WIP 9/30

Well all the rough textures are in place except for the powder, which still needs geo as well.  It shouldn't take too long, and a lot of it will be bump mapped.  Speaking of bump maps, I still haven't figured out why I can't get the Renderman textures to show any bump.  I'll keep researching...

WIP 9/29 - Bump

Here's the latest with the rendering today.  The background in supposed to have a bump on it, procedurally generated with a grid texture node, but for some reason nothing shows up.  I haven't figured it out yet and it is bugging me.  I have tried all sorts of things, and the tutorials online so far haven't been any help.  I need to figure this out because it is a very important tool.
Let me know what you think.

Still rough textures, work in progress

The original photo for comparison.

More textures, WIP 9/28

As of right now, I've been putting in the rough placeholder textures.  Even though some of these look good, they aren't anything as good as I hope to get them to.  I still need to refine the textures/materials so they look exactly like the materials in the picture, and then i need to add all the dirt, scratches, etc.  While going through the scene, I've not only seen some geometry issues to fix and started fixing them, but I realized a giant error I'm not sure I want to fix.  It is not easy to see, which is why it might be worth cutting the corner, but the inner brown box that holds all the tongs and scoops (and the stuff within) are supposed to be 3 boxes side-by-side, and one is at an angle.  Not sure how I missed that before, but now that I see it, fixing it involved major overhauling of part of the scene.  I might go back and do this, but not yet.  It is something I will consider, but since it took so long for me to realize it, it isn't a glaring problem.
That being said, I am also struggling with the textures.  I put a granite texture on the counter top and it is not exactly behaving as it normally does.  Renderman is treating it differently so now I have to figure out how, if there is a fix, and how to make it look right.  But for now the placeholder is fine.  All that's left is the wall, the calk, the baseboard, the jugs on top (and their liquid), the small rivets, the limes, adding the geo and textures for the powders, and the background wall, which ultimately should have a metal basket and a lemon in it, which is something else I might add later, but now yet.
Let me know what you think.
(Also I think the IT is putting things in linear space, but for some reason it put this output from rgb and converted it as if it was linear, which darkened it.  So it is too dark now :\  I'll fix that.)

Converted on-the-fly from linear to srgb

Incorrectly converted from srgb to srgb as if it was from linear to srgb, making it too dark.

Materials in Progress... WIP 9/27

Here is where I am with the first step in the materials: rough blocked in materials.  Again, no lights, unrefined textures, no dirt or grime or imperfections yet.  Just putting something basic in place so I can start the process of putting things together.  Also it will be full of noise cause it's only a test render.

Tell me what you think so far.

More learning

Again, not much to show yet... but I finished some tutorials and I'll be starting the texturing next.  I have a few blocked in materials.  My goal is to put in blocked materials, then go back and refine each one to look at realistic as possible, then go back again and add dirt. grime, grunge, etc. to mess it up a bit, and then do one more pass overall to make sure it matches close to the original photograph.  Here is the start of a very rough blocked in pass.  Lighting comes later.

Just a hint of color

Not much to report today, except I've been doing tutorials for Renderman materials.  Good stuff!  It'll take getting used to with some of the different parameters/attributes, such as presence.  Well at least here is a small section I was briefly experimenting with.  It is way too clean and not refined and has no lighting, as it is just blocking in something, mainly messing with the shaders.

Some color at last!

Tutorials abound

Update for tonight isn't as exciting as I'd like it to be.  Had Maya crash and lost a bunch of work I did.  Oops.  Should have saved.  But I decided that most of what I was doing was flailing around in the dark with Renderman.  While that sort of technique is great and all, I figured maybe I should spend some time looking at tutorials on Renderman and the like.  I learned that since the newer Renderman versions (19 and 20) have come out, they've added a whole new rendering system.  The old one was called REYES (Renders Everything You Ever Saw), and the new one is RIS.  Might as well jump into the new one for now.
One of the cool things I found out was about the unusual Image Tool... or IT for short.  It is just like the render window Maya gives you, except a separate program Renderman uses.  And it has some cool features.  By default, everything is in Linear, with easy tools to adjust for srgb.  It also has a much better image comparison system, using catalogs and wipes, so you can compare between old and new renders.  It even lets you select objects and shaders in Maya from within the IT.  Very cool!
So for today, I don't have anything newly rendered to show yet, but I have spent many hours just getting used to the new interface of Maya 2016 and the new tools in Renderman.
I have to find some more tutorials on this stuff.  If anyone knows of some I can get access to without spending money, please send me a link and I'll take a look and review what I find on here.

