Transcription - Mental Gay

Despite the extra day it’s not helped me much in all honesty due to more set backs...

I’m glad it’s more time but I’ve now hit problems with Mental Ray not rendering transparencies out.

I wanted to instance trees to create a forest. However it was ridiculous on memory and my pc couldn’t handle it due to the high poly count etc, so I tackled that problem by lowering the render quality and the lowering the smooth on the trees still didn’t help much. So I resorted to creating a square filled with trees then render one shot from each of the four sides then put them back into Maya as image planes then instance just a couple of trees to pan around etc.

However Mental Ray is driving me mental.

I can’t get it to render out the transparency and have found out it can be notorious for this. I though about software render but that will put all the time i put into making specular maps and bumps to waste. So transparencys screwed and also for some reason my texture have become all washed out and grey so I’m really confused about what’s happened there. I’m guessing its something to do with lighting but i havnt changed anything lighting wise for ages on it and i cant work out what it is thats doing it. :(
Im so fed up, it feels like EVERYTHING is going wrong for me.

What I wanted to render out was a little animation of the camera travelling through the jungle then coming upon Mandella (the main character in the story) have a bit of a pan round him a few close ups over his helmet etc. Then have the camera travel on and come to a Tauran, then have a similar kind of dynamic turn around. Then a the ship would come flying overhead and the camera zoom into it have a bit of a look around it again then the ship fly off.

But not with Mental Ray playing up and me not having enough time to sort it I want to go for more of a around animation for the separate parts as otherwise I’ll end up with no final piece or at least one that has crap looking image planes dropped into it which would ruin it. Despite the fact it’s not going to be that spectacular now anyway...

Just set it rendering so wait and see how it goes etc really...
Although its rendering Mandella pretty quick so might get time to jazz it up a bit or try :P