So, I thought I would start this blog off even though I haven’t finished the design… I’ve been dying to get into these new Gnomon DVD’s I purchased recently, mainly on Mental Ray and Global Illumination to try and help my pathetic lighting and rendering skills. I’ve gotta say, this is the first Gnomon DVD I have looked at and I am already impressed! Never knew even after watching only 5 lectures, I would learn things I never knew that could aid me so much… I plan on jotting down the key points here before I forget (highly likely, my brain is like a siv). First point, and a very important one about file organisation…

I’ve always known file organisation is key to maintaining an efficient workflow, especially when dealing on multiple projects. Although i’ve never managed to sort out render layers effectively, the very first section on the DVD talks about file organisation and a method to make it incredibly easy to control. Basically, it incorporates using some code shortcuts to name files, and put these files in directories. This is all done in the file name prefix in the common tab of the render settings in Maya…

%s – create directory based on the scene file

%l – create directory based on render layers

%c – create directory based on camera

You can string these together after creating the folder shorts so it can name the render frames which are applicable to layers/cameras also. An example can be the code line ‘%s/%c/%l/%s_%c_%l’ which would output files from a blank scene as this: untitled/camera1/masterLayer/untitled_camera1_masterLayer.sgi

This allows for awesome file management for your renders as its all seperated dynamically, allowing you to render different cameras and split up every layer effectively. The Gnomon DVD also suggests to use sgi, as the compression algorithm is efficient in compressing wide areas of the same colour and not compressing areas of detail. I will have to look into my compositing pipeline to see if .sgi is usable for how I work. I keep forgetting to change the frame padding also with my own personal renders so take note, frame padding should be 4 or greater depending on how many frames are being rendered!

So that was just in lecture 2 – after the introduction. I mean its probably all common knowledge to those experts, but for me it was shocking. I’ve been using Maya for years but never really looked into this organizational stuff, which is quite dumb of me…

I wanted to add an extra section on lecture 5 – Memory management, BSP, leaf size etc but I will save that for the next post when I have time.

- Jarrad