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!
I haven't managed to make any progress on actually finishing this project since my last post, but I have had a bit of time to play with ambient occlusion and z-depth mapping. So... same render as before, but now with depth of field and some ambient occlusion:
...and the z-depth map:
...and the ambient occlusion map. I did the leaves on the trees by transparency mapping the planes where the leaves went on the model, but because of that I wasn't sure how I was supposed to ambient occlude the trees. So I removed them for the ambient occlusion map:
I actually found an alternate way to render out the z-depth map, but I'm not entirely sure this is as physically accurate as the standard way Maya does z-depth:
I've been working on a little city street for a few days now. I want to capture the kind of old European feel that one can find in places like Edinburgh.
Right now this is about 65% done. I think I'm going to try to make it look like an old postcard.
Over the weekend I decided to do a little mini-project to try out some new tricks I've learned with rendering. I decided to try to make as photorealistic of an image as possible of a clock. Here's what I came up with:
The clock face is noticeably pixelated; I'm not entirely sure why that is. For some reason Mental Ray is not sampling the texture file at a very high frequency, I'll work on that next I suppose.
A little breakdown video of the compositing that went into the clock:
Modeled in Maya, textured in Mudbox, rendered with MentalRay.
I'm perfectly aware that no hermit crab would ever actually live in a conch shell that large, but I thought the image of a small crab in a huge shell was amusing.
Some stills from some different angles...
As the title "redux" suggests, the crab above is actually the second version of the hermit crab I've made. I originally finished about a week earlier with a different version, but then after getting some suggestions from Professor Scott White, my 3D modeling professor, I decided to redesign the conch shell. Here's what Hermit Crab Mark I looked like:
I actually still want to change some things. If I have time, I'm going to go back and change the displacement mapping on the conch to get the groves to all go in a more uniform direction. Also 9 seconds into the turntable, you might notice there's a slight shiny spot on the conch. That's a mistake I made in the specular map that I definitely want to fix. I also want to try placing some small low intensity lights really close to the crab's eyes to bring out the gloss that's visible in the Mark I crab. In the Mark II crab, the shadow from the flaring part of the conch makes the crab's eyes look matte. The crab's claws need some color tweaking as well; the color doesn't quite perfectly match the rest of the crab.
The DMD director, Amy Calhoun, told me that no modeler is ever satisfied with a model. So true. :p
