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Euro_Lighting
Originally uploaded by mcbradd

If you're not into 3D rendering this next bit might go over your head, so I'll summarize to lay mans terms before I even say it: Spent a lot of time, without checking to see if what I was doing was even possible.

So I'm building this scene using a complex array of layered shaders. Based on my experience with Unreal 3, I'm trying to build this in a way that if I had a reason, I could just drop the assets in the engine and then connect all the bitmaps up.

Also, I wasn't really happy with how my bricks were looking with a standard blinn shader, so I rebuilt the network on a Phong, then dialed down the eccentricity to avoid it looking like plastic. What hadn't occoured to me is to check if Mental ray in Maya supports Normal maps on a Phong shader. Seems like it should, but for the life of me, every time I try to render it out, Maya crashes. Switch it back to a Blinn, everything's fine. Tried it on three different machines. Cleaned out my scene history, checked for bad transforms, even ran the render diagnostics and read through the log file.

And still, every few times I render, I get the Visual C++ "Application terminated Unexpectedly" warning....

Oh well. If this Job was easy and fun, everyone would already be doing it. ;)