Fixing surface normals:

Easy way to check surface normal problem and fix.

first, disable "two sided lighting" under Lighting tab in a view panel.
Any face colored in black will indicate surface normal problem.
If you enable "use default lighting", it will show you looking better.
To fix the problem you can select the face and hit the "reverse" under Normals.
that's it!

No more Dream giver!!!

Recently, I heard that Dream giver project was finished. Although, I couldn't finish it with others, I knew that they made a good movie at the end. To celebrate myself, I made this images. This work will be my last work with dream giver.

Good job All DG team!!!

Ground Vehicle: Turntable

Ground Vehicle from Jaetaek Hwang on Vimeo.

No HDRI,
No GI,
No final gathering.

Sometimes, using those rendering technologies make the final renders look in less quality.
I will say, "Simple is the best!"

Nuke: Z-depth

This is a screen shot showing how Nuke works with a sequence of Z-depth render with a beauty render. If you have two separated renders, beauty and z-depth, you need to plug the z-depth render into a z-channel with a shuttle or shuttle copy node. Then your sequence files will have rgba and z channel in one node to be good for z-blur node.
Green color - in focus, Blue - closer, Red - further.

Shading! Shading!

Shading is always fun, at the same time, it is really hard job.

During this work, I mostly focused on surface materials rather than painted textures.

I used Maya Mental ray as a renderer for this project. I really miss using renderMan.

RenderMan is still too expensive to use for personal purpose.

What is the best renderer? I will say,

RenderMan > Vray > Mental Ray.

That's right. I am using third best one now. Sad....