So here’s my inaugural post…

SEM shaders, before and after

When I started working at Anatomical, we had a compositor (of sorts) working here who we would pass shots off to. Because a variety of reasons it wasn’t very effective, and so I pushed to have the process modified so that the people doing the 3D rendering were actively involved in the compositing workflow, and vice versa. Fast forward some years, and at this point, I comp nearly all of my own shots, and our “compositor” is pretty darn good with rendering from 3ds max.

Turns out the rest of the industry pretty much agrees with me, and now we see a lot of people who are skilled at both ends of the rendering pipeline. The software is moving that way too. Just take a look at Fusion 6 to see what’s coming.

Here at Anatomical, we had a mix of causes and consequences for this transition that I’ll be discussing in the future, but one of the most interesting is that this makes for some fun renders, as the images that we design the shaders and lighting for are intended to be mutilated afterward.

We hope to share with you some of our more interesting images, those that show some of the process behind their creation. Not all of them are good renders, some are the experiments gone horribly wrong; but they are, at least on a technical level, interesting.

So here’s the first batch…

This is what came out of Brazil.

20 minutes later, Fusion spit this out.

Ok, the color is a lot different, which will throw your eye off making you miss the details, so I did a little mockup to let you compare just the luminance of the two.

Luminance only, Brazil on top left, composite on bottom right.

The watermarking was done just for this posting. I am not sure if I like it or not.