After being frustrated with Mentalray for a few weeks, I've decided to start experimenting with VRay. VRay is... pretty amazing.
I've been continuing my tree experiments using VRay. VRay's Sun&Sky system is much nicer than Mentalray's system and VRay has this crazy useful two-sided material for flat two dimensional planes... such as leaves. Here's what I managed to cook up over the weekend:
I'm still working out some kinks in my new tree workflow. I'll post a full breakdown in a few days.
I experimented with subsurface scatter based shaders for plant leaves today! I'm still working on it, so I won't be writing up what I've found until a bit later. But for now, here's what I've managed to get!
The grass is just Maya fur with a custom shader (woot subsurface scatter!) and the tree is modeled after a Japanese Maple and was made the same way as the one I posted a few days back.
I am really. really. really. really. really. really. really. bad at painting. Like, it's not even funny how bad I am at painting, both in Photoshop and with real paint.
So I'm going to practice until I get better!
For the past few days I've been playing with using a limited color palette. So... here's what I made.
Blah. Blaarrrggggg. I'm not happy with it at all. But... it's where I'm starting from. So... let this be a base line. Hopefully I'll learn quickly...
Every couple of months I find myself trying to make trees again in Maya. Today I found myself tackling the tree problem yet again...
I've found that using XFrog's plant modeler program is my favorite way to create base meshes for plants. It sure as heck beats hand modeling all of those leaves... Speaking of models and leaves, the method I've settled on for tree leaves is to just use planes where the leaves should go and then make the planes look like leaves through alpha mapping.
Anyhoo, here's where I managed to get tonight:
The displacement on the bark is really really weird right now and the color of the leaves is weird too. I think I'm going to try subsurface scattering on the leaves... see if that helps. More updates later...
So why the updated reel? Interviewing with Paul and chatting with the other two people from Pixar that visited Penn was a really interesting. Paul had a lot of suggestions for my work during our interview, so I've decided to go ahead and incorporate a lot of the changes that Paul suggested.
So changelog time!
Overall Changes: -New song! The new song is an instrumental version of Baby Universe from the We Love Katamari OST. As usual, the version of the reel I'm actually sending out to studios for internships has not music, though. -I've replaced "Postcards from Prague" with a new project, "Chairs" -Shuffled around the order of some pieces.
Apples: -Recomposited with slightly better z-depth using a new depth of field plugin for After Effects I found called Frischluft Lenscare. Apparently Alex Roman uses it, and if Alex Roman uses it, then gosh golly I'd better give it a try. Hahaha. -Slightly tweaked color grading -There's a little more footage of the second shot of the apples bouncing than there was in the previous reel
Hermit Crab: -Recomposited with tweaked ambient occlusion in the turntable. Paul pointed out that there were some odd light leaking issues on the underside of the shell's opening, so I've increased the intensity of the AO there to try to make it a bit darker. -Fixed a small problem with the transition between the Untextured Lambert and the Fully Textured parts of the turntable
White Room: -Every shot's depth of field has been redone using Frischluft Lenscare -The first shot of the underside of the stairs was lengthened, rerendered, recomposited, and re color graded. -The second shot has new color grading and altered AO. -The third shot was rerendered with new contrast settings and re color gaded.
Clock: -Paul pointed out that a major flaw with the clock was that the highlight on the glass washed out everything under the glass, so I fixed that by changing the reflective properties of the glass slightly and giving the glass more of a curve to break up the highlight -Turntables were sped up to help the reel's overall pacing -Textures on the clock face are sharper than before
Raincoat Girls: -Turntable was rerendered to get rid of the light blue band that appeared partway through the turntables in the previous reel -Environment shots were re color graded
