Garage Light:
One of the things that I am in charge of for this project is quality testing and rendering. We saw that there were issues with the back light of the tunnel where the "Warning" sign is located. For some strange reason, photometric lights, spotlights, and point lights rendered with so much noise. To solve this problem, I used an area light instead and clamped the AA samples in the render settings at 1. Here are the results of doing this...
Shot 0
Shot 0 has deemed our "Hero Shot" of our project, so I definitely wanted to quality check and render this scene correctly for this week. Yanni exported new Lightning FX caches for me to import and look dev in Maya.
The process for this is fairly easy. I referenced her caches (lightning, charge, sparks, and wetamp) into the scene, created different render layers for each effect (containing the effect, the car in chrome, and the environment in chrome), assigned the respective FX shader, and then adjusted the intensity in the hypershade multiply/divide node.
While I was quality checking each layer, I put a layer override on the specular samples since we are pulling the specular-indirect AOV in comp to integrate the FX and it's reflecitons. My samples were AA: 7 Specular: 7.
Shading Network | Lightning:
Attribute | Lightning:
Furthermore, each effect is in its own layer. This helps us to manipulate each one in comp in case we needed them to animated, adjust the colors, and add exponential glow.
Motion Vector Render:
Yanni updated the lightning fx in shot 0 to have velocity. The velocity attribute in Houdini can matched in Maya checking the "Export Vertex Colors" in the Arnold tab under the effect's attributes. This will result in getting the motion vector render that is needed for motion blur.
Final Thoughts
Shot 0 has deemed our "Hero Shot" of our project, so I definitely wanted to quality check and render this scene correctly for this week. Yanni exported new Lightning FX caches for me to import and look dev in Maya. I think that our project is really coming together now that everything is running more smoothly.