1. Turn on Mental Ray

2. Create a camera, name it shotCam

3. Open Hypershade and click on the Cameras tab

4. MMB – Drag shotCam into the work area

5. Open the create panel on the left, expand mental ray > lenses, click “mia-lens-bokeh”

6. MMB drag “mia-lens-bokeh” onto shotCam, int the pop-up, click “dafault” for the input

7. In the Attributes editor you can play with the attributes of “mia-lens-bokeh”

Plane: This is the focus distance ( distance from camera to object you want in focus)

Radius: Larger = blurrier (bokeh amount)

Samples: increase to make it less grainy (bokeh quality)

Link to info about shader

To help with figuring out the focal distance:

when you create the camera also create a distance tool

Label the first locator (cam_loc), the second locator (cam_focus) and the distance (cam_distance).  Then in the outlier drag the locators and the distance under the camera.

You can the move the focus locator to the thing/area you want in focus. This is the value you place in the plane attribute of the lens shader.

Here is a zip file of a lighting tutorial made by one of our former students now working at Dreamworks.

http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/the-basics-of-the-art-of-lighting-part-1-simple-principles-of-and-techniques-for-creating-artful-lighting/

Light Principles from Photography: Lowell Edu

To do a batch render:

Change the file output in the render settings:

change the frame/animation ext to name.#.ext and the frame padding to 3 (or equal to max digits you will have as frame numbers)

Then when you are ready to render go to the render file menu and select batch render:

This will create a folder with a bunch of still images in your project folder which you will then import into a program like After Effects as an image sequence.

For a reflective surface:

1. In Hypershade, create a Phong or Blinn Material

2. Adjust the Reflectivity attribute

3. In render settings, go to Features tab and turn on raytracing

4. If you want shadows as well, select light, open attributes and enable Raytrace Shadow

No Class Friday 9/21

Due 9/25

Find a household object or imagined object, prepare reference images (drawn or photo) and create a polygonal model of the object. Upload maya file to your folder or lms.

Also model a more organic object using NURBs.

Victor Navone is an animator at Pixar and he has a great tutorial all about using the Graph Editor and working with splines.

Splinophilia

This assignment is due Friday Sept. 7.  For this class we will be uploading assignments to the class file server.  Information about the file server can be found here: http://helpdesk.hss.rpi.edu/pl/file-storage

On the file server there is a folder for our class Arts-4060.  Inside the folder there should be a folder for everyone enrolled.  In your folder create a folder for the assignment you are working on and upload your work there.

For assignment 1 you should upload your playblast and your maya file.

Then to add items to the shelf either middle mouse drag a command from the script editor to the shelf or  hold Ctrl + Shift as you select a command from a menu (it might take some time for it to appear on the shelf)