ITB reality check

Well ITB isn't going to get done this quarter :-( We just didnt have enough people committed to the revision. Hopefully next quarter will be different, but I suspect It'll be a worse struggle with everyone trying to finish their thesis work. The good news is that we have started rendering, and let me tell you, ITB in HD looks amazing. The HD resolution increased our render time, but since we rebuilt and optimized a lot of things at the beginning of the quarter, it's about the same render time as what we had for standard def in the original renders. Also with Bryan Bently's help we've got the motion blur problem solved.

My original solution was to render the motion vectors out with a mental ray shader and use a retail plugin that could read the motion vector images and do motion blur in Adobe After Effects or Shake. We even got the shader installed on the render farm. However, the plugin costs $200, so all we could do was work with the demo version.

The neat thing that Bryan showed me is that maya has a hidden built in motion blur post-processor, that can read IFF motion vectors and motion blur our final composites. From what I can tell from my tests, the results looks just as good as what we could have gotten with the expensive plug-in.

What you do is render a low quality (but at the same resolution) maya software pass with default textures, no lighting, no raytracing, and no anit-aliasing into an IFF file. This should render very very quickly. If the motion blur was turned on and the option to save motion vectors was checked, then the motion vectors are stored in the IFF file. Then you take your high quality images that have been rendered in mental ray and fully composited (without motion blur) , and run blur2d from the command prompt using the low quality IFF images with saved motion vectors as a guide. It will read the low quality IFFs and motion blur the high quality images! The advantage is that you can get a very fast motion blur on images rendered with Mental Ray, because as we all know, Mental Ray motion blur, while very accurate, slows down our render time so much that the farm gives up. So there we have it, now we just have to get everything rendered with that extra pass. Good times.