United3dArtists Archive

Decided to perfect my workflow with Mach Stuio Pro, Softimage and anything else I use: Bryce, trueSpace.

I want to do animations in Mach Studio Pro (it's really fast, and I like it's traditional render methods using Direct X 11 tech) - to do quick animations.

After I've squeezed juice from there - I'll go to Unreal.

But till then... I'm having fun using my army of nearly dead or dying or completely dead software.





1. Create terrain in Bryce, throw in some textures, export it with textures as FBX
2. Import to Softimage, make a dome, put on the textures
3. Export from SI to the Mach Studio Pro format
4. Import to Mach Studio Pro
5. Setup shaders and lights and AO and GI and environment lighting and specular stuff - oh and cameras and DOF
6. Enjoy the view
7. Render - wait 2 seconds.
8. Viola, an HD frame with passes and whatnot.

Tell me more about these "passes and whatnot"

Basic summery of Passes in Mach Studio Pro 2:

You can render out HDR frames if needs be, you can render out your BEAUTY pass (typical render everything you want to see with all the effects applied), which is like everything combined - sometimes very memory hungry and intensive - sometimes not ideal - and specially NOT good when the director says.. hey, can you change the color of X object? Meaning you'd have to render that pass out all over again from zero.

So to compensate, you use passes. You have Object ID passes, Matte, Ambient Oclusion (or AO), Global Ilumination (or GI), Depth (or Z Depth), Bloom, Diffuse, Environment Diffuse, Specular, Environment Specular, etc etc. If you know how to composite through nodes, you can put it all together again and make a new image that could look like it's from the BEAUTY pass.

Essentially, all the background calculations can be output to different images and folders - because the final image is built by that info - so in post effects you can crank up the specular and not touch anything else if needs be. It's good for compositing effects and the like - shadow catching etc. You could even change the color of one object or material if you want to using the Material ID, crank up the AO after you've rendered, create dynamic DOF effects, etc.

On top of that, each pass can also be layer based, so that means you could render out a pass with just the background objects, or foilage, and then have it cast shadows on your other layer, and then in post you can composite them together - saving computer power (say you have a million polygons in one layer, and another million on the second - which together your card couldn't do, but seperately you can - still only adding seconds in calculations per frame and a bit more manual work to the workflow - but saving yourself headaches and machine prowness - a traditional approach to saving memory when rendering on CPU with raytracing). You could pop the brightness levels in the foreground with that too.

The cool things about Mach Studio Pro is I can assign lights (Spot, Projector and Omni) to objects specifically, and really run a fine control over what I want to do (Specular only? Diffuse only? On this group of objects only? Shadow caster only? Shadow catcher? etc etc).

The very fact that I can finetune the AO and GI in realtime is nice, and if my computer can hack it - anything else I want (minus particles and hair/fur).

Unreal can do all of this nicely, if not better (motion blur and Bokeh DOF anyone?) but I think you'd have to recompile the AO and GI every change you make to shaders and lights - and I think it's still a bit clunky when it comes to artistic control (as it's a game engine designed to be beautiful and optimized - precompiled). And.. my computer is most definately not beefy enough to hack it.

So yeah, Mach Studio gives me passes like I would get in Mental Ray or Arnold or Cycles - and gives me that kind of power than I need to modify animations later on but with Direct X 11, essentially a game engine renderer.

But it's still a proof of concept. I haven't actually used it in production yet.