Life comes in waves...

As I have noted in the past personally, life and all that it brings with it tends to come in waves.  Sometimes literally.

I will not say that I have had the worst time, or even a really bad time, but I have had better.  And all these not so great things (and the great as well) have just taken time away from what I have been wanting to do: 3D art.  So a (really) quick run down of all I've been doing and all that's happened.

I went to SIGGRAPH as a volunteer in Vancouver last August.  Great fun, lots of cool people, worth the trip, but I hurt my foot pretty bad.  Then, I freelanced for a while and did the whole "looking for work" thing.  I wanted to keep working on the current file on this blog, but I was waiting for the new free Renderman to come out so I waited and worked on other things.  I will post some of it in a little while.

After a while, the freelancing ended up getting put on hold as my wife and I decided it was time to move to save money.  After all, student loans are starting to come in.  So the moving process started, and we ended up with a new place just down the road that will save us a pretty bundle every month.  I started working on a new demo reel you can find on my website, and went to the SCAD career fair in Savannah, where hurt my foot... again.

There, I got to talk with some really awesome people from Floyd County, Method, Primal Screen, Turner, and more.  Despite my foot, I had a great time and got some leads out of it.  As a result, I started to learn 3DS Max as was recommended to me.  Maya isn't the only 3D software package out there, and several companies use 3DS Max instead.

As I'm doing this, my actual move takes place.  Stressful.  Things get lost/broken/whatever as always happens during a move.  About two weeks later, I finally get my computer running again but didn't have the time to keep learning things.  Finally, Renderman comes out, I manage to download it, but got too busy with unpacking and setting things up that I didn't have time to play with it yet.

That brings me to this month.  Let's see, I volunteered for the Atlanta Film Festival, and while I had a great time, one of the patrons outright stole my jacket (the only one I have that isn't falling apart), my sunglasses (the only ones I have that weren't stolen or lost), my earphones, my car keys, my copy of my wife's car keys, my apartment key, and my mailbox key.  About $700 of replacement in all, right after the move which cost more than we planned for.  So as I am recovering from the theft, we decide to plan a house-warming party to help give us incentive to finish unpacking so we can get back to job hunting/freelancing/artwork.  We buy some new Ikea furniture for the unpacking just as I come down with a cold.  Immediately after that, I hurt my foot again.  Immediately after that... the wave literally hits.  My upstairs neighbor decides to flood her apartment, my apartment, and the apartment beneath mine.  Things are still being worked out, walls and ceiling being torn down, carpets being dried and replaced... but the real torrent of water poured like an ice-bucket challenge from a garbage bin onto my entire entertainment set up.  TV and all.  So now I've been dealing with that.  Another $5,000 bill.  Still have to work things out with her insurance.

However, I am getting fed up with all these distractions, intentional or not, major or minor.  I need to get back into things, and so I am going to make myself work on both this Renderman file (the Starbucks scene) AND learning 3DS Max (which could lead to a job).  I am going to stop letting things get in my way, and just do it!

So like I said, busy, bad luck, but not the worst by far, just distracting and time consuming.  I will be back!

WIP, Friday Sept 12th

Almost done with the modeling.  I have the top of the machine int he back to finish modeling, and there are some smaller details like screws, grout, and feet to put in, not to mention the powder in the containers, but I think I'm almost there!  I am pretty satisfied with how the blender containers and handles came out.  Still waiting for Renderman, but I might have to bypass waiting for it, and either texture and light at SCAD on campus (if I can get in), or use 3Delight or Mental Ray.  Well, we'll see what happens next week.

Tell me what you think so far.

