Lexus - A Beautiful Contradiction
We recently finished a spot for Lexus which used Maxwell Render for 95% of the work involving their latest 2011 model doing laps on a 'tilt platform' precariously situated at the edge of a cliff overlooking stormy ocean tides.
The Lexus model was CAD data which we surfaced in Maxwell with carefully matched materials in a controlled environment to which we then placed onto the platform and into the shots. All lighting and surface behaviour was reliably rendered thanks to Maxwell Render dependible physically-correct shading models. Compositing was minimally required to get the car to match in with some live action shots.
The only 5% which wasn't Maxwell was Mentalray matte passes for faking the HMI headlights which, due to Maxwell's current optimisation of 'strongest emitter first' we couldn't clear up in reasonable time (personally I preferred the Maxwell headlights!!)
Another interesting challenge was in the metal plating had a very interesting moire/micro shadowing pattern which initially meant instancing high res geo, but without motion-blurred instances support we were facing 47+ million polygons. Believe it or not Maxwell WOULD render it, but Maya couldn't export it easily and needed 16gb of ram to export; so optimisation to a lower res panel needed to be built to stay within Maya's limits.
Spot Page:
http://www.fuelvfx.com/new/index.php?pa ... &mode=htmlDirect Video Link:
http://www.fuelvfx.com/new/data/project/118/mov_00.movSome of my favourite frames:
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