After being frustrated with Mentalray for a few weeks, I’ve decided to start experimenting with VRay. VRay is… pretty amazing.

I’ve been continuing my tree experiments using VRay. VRay’s Sun&Sky system is much nicer than Mentalray’s system and VRay has this crazy useful two-sided material for flat two dimensional planes… such as leaves. Here’s what I managed to cook up over the weekend:

I’m still working out some kinks in my new tree workflow. If I get to a good place, I’ll post a full breakdown in a few days.

I experimented with subsurface scatter based shaders for plant leaves today! I’m still working on it, so I won’t be writing up what I’ve found until a bit later. But for now, here’s what I’ve managed to get!

The grass is just Maya fur with a custom shader (woot subsurface scatter!) and the tree is modeled after a Japanese Maple and was made the same way as the one I posted a few days back.

Back to exploring!

Every couple of months I find myself trying to make trees again in Maya. Today I found myself tackling the tree problem yet again…

I’ve found that using XFrog’s plant modeler program is my favorite way to create base meshes for plants. It sure as heck beats hand modeling all of those leaves… Speaking of models and leaves, the method I’ve settled on for tree leaves is to just use planes where the leaves should go and then make the planes look like leaves through alpha mapping.

Anyhoo, here’s where I managed to get tonight:

The displacement on the bark is really really weird right now and the color of the leaves is weird too. I think I’m going to try subsurface scattering on the leaves… see if that helps. More updates later…

So… after interviewing with Paul Kanyuk from Pixar, I’ve decided to update my reel a bit…

Breakdown is here (PDF).

So why the updated reel? Interviewing with Paul and chatting with the other two people from Pixar that visited Penn was a really interesting. Paul had a lot of suggestions for my work during our interview, so I’ve decided to go ahead and incorporate a lot of the changes that Paul suggested.

So changelog time!

Overall Changes:

• New song! The new song is an instrumental version of Baby Universe from the We Love Katamari OST. As usual, the version of the reel I’m actually sending out to studios for internships has not music, though.
• I’ve replaced “Postcards from Prague” with a new project, “Chairs”
• Shuffled around the order of some pieces.

Apples:

• Recomposited with slightly better z-depth using a new depth of field plugin for After Effects I found called Frischluft Lenscare. Apparently Alex Roman uses it, and if Alex Roman uses it, then gosh golly I’d better give it a try. Hahaha.
• Slightly tweaked color grading
• There’s a little more footage of the second shot of the apples bouncing than there was in the previous reel

Hermit Crab:

• Recomposited with tweaked ambient occlusion in the turntable. Paul pointed out that there were some odd light leaking issues on the underside of the shell’s opening, so I’ve increased the intensity of the AO there to try to make it a bit darker.
• Fixed a small problem with the transition between the Untextured Lambert and the Fully Textured parts of the turntable

White Room:

• Every shot’s depth of field has been redone using Frischluft Lenscare
• The first shot of the underside of the stairs was lengthened, rerendered, recomposited, and re color graded.
• The second shot has new color grading and altered AO.
• The third shot was rerendered with new contrast settings and re color gaded.

Clock:

• Paul pointed out that a major flaw with the clock was that the highlight on the glass washed out everything under the glass, so I fixed that by changing the reflective properties of the glass slightly and giving the glass more of a curve to break up the highlight
• Turntables were sped up to help the reel’s overall pacing
• Textures on the clock face are sharper than before

Raincoat Girls:

• Turntable was rerendered to get rid of the light blue band that appeared partway through the turntables in the previous reel
• Environment shots were re color graded

Look! I finally cut together a demoreel!

I’m getting interviewed by PIXAR! Actually, Pixar gets a slightly different version of my reel. The Pixar version simply has no music… they’re not very big fans of music in demoreels, apparently.

Which is why I got off of my lazy bum and finally cut a reel together.

Oh, I have a reel breakdown too! Check it out here (PDF).

The song in my reel is “I Like Van Halen Because My Sister Says They Are Cool” by El Ten Eleven. I’ve recut it slightly to fit the length of the reel.

I also finally put together a personal site thing at www.yiningkarlli.com.

Speaking of new sites… I should probably get around to redesigning Omjii.com soon. Hm.

Earlier this week my mom gave my roommates and me a ginormous sack of apples, so I’ve been eating apples all week. Which is good, because I love apples.

So I had an apple sitting on my desk, and I had Maya open, and I was a little bit bored, so… I made some apples in Maya!

Over the past few months I’ve developed a bit of an… odd… workflow for texturing/shading irregularly shaped objects (apples… muddy boots… hermit crabs…). I start with modeling and whatnot in Maya, as usual:

Then I go into Photoshop and use various reference (images found online, photos taken with my Nikon D60, etc) to paint a tile of the texture I want. For example, for the apples I took some photos of the apples and then extracted textures from the photos to create this texture tile:

Next, I bring the object mesh and the texture tile into Mudbox and use Mudbox’s projection stencil tool to paint the mesh using the texture tile as the stencil. The nice thing about bringing things into Mudbox for texturing is that I don’t really have to worry too much about UV mapping. Mudbox will automagically take care of all of the UV stuff as long as the imported mesh doesn’t have any overlapping UV coordinates. So instead of messing with the UV editor in Maya before texturing, I can just use Maya’s Automatic UV mapping tool to make sure that no UVs overlap and bring that into Mudbox. After painting in Mudbox, I got a texture image like this:

After texture painting in Mudbox, deriving spec and bump maps in Photoshop is a relatively straightforward affair. Once texturing and shading is done, I render out the beauty pass and z-depth pass and other passes…

…and bring all those passes into After Effects for compositing and color grading, and I’m done!