WIP, Tuesday, Sept 9th

Well after taking a short break for the weekend (while working on other projects), I've come back to the Starbucks picture.  Right now, I am (finally) done with matching and placing the objects.  At last I've started making the refined models.  I am using a combination of subdiv and polygons (with a few NURBS).  After experimenting with the Maya 2014 feature of creases sets, which I have worked with before, I've found that while they are are useful, not everything supports it properly.  Case in point, I am planning to render this using PR Renderman (whenever Pixar releases it... they said they'd release it at SIGGRAPH but that was a month ago), so while I wait, I am using a copy of another Renderman renderer, 3Delight.  Apparently, it doesn't like crease sets that much, and there have been other issues.  But I can say this, it is a lot better and faster than Mental Ray.  I haven't gotten to texturing or lighting yet, but with a simple test at full resolution, it took Mental Ray about 1 and a half minutes to render the scene, while 3Delight actually added shadows (turning them on on the default lights) and took only 16 seconds to render the same shot.  Much faster.  So right now, I am using 3Delight, but I am hoping PR Renderman comes out soon.

Until then, here are the visual updates:

No wirefreame

With wireframe

As you can see, I have refined the models of the nozzles in the foreground, as well as the lid in the foreground to the left (also added the indents), refined the cups in the tower, remodeled the containers in the center with better lids and more details, as well as the pumps on them, and the handles sticking out of the containers behind them.  I am hoping tomorrow to finish modeling the containers in the stand, the pitchers on top of the larger case, and get cracking on the machine int he background.  One large challenging piece for that will be the odd-shaped structure on the top of it, which I have mainly avoided for the rough placement, but will need to be figured out and addressed soon.  Once that is done, I will do a once over on the models and their placement, and finally get started on shading and texturing.

I also have plans to start modeling a minor character, from Dexter's Laboratory, as a practice on modeling a character and texturing it.  It should be easy, but will let me explore Mari some more.  More on that later.

Eggs-hausted!

Ok, it's 4 in the morning... and I JUST finished rendering my Egg project after a lot of hard work and fighting with my computer to render.  I just wanted to make a quick post to show the final product.  What I was supposed to do was make an image that looked like this:

Original Photograph

This is what I got (trust me, I'd spend more time on this if I could, but I am too tired and need sleep, and my back hurts...):

3D Render

Plant Shader

One of my final projects was to create a "shader" in Renderman for a plant.  The idea of a shader is essentially all the colors and patterns of a surface as well as the way the light interacts with it.  In short, it is a tool that the user adjusts that makes 3D objects look like what they represent.  So a rock will have a rock shader, a tree with a tree shader, and so on.  But in reality, these shaders are rarely so specific.  Most shaders are adjustable to look like a variety of things, and you can stack things on top of each other to change the look.  It gets really involved actually.  But to actually write a shader out by hand means you have far more freedom to make something look exactly like what you want, and for a very specific purpose.  As such, we were learning how to make an organic plant shader.  We actually had to go out and buy plants to study the patterns and figure out how to recreate the look with a coded shader.

I admit my shader is not as refined as I would like it to be.  I intend to take it further and add what are called "octaves", which is really just another level or two of detail, to really refine the shader.  I also want to refine the controls, but overall I am pleased with what I was able to come up with.  I would love to learn how to implement things like image based lighting and ambient occlusion into the shader, so I may have to study this on my own.  There is so much more to learn for shader writing, and I really enjoyed it so I wouldn't mind diving into this more.

So for now, here is a final render of my shader.  All aspects of it (including the interaction of light and shadow, the transmission of light, the backside colors, and so much more) are developed by me, and I hope to take it further.

Enjoy!

Patterns and Tartans and Weaves, oh my!

Short post for now...
So back to the shader writing, I have finished a shader (which may still need editing) that has been inspired by weaves, tartans, and patterns.  I used sine waves to make subtle patterns in the background, diagonal lines, and layers and layers of stuff.
This was harder to make than it looks, plus it is editable in Maya so you can change things like the colors and the thickness of the stripes.

