Okay, I’m close to finished with the face…

I’ve decided not to give her eyelashes. They didn’t look very good. I also noticed that in some Pixar characters, Pixar chose to keep the lips the same color as the rest of the skin… I kind of like that style choice, so I’m going to steal it (read: Karl is too lazy to paint lips).

I’m working on a character model right now loosely based on this sketch. Here’s how the cloth simulation stuff is looking right now:

There is still much work to be done.

I haven’t managed to make any progress on actually finishing this project since my last post, but I have had a bit of time to play with ambient occlusion and z-depth mapping. So… same render as before, but now with depth of field and some ambient occlusion:

…and the z-depth map:

…and the ambient occlusion map. I did the leaves on the trees by transparency mapping the planes where the leaves went on the model, but because of that I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to ambient occlude the trees. So I removed them for the ambient occlusion map:

I actually found an alternate way to render out the z-depth map, but I’m not entirely sure this is as physically accurate as the standard way Maya does z-depth:

Hopefully more soon!

I’ve been working on a little city street for a few days now. I want to capture the kind of old European feel that one can find in places like Edinburgh.

Right now this is about 65% done. I think I’m going to try to make it look like an old postcard.

Over the weekend I decided to do a little mini-project to try out some new tricks I’ve learned with rendering. I decided to try to make as photorealistic of an image as possible of a clock. Here’s what I came up with:

The clock face is noticeably pixelated; I’m not entirely sure why that is. For some reason Mental Ray is not sampling the texture file at a very high frequency, I’ll work on that next I suppose.

A little breakdown video of the compositing that went into the clock:

The hermit crab is complete!

Modeled in Maya, textured in Mudbox, rendered with MentalRay.

I’m perfectly aware that no hermit crab would ever actually live in a conch shell that large, but I thought the image of a small crab in a huge shell was amusing.

Some stills from some different angles…

As the title “redux” suggests, the crab above is actually the second version of the hermit crab I’ve made. I originally finished about a week earlier with a different version, but then after getting some suggestions from Professor Scott White, my 3D modeling professor, I decided to redesign the conch shell. Here’s what Hermit Crab Mark I looked like:

I actually still want to change some things. If I have time, I’m going to go back and change the displacement mapping on the conch to get the groves to all go in a more uniform direction. Also 9 seconds into the turntable, you might notice there’s a slight shiny spot on the conch. That’s a mistake I made in the specular map that I definitely want to fix. I also want to try placing some small low intensity lights really close to the crab’s eyes to bring out the gloss that’s visible in the Mark I crab. In the Mark II crab, the shadow from the flaring part of the conch makes the crab’s eyes look matte. The crab’s claws need some color tweaking as well; the color doesn’t quite perfectly match the rest of the crab.

The DMD director, Amy Calhoun, told me that no modeler is ever satisfied with a model. So true.