Work Update; Final Project Idea #34807
Since I last posted I have been busy with my work at Bournemouth University. Until recently I didn’t have any set work to do, so I persued studies of my own and also some with my new colleagues João Montenegro and Johannes Saam. (On a side note, there are some photos further down the page.)
So far I have made a mostly-complete Maya to RenderMan converter which produces some cool output straight from Maya to RIB. Also João, Johannes and I have had many discussions on things like fast fluid systems and fast sub-surface scattering, though once I had my exporter to write I tended to only chip in my two-pence now and again. After we went over the theories they generally went off and actually did while I beavered away at the aforementioned exporter.
Some of the stuff that myself, João and Johannes have been working on:
There’s more stuff from João and Johannes.
These are some shots of the exporter’s capabilities:
Early days yet…
I know a Maya to RIB exporter doesn’t sound like much fun, but I can say that I know an awful lot more about RenderMan and Maya than I would have done if I hadn’t done it. I also know how much of a pain in the arse heirarchical subdivision meshes are. Ha.
I’ve also done a bit of Maya. I’m not great at it, and my first (and currently last) still work looks like this, but for a first attempt I don’t think it’s too bad. I’ve gone a bit nuts with the depth-of-field on it though. In addition, I’ve also had to create a very small animation. It’s not great, but please go easy on me: I’ve never done this before! 
Finally, I think I may have thought of a decent Master’s project. I was thinking about a graphical front-end to RenderMan, including an OpenGL pre-vis, shader editing, importing from both Maya and XSI, etc. OK, this isn’t groundbreaking stuff, but it does help me get a job in the following ways:
- It demonstrates that I know RenderMan,
- It shows that I know Maya and XSI,
- It shows that I can make tools.
The ground-breaking rendering stuff I hope to do as part of my group project in any case. Or maybe just in my spare time. Who knows. I’m still not 100% set on the idea, but I am definitely more enthused about it than I am about any of my other ideas. Just… so much OpenGL… ugh…
Johannes (fore) and João (back).
Me (left) and João (right).
Gerard.
From left to right: Matt Osbond (right at the back), Ben, Gerard, Myself, João.
From left to right: Mya, Anil, Jed, unknown (back), Hasan (fore), unknown, Matt Osbond (back), Ben (fore).
Gollum guards our projector.