Saturday, October 17, 2009

Neon & Chrome Update

I updated the shading to tone down the reflectivity. I also added the poster textures. And for a test render, I added a few area lights with quadratic decay as the tube lights, two spot lights for the car headlamps, one over soft bluish fill light and rendered with final gather. Again, it’s a rough piece:

01

I need more colors in the scene. Right now, it looks very desaturated and dull and the focal point is not established correctly in the scene.

Friday, October 16, 2009

Neon and Chrome Challenge

fruit_bowl0000

So I finally finished the fruit bowl scene which was modeled by Dan Wade. The original image is uploaded here. Comments are critiques are most welcome.

With the fruit bowl challenge done, I decided to work on another one of Jeremy Birn’s lighting challenges on CGTalk.com – Neon and Chrome. The challenge can be found here. This scene is modeled by Christophe Desse and Matthew Thain.

So the first thing I did was to UV map the pieces of geometry which were going to have texture details. Next, I moved onto creating the procedural textures for the walls and the pavement.

001

002This is what I have so far. The car has a car paint shader applied to it. Also at the moment, everything else has a blinn shader applied to them and the surface properties have not yet been tweaked. I also finalised my camera placement before I started UV mapping. I decided to light quickly and turn on final gather to see what the render would look like roughly. Here’s the result:

trialThe only texture that is hand-painted using Photoshop is the road texture. Everything else is procedural. The reflections and other surface properties definitely need tweaking. I’ll continue to work on the textures further tomorrow.

Saturday, October 10, 2009

Fruit Bowl Almost Complete

I had time yesterday to work on the fruit bowl scene. I created several passes for the render - key light pass, fill light pass, rim light pass, global illumination (GI) pass, z-depth pass and an occlusion pass. I also decided on my render composition size. I wanted an extremely wide composition. All the objects in the scene are procedurally shaded, except for the bump map on the leaf which was painted using Photoshop.



For the keylight pass, I had one directional light casting yellowish sunlight with slightly harsh shadows.



For the fill light pass, I had about 46 spot lights in a dome casting soft blue light with soft shadows.



For the rim light pass, I isolated the fruits only and placed a spot light behind them. I also had it adjusted to show off the subsurface scattering on the grapes.



For the GI pass, I had three spotlights emitting GI photons only from different directions at the fruit bowl. I had also enabled final gathering to achieve better results.



This is the ambient occlusion pass.





And this is what the final result looks like. I added fog and a vignette to bring focus to the fruit bowl.

However, I wouldn't call this done because of one minor mistake:



One of the cherries is floating above the plate. This was pretty frustrating. I should be able to be done by tonight.