Gamma correct nodes break things

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I’ve recently discovered, quite to my horror, that putting a gamma correct node into the colour of an area light breaks the diffuse pass!

I’m using PMM to create lights and things so I can work in linear.  Unfortunately making an Area Light attaches a gamma node to the colour.  I had no idea.  And my diffuse pass was coming out not too noticeably different.  But different enough that when you comp everything together, the whole thing is darker than the master.  Took me a couple hours of fiddling to find the problem.  I originally thought that I had missed a pass… but I had all the passes I needed so obviously one of them were broken.  Gamma node you little shit!!

And thus I have to re-render about three days worth because of this.  Too bad I can’t tell it to ONLY render the diffuse pass.

Ah well, the comp of the first shot is looking amazing 🙂

Proxy Success

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Proxy Success

I could have sworn I posted this with my phone…

I got the things working correctly. Don’t instance the object itself, instance a group the proxy is a child of. Why this works is a mystery. But I once had a lecturer many years ago tell me that the golden rule of Maya is “If it doesn’t work, group it.”

Seems the dude was right 🙂

On another note – I’ve been working on a really fun project recently. When I say fun I mean fun technically. I’ve pulled out all my tricks using rayswitching, blurring the HDRI per Mia_Material_X shader, throwing area lights at everything and getting their stuff smooth, hell even getting geometry to light up using the mia_light_surface shader… NOT the builtin_light one, that sucks (for now). And it is looking VERY nice. I may post an image or two later once the project is over. We’ll see.

Reasons to work…

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So there’s no Internet at the office today. What more of a motivator to carry on with my little project. I’ve not got to the story board yet but I am working on the plants.

Instanced them and and nothing is coming out at render… What the hell??

image

Oh well, I’m sure it’s some stupid switch I haven’t turned on or off…

First Shader Test

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I’ve started a new project. I’ve seen many people do cars; I’ve never done one myself. So here’s my attempt. This is just a shader test. It’s going to be on one of those LONG American roads in the desert somewhere. I’m going all out, smoke, tire screeches, the whole lot.

I’d recommend downloading it and playing it in a loop.