Finalizing 2nd Project

The main difference between my first and second project lies in the materials used. The Balloonman scene employed mostly matte, non-reflective surface, and lambert served best for all of them. And that also made the lighting much simpler as well. Basically, I didn't have to worry about having glare or unintended reflection.

This second project; a setting from Ratatouille, is a whole different story. Being a scene in the kitchen, there are lots and lots of shiny, gleaming objects. Starting from ceramic, aluminum, iron, copper up until old bronze. Each has different characteristic, and this requires detailed adjustment. 

For most of metal objects, I use phong e.  There is a big old boiler in the corner, and this one needs even more 'shiny-ness'; so I put reflection mapping (in the channel box editor, click on the checkered box right side of 'Reflection'). This works beautifully for the whole body. Note: ideal image for reflection mapping is scenery image, for instance beach with sand and blue sky.

Note for other materilas:

Matte-aluminum : phong e, reduce reflection and diffuse.

Glass : blinn, adjust reflectivity and transparency. Increase specular color for shiny bottles.

Problem: black spots appear on reflective surfaces.

Possible cause: corrupt lights. Apparently (according to CG talk forum) this is common problem with mental ray dealing with reflective surfaces.

Possible solutions: re-do the lighting. (Which I didn't have time for)

First trial

Second trial-putting glow

Sixth trial-abandon glow, put in reflective mapping

Ninth trial - adjusting lights

Tenth trial-Final Scene

Second Project : Photo Realistic Scene

For the second project I've decided to rebuild one of the amazing set in Ratatouille. Just one corner of the old kitchen, with all the porcelain jars, bronze railing, metal boiler and other distinctive kitchen equipments.

Just a moment after start sketching the preview, the meticulous details have come up to the surface. There's so much fine features in every object, it's clear this will take so much time, not mention patience.

To get to familiar with the objects I made little drawing of them (sometime I made up the details in my own perception). This helps a lot when it comes to modeling; I found it's better to have a reasonable amount of understanding about the object and its environment before starts modeling. It will make the modeling process a lot quicker too.

Because there are a lot of roundish object, such as bowls, plates, jars, cans, etc, I used a lot of Surface/Revolve technique. This works better when we have a precise-shaped curve, with sufficient amount of dots/vertex, but not too much that it makes it hard to manipulate. Some practice with Curve tool will get us the knowing of effective use of dots.

At this stage I have the basic interior and several objects ready. Next thing would be texturand material research.

The Crow by Psychology Operation

I was directed to this video couple of weeks ago by some video enthusiasts. I read the designer's note about the making of it, and completely fell in love with the visual.

This video was made for MTV HD, and apparently the agency wasn't given a definite brief on how it should look like. The request was just 'it should looks cool and speaks of HD'. I agree with the designer that this was a nightmare-ish brief, since the visual could take any kind of shape and leads to practically anywhere.

But their idea in combining the concept of classical music and graphic in this production was interesting. The first thing I noticed in the video was the continuity of graphical elements and colors. Well, there are only 2 colors, black and white, but the way those two played out was very powerful.

Crows, as we know them, are naturally black and a bit mysterious. Put them against bleak landscape of black and white barren trees, and we'll get a nice visual tension. That's the starter. But the idea goes beyond nice visual; if we pay attention to the music, it's a re-composition of Moonlight Sonata by Beethoven. The melody of this music is very beautiful, sad and daunting. Flowing on and on, forming and re-forming, breaking and joining, and brings out the mesmerizing effect on the listener.

The visual elements perfectly captivate and reflect this concept. Sometimes 2 dimensional, sometimes beautifully 3 dimensional HD, the variety of images flowing through the sequence, joining, dividing, forming and re-forming. The artwork of the HD 3D crow was of course very impressive and life-like, but for me the actual work of art here is the ability of the designer to create a successful marriage of music, motion and graphic that re-captures the nature of a life form: Crow.

Images from www.psyop.tv/

Images from www.psyop.tv/

Images from www.psyop.tv/

See the video here.

Final Stage - The Balloonman Project

Finally, the first project is done. The end part, lighting and texturing, was very hard. Lighting is tricky, and one thing very important when we're in this stage of modeling is: ALWAYS SAVE THE FILE EVERY STEP OF THE WAY. Because you might get a very nice effect of light once, and you think you would just play around a bit more. But then you end up with something you don't quite like, and you can't remember the earlier perfect setting, and you just can't get it back. Argh!

But anyway. Here's Mr. Balloonman in all his glory, boozing and dozing his time away, in dirty corner of a dodgy kind of street.

