Chairs…. now with Balloons!

Oops, I haven't posted in a while...

A few weeks back I decided to try out overhauling one of my previous projects with VRay. I figured the chairs project would be fun, so...

Wwwwaaaayyyy prettier than before. I really like VRay, although I feel that setting it up is a bit more involved than MentalRay is. Still haven't made too many inroads with Photorealistic Renderman yet, so I can't comment on that quite yet.

Oh, also, as you can see, I added balloons too. I like balloons.

I decided to add balloons after seeing an article on RonenBerkerman.com a while back about shading balloons using VRay in 3DSMax. I'm using VRay in Maya, however, so I had to figure out how to recreate the shader in Maya's Hypershade. The shader network winded up looking like this:

It's *almost* fully procedural, minus that one black and white ramp image that I wound up using for a lot of things. Replacing that image with a procedural ramp shader to make the entire shader fully procedural probably wouldn't be very hard at all, but I got lazy :p

I was originally going to post breakdowns of all of the settings for each node in the shading network as well, but again, I'm lazy. So instead, here's the shader in a Maya .ma file!

A few more renders:







As soon as my last finals are over in about a week, I'll catch up with my backlog of things that need to be posted. I'm planning on posting a series of posts introducing some concepts in graphics programming that I learned in CIS277 this semester. I'm not going to go super duper in depth (for that, take CIS277! Dr. Norm Badler is an awesome professor.), but at the very least I'll highlight some of the cooler things I learned. That class was really neat, we wound up writing our own 2D animation software from scratch and our final team project assignment was to build our own 3D modeling software. Basically, we made mini-Maya. My team (Adam Mally, Stewart Hills, and me) got some really neat stuff to work.

Speaking of Stewart, Stewart and I both will be interning at Pixar this summer! We got into their Pixar Undergraduate Program... uh... program. PUP essentially is a 10 week crash course on Pixar's production pipeline, so we'll be learning about everything from modeling to simulation to using Photorealistic Renderman. I'm really looking forward to that. :D

VRay Tree

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.

Mo’ Tree (and Grass) Experimenting

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.

Back to exploring!

Things I'm Bad At...

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...

Autumn Tree!

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...

Demoreel Update!

So... after interviewing with Paul Kanyuk from Pixar, I've decided to update my reel a bit...



Breakdown is here (PDF).

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

Demoreel and New Site!

Look! I finally cut together a demoreel!



I'm getting interviewed by PIXAR! :DDDDDDDDD Actually, Pixar gets a slightly different version of my reel. The Pixar version simply has no music... they're not very big fans of music in demoreels, apparently.

Which is why I got off of my lazy bum and finally cut a reel together.

Oh, I have a reel breakdown too! Check it out here (PDF).

The song in my reel is "I Like Van Halen Because My Sister Says They Are Cool" by El Ten Eleven. I've recut it slightly to fit the length of the reel.

I also finally put together a personal site thing at www.yiningkarlli.com.

Speaking of new sites... I should probably get around to redesigning Omjii.com soon. Hm.

How 'Bout Them Apples?

Earlier this week my mom gave my roommates and me a gigormous sack of apples, so I've been eating apples all week. Which is good, because I love apples. :)

So I had an apple sitting on my desk, and I had Maya open, and I was a little bit bored, so... I made some apples in Maya!



Over the past few months I've developed a bit of an... odd... workflow for texturing/shading irregularly shaped objects (apples... muddy boots... hermit crabs...). I start with modeling and whatnot in Maya, as usual:





Then I go into Photoshop and use various reference (images found online, photos taken with my Nikon D60, etc) to paint a tile of the texture I want. For example, for the apples I took some photos of the apples and then extracted textures from the photos to create this texture tile:



Next, I bring the object mesh and the texture tile into Mudbox and use Mudbox's projection stencil tool to paint the mesh using the texture tile as the stencil. The nice thing about bringing things into Mudbox for texturing is that I don't really have to worry too much about UV mapping. Mudbox will automagically take care of all of the UV stuff as long as the imported mesh doesn't have any overlapping UV coordinates. So instead of messing with the UV editor in Maya before texturing, I can just use Maya's Automatic UV mapping tool to make sure that no UVs overlap and bring that into Mudbox. After painting in Mudbox, I got a texture image like this:



After texture painting in Mudbox, deriving spec and bump maps in Photoshop is a relatively straightforward affair. Once texturing and shading is done, I render out the beauty pass and z-depth pass and other passes...



...and bring all those passes into After Effects for compositing and color grading, and I'm done!

Watermelon Smash

For animation class, we were given an assignment where we each had to pick a random mixed drink name and use that name as the basis of a 10 second animation in After Effects. I picked something called a Watermelon Smash (it contains.... watermelon cubes... and I don't remember what else). So... here's a watermelon smashing something!



We were actually allowed to use anything we wanted for the actual animation, the only rule was that we had to composite the final result together in After Effects. I wound up doing the ocean, splashes, and sparks in Flash (with tons of help from Joseph Gilland's book Elemental Magic) and painting the boat and the watermelon in Photoshop. The watermelon itself is animated entirely using the puppet warp tool in After Effects.

I'm not terribly happy with the sound. That needs some reworking probably...

Here's a few stills breaking down how the entire thing was composited:









...and here's some random stills:

Recent Stuff

This is just a quick dump of recent things I've been working on, detailed posts to come later.

Raincoat Girl Turntable

I'm done with my character model! Until I can think of a better name, I'm just calling her "Raincoat Girl" :p

Here's a still:



Getting the hair and cloth sims to work right took aaaggggeeesssss. Thank goodness Marissa Krupen knows so much and helped me out a lot. :)

I wound up cheating on the subsurface scatter for the skin. I couldn't get it to look right on its own, so I wound up using a layered shader with the subsurface on one layer and a normal texture map on the other layer. I think the end result looks okay.

Turntable!

Raincoat Girl from Karl Li on Vimeo.

I'll post more stills later, but now I really need to study for that Finance final that I've been avoiding. >< I also have to make an environment for my character to go in to, and I still have that final project for 3D modeling to finish (I haven't even started...).

Character Model Face

Okay, I'm close to finished with the face...



I've decided not to give her eyelashes. They didn't look very good. I also noticed that in some Pixar characters, Pixar chose to keep the lips the same color as the rest of the skin... I kind of like that style choice, so I'm going to steal it (read: Karl is too lazy to paint lips). :p

Character Modeling In-Progress Render

I've finally got hair, skin, and eyes in a somewhat presentable form. They still need a LOT of tweaking though. I also still have to add teeth, eyebrows, and eyelashes. Also, nothing is rigged yet, hence the creepy blank expression...



As for my final project... I have no idea what I want to do ><. I'm thinking about maybe an old fashioned train station or something... that would be kinda cool.

Cloth Simulation Progress

I'm working on a character model right now loosely based on this sketch . Here's how the cloth simulation stuff is looking right now:









There is still much work to be done.

Ink Tree Drawing

I have a pretty sizeable backlog of things from the Drawing class I took over the summer, so I'm going to start posting a few things from over the summer each week.

One homework assignment we had was to do an environmental drawing with ink. I did a tree based on a photo I took at Peace Valley Park.

An amusing sidenote: for large format things, I usually depend on decent lighting and my Nikon D60, but this particular drawing was small enough that I decided to try using a large format scanner with it. Even with a giant large format scanner though, I ended up having to scan it in four segments and then stitch the segments in Photoshop. Photoshop is good at auto-stitching!