This toy design started out with some hand drawings, then moved into Alias Studio for creating class A surfaces with the Bezier techinique. It is designed to be effectively produced with thermoplastic moulds, and a rapid prototyping sample was physically created using stereolithography. For more visual evaluation, the model was then moved from Studio to Maya 5, and rendered using only the final gathering feature. (After IGES file import into Maya, they had to spend time properly tesselating the trimmed surfaces.) The rough number of FG rays was 750, a compromise between the global amount of FG rays and the minimum and maximum radius. SInce it was Maya 5, they had to manually select the miDefaultOptions node in the outliner to increase some memory limits related to the phisycal and virtual RAM. Diagnostic rendering was used to find the right BSP (size - depth) value, by empirically minimizing the distribution of red color in the diagnostic image. The render statistics seemed to confirm this. |
