Interrogation Room

So I finally did some lighting on an interior scene created by someone else. In this case, Naf, my classmate, made the models and textures for this scene and the layout was done by her too. I requested her if I could do the lighting on it and she agreed fortunately! :)

So I got started. I knew that I wanted to give this place an uncomfortable feel, hence I chose my color palette and decided to start lighting. I also did a simple camera animation with some changes in focal length as I wanted to play around with the depth of field in post.

I used final gathering. Also, I felt the need to render the scene in different layers as the chair in the foreground wasn't getting enough backlight and my focal point was being affected. Hence I added a spotlight and rendered the chair as a separate element. I also added a zdepth pass for compositing depth blur in post.

After the render (using mental Ray), I brought everything to Fusion and composited everything. I animated the lens flare by hand, but after a while, it got tedious and it wasn't so accurate either. So, I motion tracked the last few frames of the shot and had the lens flare follow the track. The tricky part in this whole compositing process was of course to animate the depth of field effect.

Here's the final footage:

(if the video below is being cut off, please visit www.youtube.com/digimator to view it.)

Rings

I decided to do dedicate something to my girlfriend, and I had this idea of two rings. This is not the final image. I plan to work on it more to tell a story by adding more elements and working on the lighting to give the mood and feel.

Modeled in Maya. The textures are 4K each for the ring because I wanted the quality to be pristine. The diamonds need a little work though. Rendered using mental Ray. No post-processing done as yet - pure render spat out from the renderer.

Toon Rendering

Recently one of my school projects required me to do a short animated film in a group. My role in the team was modeling/lighting/texturing/rendering/compositing. The film was basically done by animating characters traditionally and the backgrounds in 3D. To have a consistency in style, a stylized look for 3D rendering was required. Hence, I began my research in toon shading using Maya. I faced a few problems such as lighting and getting the shadows right, but I fixed most of them.

This car was modeled by my friend, Gregory Poon. I constructed the set, did the mountains background in Photoshop and rendered everything using Maya software. Finally, everything was composited in Fusion. The original clip has camera shake, which I did using an expression to randomly offset the camera's position.

The exterior set of a gas station on a highway just before a death valley in the United States. The shadows were blurred during compositing in Fusion. Entire shot done by me, including concept, layout, modeling, texturing, lighting, rendering, and compositing.

The Death Valley sign. Still facing the issue of jagged-edged shadows.

These two are interior shops inside the gas station. For the first shot, everything was done by me. The hand is the same hand used in the previous iSellfish project where the shop-owner puts the bag of fish on the counter. For the second shot, the character was designed and traditionally animated by Angeline Chong. The rest of it was all 3D and done by me.

I'll update here once the video is uploaded on YouTube.

Z-brush Old Man

Okay, I've been really busy with school stuff and preparation for my summer internship at MIT. I'm trying to get some stuff uploaded on YouTube but I'm facing problems. I'll fix those as soon as I can.

Anyway, I had been playing around with Z-brush in more depth. I started working on the default super average man provided by Z-brush and started sculpting it to make him look like an old man.

I used my Wacom tablet to do this. I've only worked on the neck-up area. I have yet to modify the nose, ears, cheeks, chins and pretty much the rest of his body. I'm pretty happy with the result, however I do wish to continue working on this elderly dude once I have the time.

Legrand-Simon LS-60 Complete!

It's finally done.

I wanted the plane to have a showroom look, as if it were on display on a turntable. I changed the lighting set up. I made a three point set up. A spotlight as the key, the HDRI dome as the fill and another spotlight as the fill. I set up the renders in 5 layers, including z-depth. I had ground occlusion and plane occlusion as separated passes so that I could lower their intensity during compositing.

It took quite a while to render - at least 2 days. I then jumped into Fusion (I love this program) and composited everything:

And then I thought, why not do something different? Thus, I played around with the zoom lens of the 3D camera and rendered my image in few passes again. During compositing, I gave it a different lighting feel:

Hope you like this image. It can be found here. Do feel free to comment on this :)

Interior Updates

I decided to adjust the shaders to give it a better look. I changed all the blinn shaders assigned to the body of the plane to car paint shaders. Then, I adjusted the window settings to have refractions and such. I did not assign the car paint shader to the wings because I thought the wings shouldn't be so reflective and have that car paint look, so I left it as blinn and adjusted the reflectivity settings to be low and blurry.

