An article on milimet.com discusses Foster + Partners entry into the design for a masterplan in Sofia, Bulgaria. Our work is featured heavily and also displayed integrally as part of a wider presentation.

An article also appears on e-architect.co.uk containg the same visuals and animation.

I’ve been working with UK street artist Ronzo to animate his character designs for German company aka-aki mobile location networking game.

aka-aki are developing the application and got Ronzo on board to design the characters. I worked with Ronzo to develop and render the 3D for the game and also with aka-aki to produce 3d for the video. It’s great to be involved with people producing great stuff, and anyway it’s my first iphone title.

Here is the short aerial camera video that we (the meshroom) completed for the Foster and Partners Sofia masterplan competition this year. The job was completed in 3DStudio Max and VRay and initially rendered as still images at 8K pixels wide. We rendered them this large as they were going to be printed at an obscenely large scale. My colleague Dimitar was in Sofia when the exhibition was on and had a chance to see the final images printed out this size. The sunset image is shown at the end of the video.

I’m posting this video which was completed quite a while ago now, back during the development of the Foster Yatch.This was completed so that Yacht Plus could use it in their show at the Monaco boat show in Monte Carlo, France.

All the work was created in 3Ds Max and rendered in Vray using Dreamscape.  The post production was carried out in Combustion and the editing in Premiere. That’s enough technical jargon for now, you get the idea.

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And re-edited.

I use this in conjunction with Slide Shaders which you can read about here to output the masks as layers within an exr file.

- Introduction.
- Selecting material map slots.
- Assigning the MR labeled Element shader.
- Adding the MR labeled element.
- Conclusion.

Introduction.

The labeled element shader outputs a shader tree to a render element. We’re going to combine three materials together and export them as RGB components of a image. Each channel of this image can then be used as a selection set to edit part of the final rendering in post production.

Selecting material map slots.

First, we need to add the shader to the materials we want to output.  We need to use a material slot that will export the shader but not effect our material. The slot we use is different depending on the materials characteristics.

- if the material is not refractive (ie, doesn’t have any transparency) we can use the transparency colour map slot.
- if the material is refractive, then we can use the anisotropy rotation map slot.
- if the material is refractive and anisotropic then we need to find a new slot to use!

I’m hoping that in the future we might get a ‘spare’ slot in the A&D mi material to use for this purpose.

Adding the MR labeled Element shader.

We need to group our materials into threes, one for each channel in the image (RGB).

- In the first material select the slot using the procedure above and add a MR labeled shader.
- Change the shader/ map to store (passthrough) colour to pure red.
- Name the label ‘m1′

- Repeat this for the next material except for the second step change the colour to pure green.
- Repeat this one more time for the third material but change the colour to pure blue.

Now the three MR labeled shaders will have the same label ‘m1′, but they will have different colours. I’ve used the new max 2010 material explorer to help illustrate.

- make sure you have selected your render output file (this will allow max to link the output files of elements to the render output, so if you change the render output file later the elements will also update ).
- open the render dialog and add a MR labeled element on the render element tab.
- change the label of the element to the same as the MR label shader above, in this case, ‘m1′.

Now repeat this but with a new label name ‘m2′ and so on until you have created enough masks for your scene.

When you render images will be created for each MR labeled render element. These images will contain a different mask in each channel (RGB) of the image. These can then be used in photoshop or your favorite post production program for compositing your image.

You’re only limited by your memory as to how many elements you have . Of course, using many render elements can have a detrimental effect on your render times and the use of system memory.

Conclusion.

This is a very handy way of creating masks. It can be a little tricky to set-up (thinking about writing a script here…) but I really like this techniques ability to create masks at render time. By using this with slide shades (follow link at the top) you can save the elements into a 32bit exp file with the final rendering.

This is a short video showing the changes that take place during the post production of a rendering before it is finished. The renders that we create are of a very high standard, but we will usually enhance them using photoshop to get that extra touch. Many special effects such as volume lighting can be created in 3D at the cost of render time, but to add such an effect in photoshop or by using render effects and layers is very straight forward.

I’ve been talking with Robin Deitch from Slide London and experimenting with their mental ray shader called Slide Shaders. Essentially, this great shader will export a multi-layered EXR file from max when you render with mental ray.

‘but I can already save as an EXR file!’ I hear you cry. Why do I need this?

The advantage of this shader is that you can include any number of additional render elements as separate layers in the EXR file. This can then be used in your favorite compositing package such as Nuke, After effects or even photoshop. Of course it is possible to render each element as a separate file but this is much more convenient

You can download the shader from http://slidelondon.com/

You can download my Cornell scene with the Slide Shaders, the rendered exr and a PSD files with adjustments here

Installation.

Extract the correct version into the root directory of Max and re-start.

Required files.

The Slide Shader uses the mr geometry shader object from ctrl.ghost which is maintained by Dave Baker from www.maxplugins.de. This plugin introduces a new geometry object that allows you to place a mr shader in your scene. The file is included in the slide london installation.

Usage.

1. Create a mr Shader object

create panel | geometry | mental ray | mr shader

2. Create a slideElements object

create panel | helpers | mental ray | mr shader

3. Click on the ‘Pick mr Geometry Shader’ button and then select the mr geometry shader created in step 1

4. Enter an output file name

5. Enter an output directory

6. Set the various options, including which standard mr passes you want to include

7. Add all the render elements in the render setup dialog, as you normally would. Give them whatever names you want them to have in the final exr. You can have more than one element of the same type.

8. Click on ‘Build element string…’. This will make a long string of gibberish in the text box below which is what the shader uses to work out what to save, in which format, and what to call it. You need to update this every time you change the render elements in the render dialog.
9. Put the name null.exr in the null file path text box and click ‘Apply to all elements. This assigns the same output file to each render element. This stops max from creating a file for each element, all your elements are going to be exported into the same exr file.
10. Render

Post Production.

You’re now going to have a multi-layered exr file ready for post production and compositing. You can render animations so that rather than having many files for each from, now you only have one.

You can use this in Nuke straight away. Combustion wont accept hdr files, so exr is out.

If you want to open the exr file in Photoshop or After Effects then for a price you can use the excellent fnord ProEXR plugin

Adobe will open exr files just fine, but according to them the ILM specification for exr files doesn’t include layers. Whether or not this is true I don’t know, but what I do know if that I want to be able to use layers. The ProEXR plugin will allow this.