Patrick's VFX Blog

After the completion of the Future of Us Launch Video , I took some time to test Nvidia's iRay renderer. iRay is included in 3D Studio Max 2015. However it is not included with Maya. I found that the company 0x1 has implemented an iRay for Maya plugin , sold as a commercial product. Using the car model from the previous project, (which was purchased and modified), I set-up iRay shaders for it. The background image is being used as a source for image based lighting and reflections. The depth of field and motion blur are in-render, rendered as a single pass. Each frame took 12 minutes (cpu/gpu batch render) on a dual Intel Xeon 2.5ghz with 64gb system RAM, and an nVidia Quadro M600. (This is the machine I'm using at work). iRay for Maya is responsive. I really love the interactivity. I have not tried rendering in passes and compositing images with it, but from the video links for their product site, it seems quite possible to achieve a passes-based workflow like ...

20150909 Particles Colour Change by Distance from Patrick Woo on Vimeo . Here's a test that I created a few months ago. In this test, all particles were created to have random colours. I then attached an expression to the colour in a per-particle context to gradually change colour to the nearest cube's colour, if the particle is within a pre-defined distance of any cube. When the particles again leave the proximity of a cube, it again changes it's colour back to it's original colour. The challenge for me this time round was to have the particles gradually change their colours, instead of popping in and out of the colours from one frame to the next.