Tag Archives: Mental Ray Shaders

Information about Duiker Research Corporation’s mental ray shaders

Digital Emily on github

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The Digital Emily project from the USC ICT and the Wikihuman Project provides texture maps, geometry and reference photography for a model scanned in the Light Stage.

Reference
emily_heads_1920mental ray
PBRT v3

For this project, a github repository has been created with Maya assets ready for use in matching the real Emily with different renderers. The data set currently includes example images and materials rendered using mental ray and PBRT v3. These were created with an eye towards facilitating further experimentation with the existing dataset, extending material definitions for Vray and the skin shader in OSL provided on the main site.

The repository can be found here: Digital Emily.

A direct download of the assets and scenes is available here.

Multipass Rendering in mental ray for “The Matrix” sequels

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multipass_005 still 1920

The Siggraph 2003 presentation “Multipass Rendering in mental ray for “The Matrix” sequels”, an early deep frame buffer approach to rendering and compositing large datasets, are online here:

Authors:

Haarm-Pieter Duiker, ESC Entertainment Thomas Driemeyer, mental images

 

Abstract:
Rendering resources are by definition constrained and yet the task of rendering many objects at high quality is frequently encountered in the effects industry. Breaking up scenes into renderable pieces, or passes, is a common approach to rendering large scenes. To achieve the quantity of photo-real effects in frame that were required by the scripts of The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions, mental images and ESC Entertainment developed a system for rendering and automatically compositing many passes. The system we developed has the key advantage that it takes as its compositing primitive not the pixel but the sample.

The full writeup and slides are available below
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