Ambient Occlusion, Specular Pass, Final Gathering, Global Illumination.

If you understand any of these terms, you know the hell I am experiencing right now. I kid of course, but lighting and rendering can certainly be a tedious process and I have yet to land on a “right way” of doing it. Certainly I have yet to land on an exact method that works well for me.

Perhaps what makes my process a bit unique is that I start working on lighting and rendering my scenes as I am still texturing my objects. I find that much of the final look of an object depends on both its material attributes (texture maps, bump maps, specularity, reflectivity, etc) as well as how that object is lit, rendered, and composited into the final image. I find that I can save a lot of time by combining these two process together and dealing with both of them at the same time. Less guesswork, less re-working, more time for drinking. (still with me? Just checking.)

I have been working on developing the render work flow for Annabelle’s Bistro for the last few days. My original intent was to render the entire animation through Mental Ray with Color, Shadow, Specular, Occlusion, Reflection, and Depth Passes. However, time considerations require that I simplify the process significantly.

As of now I am considering rendering Specular and Occlusion Passes through Mental Ray and combining the Color, Shadow and Reflection Passes into a single pass and Rendering that using Maya’s software render engine.

Below are examples of each pass and the final image resulting from combining them together in After Effects. I think the final composite looks pretty darn good for a simple test.

Thanks goes to Dave for his helpful suggestions concerning this process. I am sure I will be bugging him for more help as the film progresses.