Maya 2017 + Arnold

After a summer that flew by taking part in the BFX Festival Competition, I'm trying to manically work through my list of saved links and techniques in preparation for 3rd year at Falmouth.

I'm hopefully going to be able to talk more about BFX soon, including the film we made and some of the breakdown, and work I put into it, but we are currently waiting for the films to be released online to be able to talk about it.

For now I am focusing on getting to grips with Arnold, and Maya 2017 in general. There are lots of little improvements all around, especially with the animation and general interface changes.

As part of a continuation of the lighting I was doing before I took the Stanford dragon into Arnold and lit it with a HDR image. One of the big problems I had with Mental Ray in 2016 was rendering caustics, this however worked quite nicely in Arnold. I was pretty impressed by the quick results. The glass looks clean and nice quality, there is a sense of depth in the glass. The HDR was easy to set up and after adding some more key lighting I was happy with the result.

Arnold is also set up quite nicely so everything makes sense, options are where you expect and it seems very artist friendly, which is nice. I haven't been able to put any time into comparing results with Renderman yet, as I am quite familiar with it but I will put some time into that hopefully in the future.

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