The Mantis Parable Short

Josh Staub, Art Director of Myst: Riven and Uru at Cyan, has finished his animated short “The Mantis Parable”, done entirely on his home PC using 3ds Max and VRay. The short was screened this weekend at the Winnipeg Film Festival in the Kids Animation category and looked great. http://www.themantisparable.com/

Josh Staub, Art Director of Myst: Riven and Uru at Cyan, has finished his animated short “The Mantis Parable”, done entirely on his home PC using 3ds Max and VRay. The short was screened this weekend at the Winnipeg Film Festival in the Kids Animation category and looked (and sounded) great.
Josh worked on it for over 18 months and did it all by himself – script, modeling, animation, rendering, and even the original music score which he played himself.
Josh attended the screening in Winnipeg personally and answered questions from the (young) audience.
You can visit http://www.themantisparable.com/ to watch the intro and read about the development of the short. He mentioned that he is writing 4 articles for 3D World Magazine describing techniques from the production of the short.
The short was rendered on a single machine using the free version of VRay using only raytracing, with render times of about 5 minutes per frame.
There is also an interview with the artist on CGChannel: http://www.cgchannel.com/news/viewfeature.jsp?newsid=3291