Project Evaluation

Personal development part 2 evaluation.

Second part of the personal development module gave me a great possibility to investigate some essential aspects of the 3D graphics. Critically looking at my 3D works I understood that I have to learn some very important things such as – complex modeling, sub-division, UV mapping, texturing, shading, lighting, rendering and fur. As soon as I got idea what I wanted to learn I started to think in which way I want to do it. After making some research I found out that all these things could be learnt on making one still 3D image. Immediately Krishna portrait appeared in my mind. Krishna personality attracts me a lot and his appearance so interesting that definitely could give me a good challenge. I have looked at different images of Krishna and picked those which gave me a good level of details. Some of the pictures I have used for making image planes and further modeling and other helped me a lot in understanding the shapes and the structures of certain elements. During the project development I met quite a few obstacles. In such cases I referred to the Digital Tutors, Gnomon, books and Jason. All of them gave me a great support in this project.

Even though the deadline for the personal development was moved further I still could not complete this project as I wanted. Initial idea was making it entirely in 3D, but by the end I found out that rather then just learning basics I had to go much further in shading and rendering which required much more time. Actually each of these aspects could be taken as a separate brief because of infinite depth they have. I still wanted to make this picture look aesthetic even I could not make it in Maya. That is where digital painting skill came in hand. Render which was done in Maya was painted over in Photoshop with garlands, hair, shadows and reflections.

I am still thinking to keep working on it in my own time, and investigate things that haven’t been completed.

Photoshop Retouch

For the last two days I was working on this picture trying to prepare it for submission.
I think that it looks much better thatn raw 3D model which I made in Maya.
There are still plenty of things that should go mo realistic. (as it always happens there is no limit for perefection, that is why I leave it as it is by now)Going to make a cup of tea for myself and celebrate complition of Personal Development brief :) Hare Krishna!

Finalizing

Due to the time I had to leave idea of exploring the fur shading and rendering features of the Maya. Each of those aspects requires much more time for investigation and could be taken as a separate brief.
I am still trying to make this picture look more aesthetic by retouching it in photoshop (adding some reflection, correcting the colors and etc.)

Ambient occlusion render

color render

combination of both

retouching in photoshop

Later on I want to paint some hairs as well :)

Ambient Occlusion 2

Once I have worked out how to make ambient occlusion on the simple primitives i tried to make it on my actual model. And what a surprice! mental ray doesn like my textures, it simple gives me and error mesagge saying this jpg. files are not recognizable. I have found a way around it by dublicating the scene and deleting all the materials and history of the objects (because of that i won't be able to work out if ambient occlusion works for bump maps, there are plenty of them on the crown body) Only then ambient occlusion worked well.

color

ambient occlusion

combination of both

makes a big difference to ornament elements.

Ambient occlusion

Today I have been messing around with ambient occlusion, trying to work how to use it. Want to show you some results :)

color render

ambient occlusion render

combination of both in photoshop

another example

Cloth

Just another step: clothes using nurbs curves and lofting them
Nurbs surfaces converted to polygons meshes and textured.

Sub-Divs

Some thoughts about sub-divisions.
Sub-division are quite effective in modeling organic things, if you need really smooth staff is the
good choice. But! :)
When you come to the point of texturing, you'll find it quite messy. So did I. It is really difficult to sort out UV for sub-division surfaces. Because of that I had to convert all my sub-divs to polygons in order to sort out textures. Jaison said that smoothed polygons requires less resources. Also he mentioned that mentalray has some problems in rendering sub-div. He showed me a sub-division proxy for polygon object, which could take you close to editing polygon as a sub-division.

sub-division proxy