Notes:

1. Lighting used: 4 points lighting. Main light: directional light from the right (yellow). Second light is point light from above (slightly to the right as well), also with yellow-reddish tint. The other 2 are area light at the left to brighten up the dark corner between boxes and the pipe and a low light (directional light) on the down-right corner.

2. Light effect: Foglight for the point light above, and fractal noise in the color of the keylight.

3. Texture and UV map: automatic mapping with 3 sides for Mr.Balloonman (with much, much adjustment later on). I split him into 2 sections, top and bottom to make it a bit easier to deal with. The other objects are very much straight forward.

4. Glass effect: I use Blinn material with a very dark color, almost black. Turn on the specular shading, eccentricity 0.091, Specular roll off 1, Specular color: light green, reflectivity 0.165. No other special effect.

First Fogging Try Out

Lighting Attempt-1

Lighting Attempt-9

The Almost Finished Stage

Final Texture and Lighting

Bump Map Fiasco

In the course of finalizing my Balloonman project, I was so bumped by the bump map. To me, it is so tricky to get the hang of.  Especially if we have complicated model with 'organic' shape (like Mr. Balloonman) that needs to be mapped correctly, so that I can place whatever features I want to be in his surfaces, in the right places.

Up to this day I still can't get the UV map work smoothly for my Ballonman, but that is for another post. This one is my note in my attempt of getting to know bump map and a bit of lighting effect.

1. So I worked with basic forms, polygonal spheres, to make it easy. I created a simple scene with 2 spheres, a wall and a floor.

2. I added bump map (cloth texture and leather), and rendered it without changing anything. As we can see, the result was horrible.

3. And so I began to manipulate the bump depth, bump value and 'Repeat UV' in the 'place2DTexture' tab. Cloth and leather each has different parameters, and so it took me a while to get to know what each parameter corresponds to.

4. The second render with the bump map adjusted was much better.

5. To get a better view of the objects, I added more lights. Here I put 3 lights (only 2 shows in the picture): the right one is area light, the top one is point light, and there is one on the left, a directional light.

6. Next I played around with their colors and effects. For directional light I use green, while point light is blue and area light is kind of pale purple.

7. I also put fog effect in the point light, and later a fractal noise in its color. The result is quite crazy as we can see here.

8. Up until this point I've been rendering with Maya software. Just to see the difference, I adjust the shadow and put the rendering configuration to mental ray. The shadows and edges are much better.

Toy Modelling Exercise-Chicken

I stumbled into this video tutorial when I did my research for the first project. The guy in this tutorial explained how to create a chicken toy using NURBS, in a quite simple way.

I didn't know much about NURBS modeling, so it was a good thing to try this tutorial.

Several things I learned in during the exercise:

1. NURBS has an isopharm, which actually acts like a zipper. We can open and close the object by manipulating the isopharm.

2. Because of that, pay attention about the placing of your model. By that I mean front, back and side should correspond with X, Y and Z axis correctly.

3. Also plan well where we're going to place the isopharm. If we have the kind of model where 2 sides are geometrically symmetric (like this chicken toy), we can use the isopharm to split the model exactly in half. We then create a dynamic copy of the half and flip it in opposite direction. And from that point we just need to work on the original half; the copied part will mimic whatever changes we've done exactly in the opposite direction. Pretty neat, hm?

4. Of course, there will be the business of joining those two halves together again, that was quite tricky. For some reason my chicken didn't do what the guy's chicken did in the video. It wasn't closed very properly, I guess. But I haven't figured out what went wrong.

Anyway, this is the chicken about half way. Once I finish it, I'll be back and post it here. 

See the video tutorial here .

Human Hand Exercise

This was an independent exercise I did during week 3-4 into the 2nd semester, from Maya tutorial. The point in this activity was to learn greater ability to manipulate surfaces through 'Refining Surface Component' feature.

The object to be created in the exercise was a human hand. I have always thought that hands are the most difficult parts of a human body to imitate, even in 2D illustration. There are so much subtle ridges, creases, curves and corners; and maybe that's why this was a perfect sample to demonstrate Refining Surface Component method.

The exercise began by creating a polygonal cube in a form slightly similar to the base of our left hand. Then we converted it into subdivision surface, split the faces and extrude 5 digits out of the base to form fingers. To mold this mesh into a hand form, we can switch between polygon and subdivision service tools, as we need it.

Once the basic form was done, we then continue to deal with more subtle details such as in fingernail region. This part needs more accuracy, and this was where we got into Subdiv Surfaces/Refine Selected Components. This option will present us with several levels of precision, from 0-2 (2 being the most detailed). By navigating between this options, we have greater command in manipulating small areas with a lot of details.

Unfortunately I just managed to get 1 finger done, and hadn't had the chance to continue ever since. This exercise took a long time and patience to get it right, for sure.