3Delight for Maya | Physical Sun & Sky

3Delight for Maya 6.0.3 was released a few days ago.

I'll quote maxime here:

On top of the bug fixes, there is now support for Hypershade networks connected to the render camera's "miEnvironment" plug, and they auto-generate env maps for the GI effects. This allows support for the physical sky Mental Ray node with the Global Illumination effects of the Render Pass. See the "physicalSky.ma" scene in the examples folder for a simple setup showing how this works.

I finally had the chance to set up something more than spheres to show you how it looks (you may even recognize something I've used before):

multi-channel exr & 3delight

I've been rendering some multi-channel exr files lately using 3delight. Everything is right but the size of every file is around 39 MB each and some sequences are very long. The compression I'm using is zips but I still feel I'm wasting disk space.. really.

UPDATE: I *was* using opensuse 10.2 and somehow, using "zip" compression in rendermn.ini was causing errors with nuke and others. After switching to ubuntu 10.0.4 everything is perfect (small files).. and makes me feel a bit silly. So my best advice would be: use ubuntu.

A Solution? Using python and nuke to rewrite the files with all channels into a new file. Of course this comes *after* everything is rendered and as a fix.

Reading some posts at vfxtalk and nuke forum, I got this as a base for a more robust script:

cat imageconvert.py

import sys
r = nuke.nodes.Read(file = sys.argv[1])
w = nuke.nodes.Write(file = sys.argv[2])
w.setInput(0, r)
nuke.execute("Write1", 1, 5)