XSIBlog

Render optimization: a black art that can make delivering the shot a reality. Rendering special effects, BSP tweaking discussions and the mental-ray engine are some of the subjects you may find in the following articles and posts.

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Let’s look at a short technique that will allow you to export any custom function curve or scripting math function to a texturable node to be used in the rendertree.
Let’s get a curve
We start by taking a poly strip, with a 100×1 subdivisions. This will be our “drawing” table. We then make a cluster of [...]

Generating anisotropic highlights or reflections on polygon objects, was a real pain for many years. We always were jealous of NURBS surfaces which allowed artists to generate anisotropy along UV parametrization. Once polygons received the ability of anisotropic highlights, the users wanted more. Anisotropic reflections have the power to add great deal of realism to [...]

Yes, yet another occlusion technique.

The game is pretending no occlusion nor FG/GI tool is shipping with XSI, and do it with what is left, in particular area lights.
In the end, the result is less accurate than the standard ambient occlusion and FG, but, in some ways, more intuitive and flexible.

The graphics pipeline from source art to final output is complicated, and requires the artist to work in several different colour spaces along the way. In this article I”ll give a brief overview of colour spaces, and then detail a commonly overlooked area in the texture pipeline where gamma is important.

Buzz has been working for a little while on a show that required us to create quite a few shots of water surfaces. One of the guys here, Pierre-Simon Lebrun-Chaput, cooked up a really cool recipe for our water surfaces but to get the look to where he wanted it he was missing a critical [...]