ITB update

The "Inside the Box" revision is coming along nicely. We're finally getting animation fixes and seeing some renders. Chris Henderson's new lighting alone has improved this film by 100%. There's almost no comparison between the old film and the new renders, it's like night and day :-) Kelsey's animation was excellent to begin with, but it's even better now. The same goes for DingDing's textures. He's redone the street texture and is still working out the rich side's color. We've been struggling with how the rich side should look compared to the poor side, as we've always liked the poor side and are still having trouble finding the right color ballance. Another thing that we've been struggling with is motion blur. Mental Ray's motion blur increases our render time by 300%. It gets to the point where the render farm drops frames because it takes so long on some of the slower computers (we have to motion blur at least six layers per frame, and some of those layers are an occlusion pass). To solve this I've been doing some research. This led me to the Real Smart Motion Blur plugin for After Effects or Shake. I downloaded the demo and instantly saw the power of this plugin. It can read motion vector information (which I still havent figured out) but also does an amazing job without anything extra. It gives us good motion blur without any of the render time, especially when we separate the characters layers from the background, which we're doing anyway. Once we figure out how to get maya to give us motion vector information it will be amazing. The only trouble is that the plugin costs $200, so we'll have to raise some money somehow. Speaking of which, does anyone want to give us a grant to get some professional music done for this thing? Maybe we can get the school to foot the $5000 bill.