Next, I moved onto creating the interiors. Some of the textures of the outside could be seen inside, so I had to model some parts to hide that:

Plane with Interior





Brighter Interior

I shall continue to refine the interior tomorrow :)

Aircraft Test Render Turntable

This is a rough lighting set up for the aircraft that I'm working. To view it in HD (ie much sharper quality), please visit http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcgN2a5rshs and switch to HD mode by clicking the HD switch at the bottom right of the player :)

More Lighting Tests

I received feedback from my friends that the previous renders made the plane look like a toy plane. So I scaled it up, switched on the HDRI background and adjusted the camera angle :)

Lighting Tests on the Aircraft

Sorry, I was just too excited to light up my aircraft :D Here are a few test renders. Definitely need some work:

All the images are rendered with mental Ray and with HDRI lighting. The details on the wings are through the use of bump maps. I still haven't changed the tail color yet. And, I feel the wheel color don't quite suit. On top of that, I've yet to model the interiors.

Can't wait to finish it and render it :)

Decals & Stickers on Windows

I've been having fun at textures and I just decided to go with the flow. Since I wanted the plane to have a sports kind of look, I went on to texture the windows and the windshield:

Since this would have been my first attempt at texturing a vehicle properly (other than the spaceship previously for which I had strict deadlines to adhere to), I want it to signify me. I want it to represent me, and what I do. So if you observe closely, my name and my identity is all over the place. If you look closely on the front part of the plane on the side, I made a decal that says "supporter of:" and then the logos of the various software I use such as Maya, AE, RealFlow, Photoshop, Fusion and boujou. This is meant as a subtle humour kind of thing. All the decals and stickers textures are made in Photoshop.

What I'm most proud about this process is that I went on to UV map every single aspect of the plane, even the windows and the windshield. Notice the black lining on the door frame just before the window starts. That is supposed to be the rubber strip for the seal. I'm very proud of this personal project. More to come soon :)

Legrand-Simon LS-60 - Texture Progression

Its holidays for me at the moment, and I thought I would finish some of my incomplete works that I did not get a chance to touch due to school projects.

So anyway, I carried on to texture my aircraft. I wanted to go for a very sports feel - as if its a sports airplane with decals and stickers all over. At the same time, I wanted to give it a circus feel.

I had to UV map every part before moving onto Photoshop. I'm starting to get used to the UV mapping process after working a lot on it during my school projects for the past two months. Here is the update:

That's all I've done so far. The wings aren't textured properly yet. I still have to UV map the wings and the wheels. I plan to remodel the propellor because I received feedback that it looks too small and puny. Once that is done, I would model the interior and texture whatever that is left.

Still a long process, but shouldn't be a problem. More later :)

iSellfish Test Animations - Compilation Video

If the video cant be viewed here, do visit www.youtube.com/digimator to view it

Been busy - 1st 3D Short Film

Hello everyone. I've been busy for the past two months. My friends and I have been working on our first computer animated short film as part of our end of year project. However, neither of us did not release anything on the web because we decided to follow strict rules of keeping production confidential until it's finished. Even though submission have passed, we did not manage to complete the film due to unfinished renders. Hence, we're going to continue working on this film until it is polished and finished.

I've just finished creating a short video compilation of most of the things that I've contributed to this short film. The video mostly consists of early test animations. I'm trying to get it uploaded to YouTube. Once it's done, I'll post it up here.

Meanwhile, let me share with you a little about this story. The people working on this short production are Dion Heng, Gregory Poon, Angeline Chong, Wendy Chan and myself. This story is about four fishes who are strongly bonded and are living in a fish tank in a fish shop. They are the last fish to be sold as the shop is having a clearance sale. The story takes a turn when a little girl by the name of Sarah walks in and chooses a fish for herself - the leader of the fishtank. Seeing this, the others do all they can to save him. I'll leave the rest for you to find out when we finish the film.

