Process and Challenges:
- Making the polygon models turned out to the least time consuming part of this project.
- Figuring out how to do UV mapping for the beer labels, burgers & fries and etc took about 8 hours.
- Creating glass for the beer bottle with mia_material was actually pretty fun.
- Trying to get the light to shine through the window the right way using Mentalray's physical sun and sky took re-watching 5 different YouTube videos repeatedly for an entire afternoon (What, I can't just put an area light by the window? Nope.)
- Realizing that Maya's shatter effect doesn't work if tried using it with deformers and lattices and that it is completely broken if combined with key frame animation instead of dynamic effect makes me want to cry (too late to change now, we've come this far).
- Finding out the importance of working in a linear workflow was an unforgettable lesson because the images looked good rendering in stills, but turned out too dark in batch render because the gamma was off.
- A strong distaste for shiny surfaces resulted from working with materials in Maya. Why is everything so damn shiny and reflective? The amount of trials and error to make the surface of the floor matte and not shiny makes me never want to mop my floors ever again.
- Becoming obsessed with the texture of the carpet costed about 5 hours.
- Rendering 500 frames took about 3 days (a couple hours a day @ about 40~50 frames an hour with my i7 Skylake processor and GTX980Ti graphics card) due to the quality setting with global illumination and final gathering.