@unknownuser said:
Lewis,
Can we see a sample of one of these obsessively scrubbed renders? You've piqued my interest here. Was the dirt occlusion mapped rendered separately or was this some sort of generic dirt filter?
Let me see if I can dig something up when I get home that doesn't violate my agreement. I actually don't use Max at all any more, pretty much because I worked for these guys and came to rather dislike certain of their practices and the way they used that program...I refuse to install 3D Studio Max on any computer I own. But the lesson of doing as much as possible post-processing was a valuable one...the idea was to use the renderer (a customized version of Max with VRay with some Mental Ray renders for layering)as little as possible, and Photoshop (if it was a still image) as much as possible, just to keep production times reasonable. It was always faster and less like Russian roulette to use Photoshop! And I still do this in other situations.
But to answer your question, yes the dirtmap was rendered separately, using Mental Ray but the same camera and frame resolution as the main full-blown VRay rendering. Then the dirtmap (which they produced using a script on Mental Ray, but which newer versions of Max can produce with just an ambient occlusion-only grayscale render)--and sometimes a hidden-line render as well--would be placed on a Photoshop layer above the VRay render with transfer method set to Multiply...and we would "scrub" the dirtmap as much as necessary using the Photoshop tools, layer masks, blurring filters, and transparency.
It's been almost two years since I've worked there, so please forgive me if I'm getting my Max terminology a little confused with other program's terms.
I will try to find some examples for you, as I said, but I have to do some "real" work now.
--Lewis
[Lewis Wadsworth]
