Long time no post. I've been finishing the Lighting and Rendering in Mental Ray course. It's been really good and I've learned a lot of techniques and tips for not only making my lighting/rendering better but also more efficient. One of the most important things I've done to improve is to no longer just 'guess' lighting work. It may take a little longer at first to take time to set up your key lights etc but taking time on small changes instead of adding new lights to overwrite errors in the scene is worthwhile in the long run.
Since finishing the course I've been planning on how to use it, as well as starting a redesign for my website. I updated my current CV/Resume (which can be found to the right of this page). My new website will be easy to use and just have simple links to gallery, videos, CV and then the news can be updated from here.
Finally I've been dusting off Boujou and doing some motionmatching. As most starting 3d jobs within VFX/film require motionmatching skills I thought I'd pick it back up and start to test footage/ scenes to bring me up to scratch again (I last used it last year while at university).
I did come across a few problems within Boujou and Maya, looking on various forums I found the solution to some of it. Here are a few tips if you are unable to find them.
The image plane sequence may not load in Maya, or if it does it may only be freezing on frame 1. If this is the case you will need to make sure the sequence is something like filetype.sequencenumber.fileformat - eg testfootage.1.jpg - having it as testfootage_001.jpg can cause some issues.
If you are using XSI remember that it is required first to change the playback speed to the correct fps (in my case PAL) as well as rotoscopy playback and size. Overall I found Maya easier to use for getting a preview as XSI did not render the background image plane on the default pass (as this is test footage currently I'm not splitting up passes till I have the camera moving smoothly with no slip).
I managed to get a smoother camera within Boujou when testing geometry in there but unfortunately I'm getting crashing issues when trying to export the sequence with the geometry within Boujou. In future I might just get some screen capture software to capture it.
Anyway I have a lot of work to do although it is coming up to Christmas so I'm going to take it a little easier and take the time to really learn the ins and outs of the program, maybe try some harder shots to match when I have become comfortable with the software again.
