Visual Development: Final Project

For the last three weeks of Visual Development, we were given multiple tasks to create one final piece using the objects in the scene. These included a box with a sticker and blood/dirt that we had to light and place with bump, the scraper from my previous post, and a bottle of soda that we placed a label on and created the liquid inside.

With each render of the objects, we needed to render in different passes or renders that only show one type of lighting from each render, including the full beauty pass, diffuse, reflection, refraction, indirect, and specular. Each of these passes is shown on the bottle below (which I created the textures for the glass and the liquid, plus added bubbles, dirt, and a label to the bottle).

Reflections render pass

Refraction render pass

Specular render pass

Diffuse render pass

Indirect render pass

All of these passes together lead to this final pass, or the beauty pass, which came out pretty nicely in my opinion.

Final beauty render with all passes combined

After we rendered out the bottle, we rendered each pass for the rest of the objects in the scene as well. We also rendered different lighting setups for each render, each with a different type of lighting, including Warm Light, Cool Light, and a Key Light.With all three renders, we then brought the .exr files (which contained each render pass for each type of lighting setup) into Nuke, where we shuffled out each pass. This allowed us to individually edit different passes which gave us very different results depending on what we edited. For example, editing just a specular pass allows us to change the color of the bounced light without editing the entire piece. This allowed us to create many different types of the same project. Below are my final two final pieces, the original yellowish image and my final cleaned up work.

 Original final render

Final render edited in Nuke

This class was very helpful for me in shading and lighting. Considering it's been almost a year since my last shading and lighting class, Visual Development has really helped me use new techniques in Maya, Photoshop, and Nuke that can help my renders look even better!

- Drew

Visual Development: Scraper

This month, I took two classes. One of them was Visual Development, a follow up to Shading and Lighting (nine months after the first class...). The class was essentially creating different effects on objects using one material in Maya and how the lighting on them would create different results. We also needed to properly UV an object and create a texture map for that object.

We worked on the final scene for the last three weeks of class, starting with the object we were going to texture. We were given the choice of working with a gear, or a paint scraper. I chose the scraper, because the UVs were not easy to lay out, but the textures were not too difficult to create. We first started by assigning a surface shader to the object with a number grid laid out. The purpose of this is to line up the edges of the object to create seamless lines on the scraper, so that when an actual texture is applied, the it is seamless.

The plain scraper with no textures applied

Scraper with the number grid laid out

The UVs for the scraper laid out in the 0 to 1 space, using all available space

Our next job was to take our UVs and bring them into Photoshop, where we would use the tools there to create a texture for our object. I was given basic shots of the scraper, and needed to use those to create a final texture map using the original images. Using the clone stamp tool and masking, I was able to duplicate areas of the texture to fill in areas, and also remove highlights.

  Texture for the scraper created in Photoshop

Finally, we brought our textures back into Maya and applied it onto the scraper model and adding a basic bump onto the model to give the appearance of depth.

Final render of the scraper with bump added

All in all, this project helped me learn a lot more about properly creating UV maps, as well as using tools in Photoshop to create a realistic texture from reference and applying them in Maya properly. The second half of this project will be posted soon!

-Drew