Image Based Lighting and more

So last time I showed some photographs I took studying light, specifically time of day outdoor light changes.  I have been working on a short animation that involves an outdoor shot of a market as the sun sets.  Right now it is suffering from rendering errors that our renderfarm occasionally puts in, so my next step is to fix all those.  I also have a slight displacement problem, but the other big factors include the light colors and positions of the street lights.  I have a lot of work to do to make this scene work, but once it is finished, it will look really nice.

Time of Day lighting test 4 from David Hixon on Vimeo.

But that isn't all I've worked on.  I have also been taking this to another level and creating a scene that uses actual photographs and actual light information from the environment and integrated by own CG element into the scene.  In other words, like action plate CG integration.  I went out and took a series of images at SCAD Atlanta's DMC, where I captured "background plates" and environment maps.  These environment maps are made as HDRI so they hold more information than a regular image, and are then manipulated in a program called HDR Shop to fit into my CG scene.  I can then use this to capture the light information in the scene to capture the ambient light, and then tweak it from there.  I also had to render in passes, so I could isolate everything from the shadows to the reflection of the chairs to the ambient occlusion.  I finally used Nuke to composite it back together, and voila!  Movie magic!

 
Image Based Lighting with CG Character Integration from David Hixon on Vimeo.

But that's not all!  I've been a REALLY busy bee.  I can't show anything currently from my last 2 projects I've been working on (not to mention math), but you can check out my other blog to see updates to my senior film, Last Light, at LastLightFilm.blogspot.com.  Besides working on my film, I have been lighting and rendering and compositing Michelle's film, Leaping Place.  It continues to be a challenge, but this entire thing must be done in one week, so it's crunch time!  I'll update more on that later!

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.

Photo Preview

Today I have for you a preview of my final project in my photography class.

The final project in this class is to take a photographer (or other artist), and either try to mimic their style and work, or improve on it.  Since I would rather learn from others, and not show them up, I chose to mimic a photographer.  After much searching, my wife and I found Michael Eastman.  Michael Eastman began taking pictures in 1972, and his work is really impressive!  He has done a series of different subjects, from Americana to horses to abstract to Cuba.  His images have a certain aesthetic appeal I really like, and I find that his study of reflective, refractive, transmitting of light in a city at night is intriguing, bordering on abstract, but with a certain sense of place.  You look at things you see everyday in a new way, or at things people never notice at all that's right in front of them.

Usually his images are of textures and play of light.  I have to wonder how he gets into all these places, but I really enjoy his work.  I spent the better part of a weekend (with some planning beforehand) taking pictures around Atlanta.  Here is a preview of some of these images.

I will also be using a similar aesthetic to follow is Vanishing America series, contrasting the big city with rural country.

In the end, I have to pick a grand total of 10, so that's around 5 for each study.  But what I really care about in this is keeping consistant with te aesthetic and building some good photography samples for my demo reel.

Enjoy!

Diner

So you remember yesterday how I showed you all a sneak peak of my project for today... well I finished everything and it looks great!  I plan to do more with this though, but I am satisfied with where I got it for now.
In this scene, I modeled the background, the bottles, the cups, the plates, the ketchup  the salt and pepper shakers... pretty much everything except the chairs (which you can barely see), the bottle caps (which I adjusted for my scene), and the flatware (which I also adjusted).  All the textures (with the exception of the photograph in the back) were made by me.  With the exception of the labels, they are all procedural.
This project was specifically designed to show reflection and refraction, which is why almost everything in the scene has some of this on it.
In the future, I plan to adjust the plate thickness, adjust the brightness of the glasses, add some wear and tear, model a booth, fix the background, and give it all new lighting.  I also plan to take this into Nuke, and do some post production composite work on it.
Again these are all NURBS (which the exception of the table and salt shakers, and the things I didn't model), which are really underrated.  NURBS can be used for so many different things, and or really great tools to use, I am surprised more people don't use these.  I would like to learn for Subdivision modeling on my own, but for now, NURBS are doing a fantastic job.  I am also really pleased with the way the table came out and the Coke bottle.  The ketchup was also fun to do and very effective.
So enjoy my newest render.  I will post more when I make edits to it in the future.

Now I'm hungry...