Here are some of the things that I created for this film:

Fish Net - textured in Photoshop and rendered with raytraced shadows



Ceiling light in the fish shop



Flower pots - for exterior set of the street

Initially, our story involved a boy character by the name of James. So I modeled him in Maya. The main issue was his hair. I had never done hair before. We did not have enough time to do hair simulation. Hence, I decided to model it out of polygons. However at first, it turned out extremely ugly so I decided to use paint effects approach.

James' hair - paint effects

But this method lagged the entire system and I figured that it would be a hard time when it came to animating and rendering. Moreover, we were planning to use mental Ray to render the entire film but paint effects aren't supported by mental Ray. It could be solved through compositing (which is what I did in the case of the fish tank interior where I had paint effects weeds rendered in standard Maya software and the rest of the scene using mental Ray and then everything was composited later) but it would give rise to unnecessary problems.

Thus, I decided to try modeling his hair using the polygon approach again, and this time, it did not turn out that bad.

James' hair - polygonal approach

As for the shop layout and design, we initially thought that a checkered floor with newly painted walls would look good. But then, the shop was having a clearance sale. It wouldn't make sense for it to look new if things were meant to be cleared out. Secondly, the checkered floor texture would look like somewhat in the process of UV mapping where one would apply the checkerboard texture. It did not look right:

Initial design of fish shop interior - fans modeled by Gregory Poon

Thus, I changed the entire look of it by making the floor wooden and the walls brown to have an old feeling to the place. There were way too many things in the scene. I had dressed the set so that it would look natural. Of course the props were done by my group mates. I tried some lighting tests using mental Ray:

Lighting test - without props

I wanted the shop to have a wet floor. It's a fish shop - there has to be water. This explains the wet looking floor above. However as you can see, there are no props rendered. This is because I turned them off. It lagged the scene and slowed it down tremendously. I decided to try it with props turned on though.

Lighting test - with props

Maya crashed eventually, stating that there was very little memory left for it to survive. So I decided to move on to tank lighting as we were running out of time.

For the tank lighting, I had to make it look like underwater. From my research and observation, I learnt that there are three things that would make a scene look like underwater:

1) Caustic Lighting
2) Atmospheric Fog
3) Floating Particulate Nature

However, I felt that due to space constraints in a tank, there normally wouldn't be atmospheric fog unless the water is murky. Hence, I took that point out. I jumped into After Effects to create that caustic light pattern as a texture which I plugged into the light in Maya. Here is an example. This is the first scene of the tank which I lit:

Image also uploaded here

This is the completed scene, rendered using mental Ray and composited in Fusion. I'll explain the breakdown in my next post as I still have to gather images to support my explanation.

Since I had time constraints, I did not try out global illumination or final gathering. I decided to stick with the traditional lighting methods of key, fill and caustic lights. For the key light, I used one directional light as the sun light. For fill lights, I used about twenty five point lights in an array with low intensity values. Lastly, I had five area lights with the caustic pattern plugged in from all directions. This is by far the most complicated light set up I've worked on.

That's it for now. I'll post more later - probably tomorrow or the day after.

Norman Georgio - 3D Character Model Complete

So I finally finished my Norman character, complete with textures and an almost fully functional rig. I spent a lot of time rigging this guy, and I managed to finish all of it except his head. I did create tongue controls by figuring out which constraints to use and by a couple of set driven keys. I did not have time to do the paint weights properly, as submission was extremely near. So here are a few snaps of my dear Norman :)

Complete Norman model



Norman rig and controls

Pose Test



Pose Test

I was trying out a few blendshapes for facial animation. Just when I thought I was going on the right track, I realised that I had rigged the head in the wrong order, thus I had to delete all my blendshapes and re-do them:

Wrong set of blendshapes

Norman Head Close-up



Norman Facial Test

Here's a short animation I did on Norman walking. I did this is roughly two hours. It's not complete yet though.

When I get more time, I'll complete this properly with animation :)