Last Post About The Car

So here's my final version for now. Some of the aliasing issues I feel are a limitation of the resolution. Some of these problems would be better at (true) 720p rather than the upres'd renders I've been producing. In the end I created another ambient occlusion pass for the ground only which helped match the background shadows under the cars. Additional masks were used to tint the windows so they weren't so blue. Blacks overall I feel match better and I reduced the amount of glow around the reflections/highlights.

A bigger issue has to do with the HDRI that I shot when this footage was filmed. I used the mirror ball method and unfortunately it's quite scratched. This gives me very elongated highlights. It would look much nicer if they were proper, circular highlights. Perhaps if/when I revisit this I'll block them out of the HDRI and put geometry in the scene to represent the ceiling lights.

I feel that doing this has helped better my knowledge of mental ray and Nuke. The thing I find mostly with projects like this is that the more you know, the more you know you don't know... or something like that. Every time I learn something new I can see where there's potential to push renders, textures, and lighting even further. As they become more accurate or real or advanced, the renders take longer. It doesn't matter how fast your computer is. As soon as you buy/build a faster one, the technology advances to undo your purchase. This wasn't so bad at about 12 minutes / frame at 960x540.

So what's next? I need to improve my render debugging skills. There's so much important information on the elementalray blog that I haven't had time to digest. Mostly I find these tweaks aren't going to cut times in half, but I always like to know why something works or doesn't and if I have a better understanding of optimizations, I feel I'll better understand why I have issues, artifacts, whatever. Along with that, there are mia material settings that need exploration and then a better understanding of new BSDF shaders... the list goes on an on.

Anyway, here's the final render (for now).