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.

My hermit crab is ready for texturing and lighting and rendering! I’m going with Mudbox for texture painting for sure. I’m still not entirely sure how I’m going to get all the prickly parts of the legs done… I’ll probably just do a displacement map or something.

I’m working on a hermit crab in 3D Modeling class! The shell was really hard to make… I wound up making a small segment, duplicating special it, and then stitching all the segments together by hand. So… the crab itself is only some legs right now. I have a lot of work to do on this still…

I’m thinking about trying Mudbox for texturing this thing. The UVs on the shell aren’t pretty, and I don’t want to spend a gazillion hours unwrapping those UVs….

More later.

Ana suggested a few changes. Much credit to her, the painting looks much much better now:

I also played with giving the girl goggles of some sort and a snorkel, but I’m not sure this idea works so well.