A couple old renders

I did these in Mental Ray last year. I didn't model them, but I shaded them 100% procedurally and lit them in Maya, and comped them with Shake.

This one was lit with an HDR and just a couple direct lights. I mapped a fractal to the "sun" direct light so that I could get an uneven effect to mimic sunlight passing through clouds.
This one has actually only about five shaders in total; my goal was to get as much done with the lighting as possible. I used photon mapping for the fill and a series of spots, points and direct lights for the sweetening.
I'll be using these methods (and everything else I learned over the past 14 months since creating these) on my thesis.

Ambient Occlusion, again

A friend of mine gave me some great advice on saving render time on Ambient Occlusion - tighten it up by reducing the max distance in the AO shader. Check out his site for a ton of great resources. I have been rendering with a max distance of 7, with the intent of crushing it in the compositing stage, but I figured that if don't need such a diffuse AO in the first place, I might as well cut some corners wherever I can.

Here is the same frame, each time with a different max distance for occlusion. The original resolution for each was 1920x1080 with a bit depth of 16 short.

Max Distance 5.0, render time 35 min: Max Distance 4.0, render time 32 min:
Max Distance 3.0, render time 30 min:
Max Distance 2.0, render time 28 min:
Max Distance 1.0, render time 25 min:

Depending on the type of lighting I'll be having, I might need to increase or decrease the max distance for the AO. However, I do know that I will want tight AO for bright midday sun, so I could get away with using something between 1.0 and 2.0, and I'll need something a bit more diffuse AO for an overcast day, so I'd have to mess around with 3.0-4.0. I'll of course render out a single style frame and comp it in before I render out the sequence. I'll figure out which frames I'll need what type of AO for; given that this frame comes from a shot that is 384 frames long, I want to save time wherever I can.

Like watching paint dry

Here are some ambient occlusion renders of the kitchen scene. The trouble here is that the shortest of these renders took nearly five hours, and the longest one took over six.
The original size is 1920x1080. I rendered with Mental Ray using its Ambient Occlusion shader with 128 samples, but I think the real killer is the motion blur. MR is painfully slow in rendering it, so I will be trying to do the motion blur in the compositing stage.

It may seem like not a ton has changed since the last ones I posted, so why the ridiculous render times? I've been tweaking virtually every model in the environment. I've been smoothing polygons so their profiles are not jagged (this is probably where much of the render time is coming from), deleting poly's where they are not seen directly by any camera or in any reflections, re-laying out UV's and setting Normal angles. I've also converted some poly objects to subD's or altogether replaced them with NURBS because I know that I'll be using procedural 3D projections for their shaders and therefore won't have to worry about UV maps. I'm still going to try to optimize my scene for rendering.

May Renders

These were done in the middle of May, and are all works in progress.