Hello.

We just finished a spot with a full CG stuffed bear for a big client.  The spot consisted of 25 shots of our cuddly guy. Overall everyone was extremely happy with the final product.  I wanted to give you guys some feedback on some of the bumps we had along the way. But overall things went pretty well.  I will post the post once it airs.

 

ABC Export Vray Proxies

Thanks for adding in the motion blur values in the nightly build.  We created a script so our render farm can export an animated .abc sequence.   We had issues with the motion blur lining up with the animated meshes and didn't have enough time to fully figure out the right settings to get things to line up.  

 

At the end of the day we just had the live system built into our model asset.  From there we attached a point cache for each shot to animate the bear in the lighting scene.   This worked well because it removed the extra step of exporting the fur and allowed us to tweak the groom per shot at the lighting stage.  Being a commercial house... this is probably how we will proceed as it is a big time saver.

 

Multiplier Node

We had a lot of fur jumping\twitching per frame even though we locked GuidesFromMesh and HairFromGuides nodes.  It turned out that having the multiplier node above a clump node caused the twitching.  Once we moved that guy down the stack it behaved as predicted.

 

Curl Node

Another issues we had seemed to be associated with the curl node.  Even after locking the length we had funny growing strands as the character moved around.  This could have been stack order but we ended up not using that node because of this issue.  We used a frizz but below the clump nodes.

 

Clump Node

More of a question than anything, but is there a way to use an EditGuides node to groom the overall clump (the goal strand)?   It's great that you can edit each clump strand to randomize it but having a brush control the add in some variation would be great.

 

Node Presets

Using the node presets (built in maya) to save settings and apply them in other nodes seemed very dodgy and incomplete.  Only some values would be applied and any custom ramps looks like it was ignored. A more robust saving\loading node setting would be super helpful. (with map attachments would be amazing)

 

Some Random Loading Errors

these errors didn't seem to affect the asset or the shot but was more of an annoyance. (see attached images and txt files)

 

Automated way to copy and insert nodes

I needed to copy a EditGuides node that was a per shot custom groom and add it to other shots.  I duplicated this node unattached all the connections, and re-attached this node in another scene via scripting the connection hookups.  Having a way to do this built in would be handy and brought along some other baggage. Being able to duplicate it with all the internal data and re-attach to a system would be great.

 

Updating Base Geo

After the initial groom and modeling process we had to update the base geo a bunch.  This is pretty typical in production. Being able swap base mesh operation as an available tool would be very handy.  I have seen the tutorial when moving a groom from one mesh to another but that is very laborious and in this case where the mesh is very similar, having something automated would be great.

 

Vray and Render Settings node

In some back and forth on a previous thread it was determined that the best way to render with vray was to use the legacy "Render Settings Node".  The only way to create this is though a script. Not a big problem but since this node isn't really deprecated and still needed for vray I would prefer to have a built in way to create this node vs a script.  The main reason is some of my artist are more artist and not script savvy. Maybe a simple "convert" with node to Render settings button somewhere would be handy.

Again, Our client and everyone internally are very happy with the results for this project.  Sorry I cannot name it just yet. But I will soon.

Best

Andy

CG Supervisor - A52\Elastic