Hard Boiled Scrambler

So here it is! I don't really know what to say about this image . It can be seen as one of those corny 'individual in a crowd' images, or something like that. But the way I see it, they are all scared of him because he can scramble their guts now, so they want to get on his good side. It's hard to show emotion when your stuck with those wiggly craft eyes.

I got the idea to do this after seeing this totally whacky whisk thing at the World Market in La Jolla. CLICK HERE for a pic of it.

Fate conspired against me on this image. First of all it would ALWAYS crash after a couple days of rendering (and I tried like 8 times). It took 4 weeks to optimize it to the point where it wouldn't crash. Then, when I finally got it figured out, the damn washing machine decided it wanted to end it's life and take out the computer rooms fuse while doing so! BAH! So I tried again after that, and it finally went. That's my excuse for not having a render come out in like two months. It took over 177 hours to render on "Lemon", which is a dual Xeon 2.8.

Completely unedited. Came strait out of Mental Ray this way.


Technical Details</u>

Made in Maya 6.5, rendered in Mental Ray 3.4 standalone. Lit entirely with final gathering at 50,000 accuracy and 0.01 1.0 radii. Depth of field is the Physical_lens_dof node. The shaders on the egg shell and feet are Maya ramp shaders, and the shaders on the whisk and ground are both DGS shaders. I have to admit I'm quite happy with the egg shell shader. It may not look like it, but it's one of the most complicated shaders I've ever made. It has properly balanced fresnel'ish reflections, and the bump shader I made is exactly like the surface of a real egg, and there's real translucency involved (custom programmed). It took forever to render because every single surface in this scene is reflective! The image totalled 26,526,337,261 reflection rays!!


Another reason I made this was because I wanted to test a new feature in Maya 6.5/MentalRay that allows multiple diffuse bouncing for final gathering. Basically it allows the 'light' to bounce around on objects that aren't transparent or shiny. Take this [link] for example... see how the sticks are too dark underneath? That's because the 'light' couldn't bounce back up onto them. It is possible to do this with global illumination of course, but I like lighting my scenes with only final gathering if I can. This isn't to say I won't ever be using lights again, this render did after all crash a whole lot because that huge friggin finalgather map took a lot of RAM.

Here is various screenshots from the viewport: [link] [link] [link] [link] [link]

Here is the lighting setup: [link]

Here is a couple of the BSP diagnostic renders: [link] [link]

And here is an PNG version of the image, if you don't want any JPG compression artifacts: [link]

ENJOY!!