Illustrator and mental ray - United.

Thank you for all you email, we were (still are) overwhelmed, and here I’m thinking we would only get a few comments from uber techno geeks.

Here are the answers to your questions in no particular order.

Again if you have any questions, that are not answered here, you can email us im at letterboxanimationstudios.com

1) Why are there no pictures? Realistically pictures does really show anything that really show the systems benefits.

2) Why no videos? As we don’t own all dcc's, and neither do our freelancers, we think it would be unfair on the on the smaller dcc manufactures feeling left out;  IE it the video only shows product X, and then that thought translates into "ok, so it only works with X, not Y, so I get left out, great".

3) Whats the workflow? The same as you use now for ordinary textures. That's it, easy, simple, and you already know how to do it.

4) Also from our point of view we will get flooded with "I guess this only work's with product X, and i don’t suppose you'll not bother for product Y".

And we've ALREADY had those emails!!

 Our goal, maybe idealistic, but it's to have it work for all dcc's.

5) I was expecting to be able to buy it, why cant I? This is just an announcement, realistically to see it there would be any demand for it. When you work in isolation on something like this, individually you can see it uses and benefits, but it’s hard to evaluate if people want or need something like this. Our logic was just like the movies, announce it, later show the trailer, and then get the ticket.

6) Why do you say you might not release it? We were being honest with you, I only expected a few emails, the announcement was meant to see if people were interested, and just how much. The amount of email's has been staggering, looks like I really completely underestimated the interest.

6a) Also from 6) we are a small company, alot of our work is freelanced out, so to market a product like this takes staff, marketing, pr, etc, all of this takes a fair bit of time and money to do it proper justice. And with out knowing the demand it seemed the fair and honest thing to say.

7) Is it working now? As of right now, it does work, BUT not across all dcc's, see 2). That's what we think is important to achieve. Think Army Rangers.... No DCC gets left behind.

8) Does it work with Corel draw? This has not been tested, but as far as memory serves (last time I used it was back at Corel 9) Corel did allow you to save as illustrator format, so you should be ok.

9) When is the release date? As yet we don’t have any set date, as from 7) we might hit technical hurdles on certain dcc's, and if you've done development, it's hard to  put time frames to these things.

10) Why did you create it? Ok this answer is a bit boring, and technical, and the reasoning behind the solution, so you might want to skip it.

The reason is, if you have let’s say a car, and you want to, as we do, a lot of extreme close-ups, and a lot of camera pushing in for those close-ups. You have a real problem; you can test this out yourself with AO. If you have a car in the frame, and then zoom into the wheel nut, and you’ve rendered AO out to a file say 2k and mapped it as a texture, when you pull in tight as a continuous shot, it’ll crap out.

Now you could make the image 16k even 32k, but most of the programs don’t let you make ones that big. On a straight texture though you can in you paint program make them as big as you want. Let’s think about this, the final image has to be 4k for film, how big is that texture going to have to be? Damn huge.

Ok you could make a mipmap, still have a problem there too, as if you pushing the camera in close, you’ll see the texture jump, as the resolution changes.

The same problem exists if you use LOD on a subdivision surface, take a camera and push in, in a continuous take, the resolution jumps; it’s not smooth, unless you use nurbs.

Also think about this, if the image size for 8/16/32k the mipmap is huge, when you render it has to read the massive file from disk, which takes a very long time. That slows down the rendering. Multiply that for 100s if not 1000s of frames, you are going to take a huge rendering hit.

So this was created really to solve a simple problem of having vinyl’s on cars and being able to push the camera in.

But it does have the ability to be used in many more places, as we outline here.

Illustrator is a registered trademark of Adobe Systems Incorporated. mental ray is a registered trademark of mental images. Corel Draw is a registered trademark of Corel Corporation.