Maya 2017, Cam track Nuke test

Haven't posted in a while, so here's a little test I put together for a Nuke Class. Tracking the camera in Nuke and sending it to Maya with some reference mesh as an alembic cache, lighting and rendering and sending back to Nuke with AOVs for compositing. It was also an opportunity to have a proper test of rendering with Arnold and Maya 2017 so here's what I've found.

Arnold is great, but seems pretty slow and the lack of a batch renderer without the purchase of another lic is pretty much a deal breaker for education. The alternative is the new sequence render feature which basically runs in the foreground and will make your PC virtually unusable until it's done. I also couldn't find a way to quit it once you've started it, escape just quits the current frame and moves onto the next, so the only option is to force close maya.

 I really like the Arnold shaders though, aistandard has pretty much everything you need built in with support for sss etc and at a guess I would say more inputs by default than the mr shader. Certain aspects could be integrated better and I imagine they will be in the future now that it is the bundled render engine. For example having to turn off opacity when using alpha cutouts seems a bit clunky.

The Render layers workflow in 2017 is great and far more convenient to set up AOVs than the previous methods, though it may seem a bit of a pain if you are only looking for a quick beauty pass.


Here's a clip of my test, there was a frame dropped which I left because it kind of looked cool, it also slips a bit toward the end: