Mashup of Elementacular clouds, mentalRay lights and a few correction layers in AE

The giant void where my knowledge of Lights and Rendering in Maya should be is showing. I know how to do this in Max, but every light in Maya just makes stuff look/feel like plastic :/. The bats are pretty grainy too; only once I start Batch Rendering. 

Another issue too..  clouds require that I render them in Viewport2.0, and the lights need to be blown up to like... 200-300 intensity for it to register. This causes every other object in the scene turns into a white mess. When I have things which need to interact with clouds (Scenes with the temple/cliff wall), I dunno how I can isolate just the clouds, because the light linker doesn't wake up for view port stuff like 2.0. Maybe setting everything else to some surface shader and key them out in post? I dunno what the best workflow for this is. 

hmmmm oh well. another 4am on Sunday post, because there's still work to be done~

Elementacular test~

Test for Elementacular clouds in a proper scene
Some neat features in this plugin, which allows for subtle wisping, so that the clouds aren't just purely static. Some jittering in against stuff like the temple.. Partially down on that model being decimated to death to pull in a low poly model. Maybe in retrospect I should've kept it higher+quads or seomthing and just endured a slower render time. Ohwell, maybe when I stack stuff in post that strobing will be easy to fix. 

animation + lighting still in early phase


All in all though, happy with this test.
Wizard god Matt helped me get Elementacular working at school now too, leJoy.

Elementacular post #2. Wasn't sure about it at first, but I think this plug in was a kinda decent investment. Sure, I coulda done it all in post.. matte painting. But the 3 generated clouds mean I get to do stuff in 3D. Scene#4 becomes $$$.

Plus, they billow and can be animated. So wispy moving clouds will make shots a bit more alive.

"Block"

Coming along.

Was feeling pretty crappy coming off layout, but have had a few weeks to work on it and I'm feeling better about where things are going. There are scenes which are still only partially blocked, but others which are pretty far into rough. All in all though, it's feeling a lot tighter than two weeks ago when I threw the layout up here.

Tightened up all the stuff in the first scene. I've got a niggling issue with the timing of the dragon rushing her and kicking her off the cliff the first time, it may be a timing issue. Needs a hold somewhere? I dunno.

Everything in the cave is a lot looser; I have references for all the shots, but with the dragon it's so, so. The camera is also an issue I need to fix as I begin to refine this stuff, because as it is now, it's still pretty sloppy. 

The break onto the cliff is my scene I'm working with with Brent, but I've gone ahead and blocked it anyway. Camera needs to be reworked in the 2nd shot there, and I think I need to look at redoing the timing for it's bucking because it freezes.  It works in the references I have, but I think I want to favour it's time on the ground, before it throws it's neck back.

Also, my constraints fucked up and I only have one character there and it's bucking off nothing. thank god this shot's not being evaluated, right?

The final shot where they break through the clouds hasn't been touched in a while. I need to do a bit of work there, but it communicates what I want as is..

I really wanted to use a plug in for maya called Elementacular. I posted about it earlier this week I think; It'd be really handy in that final show with the whirly camera, because comping that in 3D with clouds all over the show will be a bit of a bitch. Unfortunately, school computer's don't like the plug in and it insta-crashes Maya if a scene has any cloud-related paraphernalia, so we'll see.

In better shape. Gotta keep on trucking. 

A classmate showed me a really neat Maya plugin, Elementacular, for simulating cloud based off geometry. I've been keen on it for a while, though I've been kinda put off by the $175 price tag in case it doesn't live up to the hype. I've seen a fair bit of criticism for it, because while their videos show it being played in seamless realtime with multiple lights and huge heavy cloud formations, in reality it's quite slow and clunky, 

Soyeah, a demo's been made available, and it's really nifty what you can do with a few spheres and point lights. Here's some of my trials~

The home PC's a bit sluggish for this GPU intensive stuff, so I'll need to check it out at school and see if I can operate it on the machines there~ If it works and can go onto the renderfarm, I'll be set! If not, I shall cry for stumbling upon another production hurdle~~

EDIT: school computers just crash when I even try to load a scene with the cloud simulations in them. Graphics card's compatible, so it's something to do with the GPU? I don't have the tech savy or the time to deal with this much ridiculousness..

Ohwell, perhaps best I decided to hold off before buying it? Maybe I'll just try rendering the clouds from home and compiling in AE.
I'll have a chat next week, see if I can get this working but ugghhhhhhhhhhhh why does this have to be complicated.