Gallery Set Up

Each of the 3 sections of Zohar HaNegev will be screened on a separate screen in a gallery. The screens will form an enclosed triangle formation, meant to give a claustrophobic feeling. The viewer will stand in the center of the triangle.

gallery setup

No matter the direction the viewer is facing, a part of the city will be seen. These screens are meant to be very large and give the feeling that the audience is actually walking through the city streets.

bird's eye view of gallery setup

The narrative audio track which describes what the viewer sees will be play from a phone, given the to viewer as (s)he enters the gallery space.

Upper Floors + (temp) Sound

Here is a playblasted walk through of my favorite section of the piece -- The Upper Floors. Modeled by Di Ye.

click to play quicktime

Provided are also hi-res renders. These screens may appear dark on some monitors.

Exterior + (temp) Sound

The Exterior sequence of Zohar HaNegev. Rendered with Mental Ray on standard resolution with low final gather and ray trace settings. At the moment a single frame takes aproximately 20-30 seconds to render on SD and about 1 minute on HD.

I have already done tests to resolve the flickering in this video.

click to play quicktime

Updated Lower Warrens Walkthrough + Sound

Below is an updated walkthrough through the lower warrens of Zohar HaNegev, it a simple playblast with a temp track. Professional actors are planned to record a better sounding narrative than the one in this clip.

click to play quicktime

Additionally, I've provided hi-res renders of the warrens. These were rendered with Mental Ray for Maya, and are using very low final gather settings. All shadows cast are using maps. I fear that the high amount of lights are slowing down the render times significantly. These renders may appear dark on some screens.

mayabatch.exe reeks havoc (once more)

The rendering problem I've mentioned in this post has returned in Maya 2011!

The day lighting was completed and ready for render, I received the following error from Maya, when attempting to batch render:

// Result: Saving temporary file: D:/Projects/Zohar HaNegev/zoharhangev_project/scenes/UpperFloors00__4240.mb // 
// Result: Rendering with mental ray... // 
// Result: Rendering Completed. See mayaRenderLog.txt for information. //

Of course, Maya did not render a single frame…
A further look into the mayaRenderLog.txt reaveled the following message:

Starting "C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Maya2011\bin\mayabatch.exe"
QWidget: Cannot create a QWidget when no G// Maya exited with status 1

I've attempted several things in order to solve the error. Amongst which, were reviewing  the render globals trying different image formats, deleting Maya's preferences, disabling the Antivirus, and testing different scenes. I also posted the problem on several forums. The only advice I received was to contact Autodesk.

I decided to completely uninstall Maya 2011, and the older versions that I had on my hard drive (2009 and 2010), and re-install 2011by itself.

This seemed to solve the QWidget problem.

Unfortunately, mayabatch.exe returned to the original problem of 2009, where it would only use up to %50 of the cpu power to render (8 cores, 16 threads). To be accurate, it started  around the %13 mark, blasted up to %49-%60 for a short time and then hung at %22 for the reminder of the frame. I also noticed many unnesicary DAG calculations before each frame that lasted about 2 minutes and a very long hang time after each frame was completed. This meant that a frame that would normally take approximately 1:15 minutes, would now take around 6 minutes. These problems were not present before the reinstallation.

Maya still rendered single images in a timely manner, thus I will be providing playlasts, coupled with still images of the renders for now.

As of today the problem has not been solved.

Shots 4 & 5

Proceeding with the rendering, I've solved the problems in my previous post.

1) being unable to change the color settings on mental ray in the sky, I opted for a surface shader with an envSky node in the color channel attached to a sphere that surrounds entire scene.

The light is cast from a single directional light uses ray tracing shadows, in addition to mental ray's final gather. I set the light color to a slight yellow and the shadows to purple, in order to stimulate an early evening desert light.

The envSky uses a ramp with purple, yellow and white colors set to smooth. Truth be told, I think I can simplify the network by slapping the ramp surface shader color channel and bypassing the envSky altogether.

2) The mental ray rendering problem,was solved by upgrading to Maya 2011. Now the computer renders using 100% of the CPU power.

Below are shot 4 & 5 of the exterior scene:

click image to play quicktime

click image to play quicktime

In a shot 4, there is a flicker artifact on the left hand building. Also, the shadows need to be more opaque.

These scenes were modeled by Di Ye. and myself.

Exterior Lighting Test

The modeling for Zohar HaNegev is complete thanks to the hard work of Di Ye and Melissa Davidson. I am now in the process of optimizing the models, preparing them to be textutred and blocking in the lights.

Here is a lighting test for the first shot of the city's exterior, modeled by Di. I've lit the shot using Mental Ray's Physical Sky.

There are two problems here:

1. The shadows are too blue -- and I'm finding it difficult adjusting the color of the sky. 
2. Mental Ray seems to be using only 50% of my CPU power at the moment.

Hopefully I will be able to solve both of these problems soon. Please see the clip below:

click to play quicktime