UPDATE: video up!
I’m still freelancing for now, and thought a 13 second ID is cakewalk! Well, not quite, but was doable. Can’t speak of specifics yet, but a 1 person do-all faces lots of issues I thought were easy.

Transparent mapped polygons and shadows have lots of issues.
Set shader shadow attenuation=OFF. Shadows (ray) cast are affected by angle of surface normals, so it must be off for any objects like architectural people boards.
Reflections are easy with useBackground, but shadows were a pain. I’m sure there’s a better method, but my shading experience is limited now.
useBackground for a groundplane doesn’t work, because this shader doesn’t have the common shadowAttenuation. So I get weird clipped out shadows and the ugly poly shadows. A makeshift method is use a normal shader instead, but colored. Key the color out later. It’s not great because the ground borders shouldn’t be visible in shot (curved up corners like a greenscreen set), and real uniform light for the plane is needed, since ambient/incandecence and other tricks of uniform color washes out shadows completely.

So far it’s all raytraced shadows, and soft shadows work but slooow. Although I should give mentalray a try, I need to hack my way in a short time and a test render shows mr shadows with the exact problem maya has.

A last issue I couldn’t fix with uping reflection limit or any other settings is when transparent mapped planes intersect, the shadow cast from that region is gone. So we get nice shadows with odd poly shapes cut out.

I’ve also defined an asset for “ambient occlusion” between these transparent planes. It’s really just final gather. But the boards were background elements so raytraced shadows sufficed. There are actually two ways for transparent AO (mentalray AO only supports plain geometry). One is normal FG, very easy and no special shaders. The other is the mr shader network you’d find if you google it. The FG shader seems more predictable, but I haven’t tested enough to compare their quality. I just find the simple FG has more varying shades (noise?). Theoretically AO is a white environment subset of FG, but getting FG to have clean results for sharp edge shading on white needs quite some tweaking.

Do I like freelancing? Well, it’s fun, sometimes. And exhausting, always. Don’t think of earning, because after you’ve done a few months, you’d be glad to earn a fraction of a month’s rent. I “landed” two official jobs recently, stable pay, insurance and all, but too bad this country’s foreign worker regulations make it impossible. What a shame. It’s a pretty island. If it doesn’t work out…well then it’s Singapore, Canada, EU, Hong Kong!