Sound Designer

I met with a potential sound designer this week, and I'm very happy to say that his work is great and I think he's a perfect fit for my project. He's a production student who worked with one of my 507 (intro production) classmates whose work is fantastic, so I already trust his work. We discussed my project and what kind of environments and moods I'm hoping for, and how there will be both dialogue and music to consider as well. I'll be giving him an animatic with camera moves and the dialogue track very soon.

Kitchen model

Here are some renders I just kicked off with Mental Ray. They have an Ambient Occlusion shader with 32 samples on them.

The nice thing about these images is that they were rendered with Maya 2009, which allows subdividing at render time. Every object in the scene is a poly object, except for the legs on the dinner table, which are NURBS. To subdivide at render time, you just need to hit "3" to see the subdivision approximation, and render as usual; there's no need to add a tag to any objects, as you do with RenderMan for Maya, so essentially, what you see in your View window is what you get in your outputted render.

I'll probably be baking the ambient occlusion pass for any renders in which objects and lighting do not change position.