Moved to a new location..

I've moved the blog to the following address:

www.neerajpattani.tumblr.com

This blog will not be updated anymore. All future posts will be posted on the new site.

Lighting & Compositing Demoreel 2010

Visit here to watch it in HD.

Melon composite in Shake

It has been a while since I was busy with my school's final year project. I made the decision to use Shake as my compositing package so I had to learn it. I decided to take my old melon render passes and try compositing them with a different look in Shake. Here's the result:

The color correction nodes are slightly different than those from Fusion so I'm still trying to get used to it. Also, I find myself slightly uncomfortable with the masking tools. In Fusion, I could use an elipse mask tool to create a vignette and it was that easy easy. In Shake, I had to create a RGrad node and use that as an alpha channel on a black color node. I don't know if there is any other way to go about doing this, so if anyone has any suggestion, do let me know :)

I've also set-up a YouTube account for my final year project: www.youtube.com/angelafyp

My blog for my final year project is still ongoing: www.angelafyp.blogspot.com

Final Year Project (FYP) Blog

I'm now onto my final year project in my school. I'm required to make an animated short. My main focus on that would be look development, lighting and rendering.

This is the address: www.angelafyp.blogspot.com

All my development work, from concept to completion, for that project will be posted on that blog. My personal works will still be posted here.

Cheers!

Procedural Displacement

I was messing around with displacement shaders using mental Ray when I decided to test it out by creating a rough rocky mountain texture.

So I went onto creating a NURBS plane and sculpting it briefly to block out the shape.

I created a displacement shading network. I mostly used 3D textures provided by Maya and had them interconnected.

I set up the mental Ray physical sun with final gather turned on. When I did my first test render, the displacement did not show up correctly. So I went to the approximate editor to increase the displacement quality. Boy, the render time was expensive!! Roughly 20 minutes. Here’s the result.

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:

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.

Neon and Chrome Challenge

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.

This 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:

The 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.

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.

Adjusting lights on Fruit Bowl

I received feedback from a friend of mine about the shaders - banana texture looked too stretched and the cherry reflections looked too sharp. So I worked on these shaders and finished up the rest of the undone ones.

So now that I've got my shaders all set-up procedurally, I was changing and revising my light set-up. I made the shadows of my key light softer and reduced the intensity of my dome of fill lights. Here's the before and after comparison:

Before

After

The shadow quality is still not there as you can see that they are noisy and jittery. Since this was going to be an outdoor scene, I was thinking of having the shadows of trees and leaves be cast on the scene - as if this bowl of fruits was laid on a picnic mat.

Hence, I plugged a noise texture into the light as a gobo to cast an irregular pattern on the fruits. Also, I removed my keylight, which was the directional light, and replaced it with a spot light. I made it emit photons for global illumination to work and here's the result for now:

The shaders definitely need some tweaking. There;s too much color bleeding from almost every fruit, especially the apple.

This is it for now. I plan to refine the lighting and shaders much more.

Fruit Bowl - All Procedural Textures

I decided to texture this entire scene procedurally to see how closely I can match the textures of the object to that of the real world. Hence, I removed the banana bitmap texture and created a procedural shader for it from scratch. Then, I made a shader for the cloth as well. Right now, it's pretty simple, but I blocked in the basic colors.

Here's the shading network for all the procedural shaders in the scene:

Also, I decided to change the lighting. I removed the HDRI globe. I created a directional light and adjusted the parameters so that the fruits can be take the best possible form with the shading and shadows.

After that,  I created a dome of about 45 spotlights covering the scene and set that to cast a soft blue fill light.

I then rendered the scene, which took me 8 min 50 sec to render, without any final gathering or global illumination. Here's the result:

The scene looks a little overexposed. Some of the shadows are still too harsh and some things in the scene have yet to be shaded.

I plan to work on adding indirect illumination through global illumination later on after I complete shading every single object in the scene.

Shading Grapes using Subsurface Scattering

I made a shader for the grapes. Done procedurally with subsurface scattering.

To see the subsurface scattering in effect, I placed two spotlights, one at the back and one at the front of the bunch of grapes. It took me quite some time to get the look right as this is my first time doing subsurface scattering. But in the end, this result satisfied me for the time being. Here's the shading network:

And here's the scene update with the rest of the fruits and backdrop with the same lighting set-up of one spot and one HDRI dome:

Now that I've gotten the shader of the grapes somewhat there, I think I would be more confident on handling the shader for the cherry. A lot of the objects in this scene would be procedurally shaded, hence I was thinking if it would be a good idea to shade everything procedurally, including the bananas and highlight that on my reel.

More later. Feedback and critiques are welcome. Do email them to me.

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.

Warrior - School Assignment

This is what I did for my school assignment. Maya and mental Ray. Based on a character sketch I did. Took 25 mins to render. NO post-processing. I was supposed to use ZBrush to add some details to the armor, but I did not have time.

New Portfolio Site

I set up a new portfolio site:

www.neerajpattani.daportfolio.com

This site will contain my best works. Of course this blog will still be in progress.

Cheers!

Melons - Edited

I received feedback that some of the melons were floating. And the shadows were a little too blotch due to final gathering. Hence, I fixed the floating melon and increased the final gathering quality and the point density. It took me 1 hr 15 min and 45 sec to render just the beauty image.