Doodling tonight

Wasnt going to go to sleep till i got a quick doodle out.

Great tutorial for Usebackground with Final Gather

http://vimeo.com/21709262

Background Shader rendering in Mental Ray

Some suggestions on problems with Backround shader.

http://www.digitaltutors.com/forum/showthread.php?16627-use-background-shader-mental-ray-maya-2009

Final Gather

Final Gather does not need photons. Rays are cast for points at different parts of the scene and sample the colors of the objects the rays hit. The color information is sampled back to the starting point of the ray and then the color information is averaged.

Digital Tutors has a great tutorial on this:
http://www.digitaltutors.com/11/training.php?vid=4339&autoplay=1

MR Rendering a night/evening scene

Nice paper on rendering night scenes.

http://wiki.bk.tudelft.nl/toi-pedia/MR_Rendering_a_night/evening_scene

Paint Effects W/ Physical Sun Sky

These are Paint Effects, converted to polygons with Physical Sun Sky.

MIA_MATERIAL_X

mia_material_x really kicks butt.