Slice Rendering

This Project is a part of Data Expansion project done in last quarter. I have mentioned about better distribution method before and tested it in a production environment in this summer. It worked pretty well, so I changed the major slicing method. Since I can simulate pretty many particles in the new method, it could be faster if I use just a camera clipping instead of sorting millions of particles.

 

I tried new Renderman 14's python Ri-Filter at this time. It's very cool! In my opinion, Ri-filter should be easy to make and managed like Mel. I feel the usage of Ri-Filter is more like a script rather then a plug-in which is little harder to approach. In Renderman 14, Ri-Filter can be made in python and doesn't need to be compiled. Although, I had some trouble with python's garbage collection, but mostly it worked pretty well.

For now, there is no official way to use python API through Maya UI, so I exported rib in Maya and rendered them directly in python script, which renders one rib file several times with different parameters and combines the rendered images using Shake in command line and deepshadows using ho_dsOver.

This is the python Ri-Filter that changes camera clipping area.

And this images are the sliced images.

 

And these are the deepshadow slices.

 

And combined deepshadow.

 

Since I'm using just camera clipping to slice, I can slice geometry too. Of course, this example scene is not heavy at all, so there is no reason to slice them. I just wanted to test if it works well for geometry.

 

And I got this problem.

We can see a border of each slice.

 

So, I used camera clipping with this shader to make a border smooth.

 

And the result was pretty good. Actually I still have a border probelm in deepshadow combining, but it's not really noticeable like a beauty pass. Also there is a problem when geometry has transparency. I' think about it later.

 

These are the deepshadow slices of geometry.

This is my last project in Savannah Collage of Art and Design, and today is the last day of my student life. I learned a lot of things in this school and really really appreciate all my teachers and friends.

Nov, 20, 2008