Enjoy

An Intro to Shader Writing

So lately, I've been learning how to do shader writing.  What does that mean?  Well for anyone who uses Maya (or any other 3D software), the shader is the thing that lets you apply a texture or color to your geometry, and interacts with the lights in the scene, such as spec highlights, diffuse, glow, incandescence, etc...  Lambert, Phong, Blinn, and Phong E are all examples of shaders.  What I am just starting to learn is how to write my own shaders.  Eventually, I can even set these up so you can plug in the variables for the Maya users to adjust, to make it user friendly.
Right now, it really just looks like a grid, well a weave at this point, which isn't like any other shader I just mentioned.  It has none of the light-interaction controls yet, and the other shaders don't control patterns like this one does.  However, this is just a learning tool.
It has been really fun to program so far, and there is still more to do on it, but I figured I'd post what I have so far and let people see.  I plan to add more colors, and maybe another pattern to this.  We'll see how it turns out.

In other news, I have been doing some serious Photoshop editing, but I'll go into that on another post.  The long and short of it is, I haven't really learned any new tools in Photoshop since I started, but I did learn some techniques I have never used before (which is what i was hoping to learn).  I kind of wish I could take their advanced Photoshop class to really dive into it.  We'll see.

Snow globes

Just in time for Christmas.... oh wait, isn't there another Holiday or 2 between now and then?  Ah who cares about those holidays, we all know the only holiday that counts is the one where people spend the most money.  At least that's what stores seem to think.  Honestly I love Halloween and Thanksgiving, but for my latest project in my Renderman class (VSFX 319), we had to model snow globes.  While one girl in class actually did do a Halloween themed snow globe, I couldn't help but equate snow globe with Christmas.  So I decided to model Santa's Workshop.

The assignment was specifically to learn IBL (Image Based Lighting), which is a way of taking a very specific image (HDRI) of an environment and putting it in a scene, allowing the computer to calculate the lighting of the scene based on the values in the image.  It's kind of like taking an environment and putting it into your scene.  Sounds magical, but it is really not going to look right.  Imagine taking motion capture data and just leaving the raw data on the character and displaying that in a movie... it doesn't look good, trust me.  Animators need to adjust and tweak and fix the raw data into something that looks good and suitable for the character.  Just like that, I have to take this IBL and tweak it, add lights, adjust values, etc. to make the lighting look realistic like the object belongs in the scene.

We also had to use a specific Global Illumination technique, and actually got to play with 2 methods of it.  One uses Point Clouds to calculate illumination and occlusion, while the other uses ray tracing.  The point cloud based method is faster, stores the data to speed up processing later on, and developed by Pixar, but prone to inaccuracies.  The raytracing method is longer, but more accurate.  I used a hybrid technique where I raytraced, and then stored the data to speed up the processing.  It took about an hour and a bit to render these, but it was surprising to see some students with render times ranging from 20 minutes to over 4 hours!

I haven't quite dialed in the lighting all the way yet, and I am still working on the camera focal length (so expect more updates on this one later), but for now, I am relatively pleased with the results of my work, but I'm not going to leave it there.  For now, though, enjoy these three images.  Ho ho ho.

Teapots and Ribs. Yum!

This quarter I have been taking a Renderman class.  Well, it is technically PR Renderman (Photo Real Renderman), which is really just a production ready and incredibly powerful rendering tool.  It is used by a lot of large studios, and developed by (surprise) Pixar.

Right now, we are programming in scene description files, known as "ribs", which is like coding a scene by hand, geometry, lights and all.  It is actually rather challenging, but fun when you get used to it.  But it is slow, not fast at all, but knowing how the codes work is really useful.

Our latest assignment was to make a scene with a teapot, and some of the student's works were spectacular!  And yes, these were all HAND CODED (although we did get to use Cutter to help).  I decided to use this year's Renderman Walking Teapot toy I got from SIGGRAPH 2013 as reference, but the shapes were too complicated for me to figure out in the short time we had.  So I used it as inspiration, and made it my own.

The concept I had for this piece was to make it look like a toy tea set, since I used a toy as inspiration.  There is more I would like to do to this, but for right now, I am rather happy with what I have.  Feel free to leave feedback or comments!