Monday, September 21, 2009

Bowl of Fruit - Lighting Challenge from Jeremy Birn (www.3drender.com)

School work has finally finished and I'm having a short break, hence I'm working on my lighting reel.

I came across this website, www.3drender.com, owned by Jeremy Birn, the author of the book, Digital Lighting and Rendering. He hosts lighting challenges on the site for people to download the scenes/models and practice their lighting on. So I decided to download the oldest challenge, the bowl of fruits.



Modeled by Dan Wade

I thought this scene would be a good start to practice my lighting and shading on. Hence, I started to shade the models. I first started with the bananas. They were NURBS, in fact, most of the scene is NURBS. So I converted them to polygons and started to do the UVs. After which, I went downstairs to eat a banana and take photographs of the banana skin for use as textures.

After I handled the banana, I moved on to shading the apple. This was done procedurally. I then did the pear, which was also done procedurally. The pear was a polygon, so I converted it into a NURBS surface and then started shading it. This made my texturing process a lot easier. Here's the shading network for the apple and the pear:



Just to see the kind of look I was getting, I plugged in a HDR, added a spotlight and rendered with mental ray. Here's the result:



If anyone has any feedback on this, please write to me so that I can try to improve the shaders. Also, the cloth texture is a placeholder.

More later.

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