Final Project - Corner

These are screenshots over my final project. I focused on lighting and rendering, as well as modeling. Since I am not a strong texturer or UVer yet, I made the choice to use flat colors for each of the pieces and just focus on lighting. I am very pleased with the result.

First off, I wanted to make a shag carpet using mental ray proxies. This didn't work how I expected, and nobody on any forums got back to me in time for me to make it work, so I shelved the idea. These two pictures are ones I put up asking for help.

This was my preliminary design. It was going to be a room with a lowered section, fireplace, rug, and very large windows. There were going to be plants in the areas by the pillars. I forgot to save and closed this scene, and it was too big anyway so I scrapped it. Maybe I will make something like this during the summer, because I like the design.

This was my more condensed, corner design. I started with a curved fireplace made out of bricks, as well as a way too modern looking bookshelf. I found the design for the bookshelf online and I quite like it, so I may use it in a different project.

The brick fireplace was just too annoying to move and rotate everything, so I didn't do that idea.

This is skipping head a fair bit, but here I am making one of the focal points of my scene, the Morris chair. I learned about this in my History of Design class, and I loved it. I looked up blueprints to make my own here in Maya. I made a full chair, then decided to remake it with a different frame which I liked better.

This was my reference for the second chair I made. I really liked the curved arms.

Here it is with some cushions.

During some downtime while we were working on the Unity project, I decided to go into keyshot to see what I could do without knowing really how to do anything in keyshot. I am very happy with how this looks, aside from the wood looking kind of weird on the footrest.

Major progress on the scene, this is it mostly done. The chair is in there, as well as a new fireplace, books, a candle, the window, the painting, logs, grate, etc. This is pretty much all the props in the scene. Below are renders in the order I took them while I was working on it. The last two are with very high quality settings turned on; on my computer the last two took about 7 and 5 minutes to render, respectively.

Also in the final pictures, I added a skydome with a snowy sky texture. It may not even be visible, but it's there.

Overall, I really really enjoyed this project and I'm really pleased with how it looks. Working with lighting in any program is enjoyable to me, and I really like making scenes that I try to make look "lived in." This is the kind of project that I spend time during the summer making just because I enjoy doing it.

Edit: My final renders looked good on my computer, but they are very dark on here. I will update this with better lit renders.

Introduction to mental ray

These are the final renders saved directly from Maya for the introduction to rendering course.

Part way through, on the tutorial for gamma color correcting, I think I messed something up. My renders came out very washed out all the time, though now looking at these pictures it doesn't look as bad. I think the renderer was showing it as one output and saving it may have disregarded that. The dropdown in the render view was set to sRGB gamma which I believe it always is, but since the settings have changed between the tutorial and now, I must have messed something up deeper in the settings. Also, evidently the saving from Maya does not take the background. That might be a setting I left unchecked.

Here's a mia_material with reflectivity so that at an angle, you can see the skyline. The skyline was also visible in the top half when I rendered this.

The previous two were working with area lights, using unified sampling, and detailing how to reduce noise as well as some other things. Again, the background was not white in the render.

This was about where the renders started coming out very washed out, but they don't seem as bad in these pictures. I'm not sure what's up.

This one as well looks decently good but in the render view on Maya, it looked very washed out and noisy.

This is from the lesson on rendering displacement maps. It looks really good.

The previous two were pictures from the section on image based lighting. The lighting appeared to stay, yet the image is gone.

This is from the video on making caustics patterns and again, no background image and the image itself looks far less washed out than it did on my render view. 

this is from the lesson on subsurface scattering which came out looking good in my render view. Not sure why this one chose to come out okay, but either way, I gave up on the last two since they were so washed out and didn't look very much like the finished results from the instructor.

I liked learning about mental ray, because it's what I always render in in Maya. It's good to know more tricks about it to make things look more photorealistic. One thing I wish this had addressed though, is if there is a way to make a realistic night sky using the realistic sun and sky. I will be looking that up myself.

Introduction to Lighting

These are pictures from the Introduction to Lighting course. I was just going over my blog and noticed they were missing -- I had done them a few weeks ago but saved them onto my hard drive and not my flash drive so I completely forgot to put them up!

This is placing a point light, something I've done plenty of times.

This is working with a spotlight, again something I've done plenty of times

this is using the panels menu to look through a spotlight to aim it. I've done this before too.

This is the spotlight gizmo with all the different ways to transform it visible. I prefer to make those transformations in the attribute editor.

this is changing the direction of the spotlight by using the gizmo you can pull up by pressing T, which lets you move the focus point.

This is the working with ambient light lesson.

The last four images have been going over and showing the differences of ray-traced shadows and depth-map shadows.

This is showing the ability to control what renders. There is an orange shader ball to the left of the blue one, but at the moment it can only be seen in the reflection of the blue ball.

This is the lesson on simulating illuminated light sources.

The previous two are showing light and shadow linking.

This is showing the "gobos" you can use, which basically cast shadows even though nothing is there.

This is showing light fog, which are forming "godrays" from the window.

This is showing lens flare

This is from the lesson on controlling lighting reflection and depth.

3DS Max: Rigging

These are pictures going over the introduction to rigging lessons in 3ds Max.

For the first 4 pictures, I'm working from the first lesson project file. I then switch to the corresponding project file for each lesson to make sure I didn't mess anything up that would prevent me going forward.

These are the leg and feet/toe bones

These are the bones of the core - the head and torso, and the pelvis.

This is a picture of the head and eye bones sticking out of the character (I should have shown this in wireframe mode)

This is a picture of lining up the arm bones.

These are 4 controllers that can be selected to easily move the corresponding parts of the body -- the chest and pelvis, for instance.

This is a global control, so you can select this to move the entire character. It's useful for animating if the character moves in the scene because you can just move that around.

This is just showing that the bones of the hand work, and move the character model with them.

These are the bones of the fingers

This is showing that the chest control moves the character model with it.

These are the eye controls, and this shows that the eye moves with the control.

This is the arrow that will be used as a clavicle control.

These are the leg controls. The cube was just copied from the arm controls.

These are the feet controls, with the parameter editor.

This is the hand/wrist control, and the parameter editor for it. I have circled that in this lesson, we changed the range from -360 to 360 to give a lot of freedom in it's range of movement.

This is the (slightly complicated) parameter wiring box.

This is from the lesson that goes over rotation order, which we touched on in the Maya tutorials where they talked about the same thing, as well as what Gimball lock is. However, when I opened the project files for this one, I wasn't able to replicate the problem of rotating one direction too far messing up the other directions. I guess that's a good problem to have.

Here's the parameter wiring box again, with the eyes selected.

These are finger controls from the "animator friendly finger controls" lesson.