Potato beetle

Rudy Boyang Zhao is animating the beetle for the cinematic now. I really wanted to have a go at animating but it was too much to take on at this stage and im best spending more time on lighting. I finished modeling and texturing the beetle. Im finding the beetle a real challenge as most of its texture is in the shader settings.

Lighting technique

After spending a week experimenting/pulling my hair out with point lights and mental-ray options like final gather and global illumination i found out about jeremy vickery's workshop he did with Gnomon. Not to be mixed up with his practical light and colour dvd. I took parts from his teachings and came up with a technique that can be applied to most scenes. I add a spot or directional light with raytracing for outdoor sunlight. Plug the mib_amb_occlusion1 into all my shaders. I can then control the colour and level from either the dark or bright of the occlusion. I set this down low as a base colour/light and then use area lights to paint in the rest. I re-did the final room with this approach as well as the hallway at night and got some pretty nice and quick results. Both were done day after watching the tutorial.

The textures are looking alot better and i dont have any nasty shadows. Also theres a decent gradient from light to dark. Check out the blue colour near to the window areas. Adam recommended this to me a couple of weeks ago. I also added some spec to some of the frame parts and the skirting. Im looking forward to seeing this room once i get the broken glass dirt textures done this week.

You cant see the window walls but theres some nice bounce light. In general i place a area light coming from where ever light is cast, one facing up and one down. One facing down replicates the light and the one facing up is bonce light.






Im finding this the best technique. I want to learn more about how light reacts in the real work rather than how to switch on a button in mental ray settings. Bounce light been key to both a believable and/or cinematic scene. As i found out with textures, build a base and work from there.

Lighting experiments

Last render

Ive been experimenting with lighting the final room last week. I changed the directional to a spot light for the light cast on the floor. I didnt have the as much control with the directional to soften the ray-tracing. Theres also some colour been added with spot lights positioned to also create the darker edges. Blue spot lights have to be added to create the colour of the sky on the carpet but i am moving on for the moment to finish lighting the rest of the hospital. The glow on the floor and the flare of the light through the windows will have to be done in post. Below are some renders building up to the one above.

I also have broken glass modeled in the windows that i plan to experiment plugging a transparent dirt map into.

Same lights for floor and walls

Separate lights for floor

Orange colour added to spot lights

Mix of colours

Texturing

Garry's carpet texture

Garry Whitton has joined the project as lead texture artist. A major part of this project is the learning process. Garry has been teaching me his technique which is a more random but also well though out style...faking randomness found in nature.

My texture...Garry's technique

To the left is a texture of the blue carpet i made following Garry's technique. Below is a texture of the door boarders. This was created a bit different, following patterns in the wood rather than random patterns.

Following wood patterns

Peer review - modeling and textures

Renders and screenshots of modeling and texturing on the project from last week's peer review. Garry Whitton is now working on the project as lead texture artist. He is working on walls and floors while im working on all the extras like skirting boards and door boarders etc.  Peer review was not as heavy as last time, at this stage in the year its just about getting on with our porjects.

Final project schedule

Weeks starting on:

June 20th - Modelling rooms and texture

June 27th - Texture rooms and model beetle

July 4th - Texture and lighting

July 11th - Lighting and model hospital bed

July 18th - Camera and rig beetle

July 25th - Animation

August 1st - Render and composite set-up

August 8th - Composite

August 15-17th - Final composite and render

Lighting and rendering tutorial

I finished working on the DT lighting and rendering tutorial for low resolution environments using the cryolab from a previous tutorial. This was completed after the maya lighting basics and practical light and colour theory with Jeremy Vickery. Many of the techniques in this tutorial will be handy for my final project.

• Ambient occlusion
• Render time practices
• Setting up lights in a scene from a source
• Lens shader node and gamma correcting textures
• Specular highlights
• Incandescence textures
• Volumetic steam and smoke