxTree, SpeedTree Cinema, or xFrog are other, third party solutions that are very capable as well. Each was simply duplicated as an instance.

TEXTURING:
Most of the textures consist of color maps piped through a gamma correct with a procedurally generated 3d bump map. Some of the textures- like the leaf images I used were copied and changed dramatically for different slots in the shader setup. The ground was painted in Mari as four, 4k patches with 2 channels- color and bump.

RENDERING:
The scene was set up with Mental Ray's passes, render layers, and duplicated scenes. I explored contribution maps but decided to render out everything in one layer for simplicity because what I really wanted was to get a sense of scale on how much the 1090T could handle. The final frames included geometry that ranged from almost 200-160 million polygons and required it to go at full load for about 90 hours- and it did so without a hitch or pause. For the lighting I used Mental Ray's physical sun & sky feature and pre-calculated the final gathering map every 2nd frame then froze it when I rendered. I didn't even use portal lights or a photometric setup for this one, but those kinds of projects are definitely on the way. I also really wanted to keep the RAM under 4GB so that this could easily render on a standard quad-core desktop. Maya batch showed a little over 3GB of RAM usage when rendering the heaviest areas, so there you have it. Some of the settings are at the end of the video.

COMPOSITING:
I'm most impressed at the comp I set up for this project. By no means is it a one-fits-all setup but it worked well. I added in the rendered passes and then tone mapped the white and dark values by grading. Then I inverted the occlusion pass and used it as a mask for color correction- instead of just multiplying it. This way you can boost the saturation and give it a bit of a color bleed look. After that I keyed in the alphas by hue from the material ID pass. Then I applied subtle color tweaks to each element to test. After this I put the main layer over the background - in this case just a simple 3d scene in Nuke with two pieces of geometry- one for the sky, the other for the clouds. Then I applied some depth of field and motion blur, a little bit of chromatic aberration and other lens distortion effects. The final tweaks included some exposure adjustments, a little bit of glow, and some film grain. In the end the master pass really didn't need all this, but this was just for practice as this was also a small study exercise.

QUESTIONS & THOUGHTS
This is not a tutorial but if you learn something that may help YOUR workflow then that's great. Feel free to ask questions about the setup here if you'd like. Thanks for watching!

Edited in Sony Vegas 10

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• Maya
• Photoshop
• Mari
• Nuke
• Autodesk
• The
• Foundry
• Adobe
• Animation
• CG
• CGI
• Digital
• Production
• Architecture
• Design
• Visualization
• 3d
• modeling
• texturing
• lighting
• rendering
• compositing
• pipeline
• workflow

[FallenRaee]

D'you think using Physical Sun & Sky and adding clouds and different tones in post is better than using a HDRI map?

[Cyraside]

@FallenRaee It's not bad to start out with, but an HDR map is much better than the clean and CG-looking physical sky. There's some basic modifications you can make to the physical sky, things like saturation and haze to make it look more overcast or whatever, but it's still not as good as an HDR dome.

[mrgiloz]

omg that was beautiful =) art magnificent am doing my first step to my future i want to learn composting :) am learing maya and taking course i live in egypt doing my best :D can u help me in anything just tips for the program that i have to know about...first step to me was maya then after effect then Photoshop...can u help me just tell me good points thanks anyway.... :D beautiful video (SORRY FOR MY ENGLISH)

[Cyraside]

@mrgiloz Thanks, and yeah- just message me here on Youtube about whatever tips you want and I'll be sure to write back!

[frankytap]

how u make those leaves? what are u using?

[Cyraside]

@frankytap Maya Paint Effects. It's not so intuitive but you can achieve great forms- both in the leaves and branches with it.

[hukosaka]

Hey ! Can you tell me how to enable use preview option in tone mapping ? Thanks

[sagemakaiserxl]

Wish trees weren't beastly in polygon counts. Can't wait to see what you make with next gen technology.

[Cyraside]

@MutatedHelix Another great thing about Mari is that you can load up so much, without really an issue on modest, affordable hardware. The model I'm working on has 56 4k patches per channel and I have about 35 channels- although most of them won't be used/exported, they're for layering & baking elements of the diffuse or using for masking (such as a separate ZBrush 16Bit displacement- just for masking not rendering, or normals for previewing), etc. The scalability & power is really incredible.