Cat Room in the Sky – WIP

I am working on a short proof of concept animation (10 secs)

And here is an amusing render from waaaay outside of the room.

This project is a pipeline development experiment for render passes, fur, and fun shaky handheld camera work along with a few other tricks.

Here is a sneak preview, as I am finally off to bed to try out this thing I heard of called sleep.

I am really loving Maya 2009, in which I am seeing incredible speed increases in my rendering and less errors in general so far. Shave and a Haircut also works better than ever. I render using Mental Ray, using hair primitives, and 2D post mode for the buffer. A hair count of 20000, hair segments 10, and 5 passes.  The fur I am getting is a a bit course for most cat furs, but it renders a little more recognizably as fur and gives the cat a bit of a character, although I would like to experiment more with styling the hair so its a bit rougher here and there.

I have turned off all lights for the fur, and applied only  certain lights, avoided raytracing shadows on those lights, and save lots of rendering costs.

I have decided to share this fur preset, along with another black cat version, and the whiskers.  Enjoy.

Download – Black Cat Fur Shave and a Haircut Preset