Model viewer test

Testing out a new site/plugin I heard about on the simply maya forums. Could be kind of cool to share models with. Seems promising. Click and drag around, change the shader to wireframe on shaded, etc.
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Later,
Stuart

"Physically Accurate Lighting in mental ray" from Simply Maya

I have the privilege to review a tutorial from Simply Maya called "Physically Accurate Lighting in mental ray". This is a 2.5 hr tutorial designed to get you up to speed on using the physical sun and sky system and other indirect lighting principles to light interiors (and exteriors). The tutorial starts with a solid explanation of linear workflow, which I have heard a lot of enigmatic references to but never had the courage to tackle. While the descriptions and demonstrations of linear lighting and gamma correction far from satisfied all my questions, I now feel like I have enough to go on and I will definitely try to use linear workflow on any future lighting projects. I am also curious to explore Gen's PMM Linear Lighting Buddy plugin.

The goal of this tutorial is to create a lighting setup that can be very easily modified for light at any time of day. As such, physical sun and sky figures prominently. Portal lights, final gather, and global illumination are all utilized to supplement the main lighting provided by PSS. I found the explanations of PSS and portal lights to be more detailed than FG or GI. FG and GI are often described more in many introduction to lighting tutorials.

After setting up the lighting system, the room is textured using mia_material_x and misss_fast_shader2_x exclusively. I found some of the shader connections to be quickly done and confusing, but they ended up being repeated several times, so it becomes clear what is being arranged. There are several good tips and tricks offered to both optimize render time during testing and also improve quality in the final render.

To summarize, this tutorial is not a lighting basics course. It assumes a good understanding of maya's interface and general lighting principles. The main purpose of the tutorial is to take lighting in mental ray to the next level of accuracy and realism. Explanations are well articulated, while leaving room for further study (much like a lecture can be supplemented with textbooks). The final render is rather pleasing, and it is easy to imagine applying very similar workflows to many kinds of projects. I'd highly recommend this tutorial for anyone wanting to explore linear lighting techniques and physically accurate setups.

Thanks for reading.
Stuart

Juggling Balls

Spent just a few hours experimenting with a few features in Maya I haven't used much. I like juggling, so I thought to render some juggling balls on a clean white background. Though they look like spheres, I used nCloth to give the balls just a tiny bit of sag and weight. I used image based lighting (IBL) which I'm not sure I'll use much in the future (seems too hard to control), and I added some depth of field (DOF) in PS using a zdepth render pass. DOF in post (PS) is faster than DOF in Maya, but I'd like to experiment more with both of those to see what kind of results they can give.

Maybe I'll call this the "Bad Sketch" Series: #5/1000

Later,
Stuart

Egg Campfire

I'm pleased to present my final image for the Simply Maya "Egg Photography" challenge. I had a ton of fun with this one and learned quite a bit about texturing and lighting.

I wanted to make something simple but fun and interesting. The brief was to create in CG the kind of scene that people sometimes make where they draw on eggs and pose them in frying pans etc. to create funny images. You can google "egg photography" if you don't know what I mean. I tried to picture what people would be doing around a campfire if someone took a photograph, and translate that into egg world. So, I have a tealight with matches, a mini marshmallow on a chopstick, and of course eggs with pipecleaner arms sitting on popsicle sticks.

The modelling was quite simple, since I wanted to spend more time on the texturing. I used bump maps, displacement maps, specular maps, subsurface scattering materials, fur, along with a couple textures from cgtextures.com. I used point, spot, and directional lights, light linking, fur shadowing, ambient occlusion, and shader glow (boo). The egg faces were made in illustrator, and I did a few tweaks in PS after rendering. I mentioned those things in case you have questions about how I tried to achieve something, so shoot me emails or message Biocinematics on facebook. And to show that a deceptively simple scene can have a lot going on that I needed to learn about.

This is a full 1080p render, so if you want to download it and use it, e.g. as a desktop image, go right ahead. If you do want to use it for personal enjoyment and the faint watermark bothers you, just shoot me an email and I'll give you a watermarkless version as long as I know you won't post it online or share it or sell it. I know it seems silly, but I am proud of this one and want people to be able to find my other stuff if the image gets around.

Back to school on Tuesday! Whoo!

Later,
Stuart

Egg texturing

Just a few more days before the "egg photography" challenge deadline. I've textured everything in the small scene, and am just about to embark on the challenging issue of lighting. I really wanted to focus on lighting for this challenge, although I have learned lots about texturing and some different shaders, so that was great.

Hopefully I get the final image that I have in my head. So far I'm pleased. Fingers crossed :)

Later,
Stuart

Sedan 1940

This is a stop motion animation my younger brother did a couple years ago. It's pretty cool, so I convinced him to upload it to vimeo so other people can see it. Be sure to check it out and share it with anyone you think would like it.



That represents a lot of hours. I haven't done any stop motion that ambitious before.

My egg challenge is approaching a conclusion, so I'll post some WIP shots hopefully tomorrow.

Later,
Stuart

Various projects

I've been on vacation for a couple weeks, which was really nice to get away. I posted a couple things on my facebook page without updates here, so for those that are without facebook (keep holding out!), I'll share them here too.

Update on the egg kitchen photography challenge. The deadline is Aug 31 I think.

A couple shots of the tank in progress:

Just a couple weeks before classes start again. Very excited!

Later,
Stuart

Tank modelling

Finally got back to my panzer IV modelling. I'm taking my time about figuring out the main shapes, because if those are wrong, nothing else will be right. It's still hard to figure out which components I should make separate, and which I should build as a single mesh, because in the manufacturing process, the tank started as many many separate pieces, but of course they were welded together, which is difficult to do cleanly digitally. So I'm trying to plan ahead, but that's also difficult to do without much hard surface modelling experience.

And I started on the drive sprocket (the powered wheel), because it was a little more fun.

Later,
Stuart

The "Bad Sketch" Series #3-4/1000

It's been a while since I posted any "bad sketches", my self-imposed discipline to keep practicing without fear of failure (semi-successful). I tried putting together zspheres to create a little creature I had in my head, but when I created the adaptive skin, I just couldn't put any form in it that I liked. So here is just the zsketch, and the lesson learned is to at least create a pencil sketch to work from.

I also painted a goose from one of my many photos that are not presentable as photographs, but work alright as reference. These are just half an hour to an hour.

There's been a couple of reasons why it's been so long since I last posted. I took a trip to Quebec city to visit the Centre for Neurophotonics and the researchers for whom I will be creating my Masters Research Project. It was an incredible experience, and it really restructured my focus for how I imagine the final product. Definitely need to keep on with the Unity tutorials.

I also attended the 67th Annual Meeting of the Association for Medical Illustrators. It was also very interesting and educational, and I enjoyed hearing from the speakers their perspectives, backgrounds, and ideas. E. O. Wilson and James Gurney were among the talented presenters, and I ended up buying James Gurney's latest book "Color and Light" which I hope will be helpful for my experimentation in digital painting.

I also acquired a record player and some very nice speakers, so I've been having great fun with that. I felt all cool as I laid out speaker wire and connected everything up. Looking forward to doing more sketches and some work on my egg scene and tank, and I hope you are too.

Later,
Stuart

The "Bad Sketch" series: #2/1000

Here's another sketch from ZBrush, just a few hours invested. Another alien creature (bullsquid) from half-life and this time I experimented with ZSpheres and polypainting on the mesh.

Later,
Stuart