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.

Lower Warrens Walkthrough

Click to Play Quicktime

Here is a walk through of the lower warrens. Modeled by Melissa Davidson with additional models by Di Ye and myself. The basic lighting has been blocked out and a rough camera has been animated.

The camera was animated with the assistance of Craft Director Studio. Using their observerCam feature, I was able to control the camera in real time with a game pad and record the movement. The game pad is fully configurable, which allows me to set the controls to operate just like a first person shooter. The left analog stick is used to move the camera, while the right stick is used to look around. The shoulder buttons tell the camera to move up and down, and quick repeated taps simulates stair climb.