RENDERING

rendering

Firstly I tried out different rendering options in Maya, to see what happens to the lights, sharpeness of the edges, glows and reflections. As Can be seen on the picture references, Mental Ray behaved a bit strange with the see through objects, although it gave some interesting scattered look.

Maya Hardware left edges pixelated.

Maya Software Rendering seemed to behave the best of them as it left surfaces smooth, object's edges crisp and kept the transparency. I gave other members of the group to try out other options of rendering which could help us to achieve profuse look of paper (like subsurface scattering and ambient occlusion for instance), but it all turned out bad so I decided to simply go for Maya Software.

Mental ray

Maya software seems to leave the surfaces soft and crisp definition still:

Maya hardware made surface pixialted:

We made the decision to render out all in separately editable layers in order to have more control over them in compositing phase. For that I needed to sort out all the proper naming of the objects, assign them to the layers and then create rendering layers.