Marie Jarrell; FINAL PROJECT; Due Friday. 5-3-2013

Description:

For this assignment we textured the "Challenge #18: Science Fiction" scene from the 3Drender.com challenge website (http://www.3drender.com/challenges/). Using RenderMan we were to write three surface shaders and one displacement shader. One shader for the robot's body, one shader for the robot's tires, one shader for the panel buttons, and a displacement shader for the floor. With these shaders we were to render a scene with RenderMan concentrating on texturing the scene using techniques that would result in realistic and interesting shading and texturing.

Problems and Solutions:

The biggest problems for this project was finding help for writing shaders and figuring out what RenderMan could do and what it could not. Maya crashed when ever I used a light RenderMan did not like and many of my files ended up corrupted for such small mistakes. I was able to find some coding on line, but often had to test and improvise. For example, I wanted to add iredescence to my panel button shader to allow the buttons to glow. I found a glow shader online but in practice it was more like a light inside an object not a light glowing from an object. It took some trial and error but I eventually got a glowing feature only it would produce the commentary color of the one I put in, i.e. red became cyan, so I had to go and fix that. Also though I wanted to try a more complex displacement shader it was simply much more effective to use the laughably simple one we created in class and work within those limits. Anything more complex was too much for me to control properly and ended up creating textures that only seemed more and more unreal.


Reference Images: 

 

RenderMan Shaders:

RobotBody Shader

RobotTire Shader

PanelButton Shader

MetalDisplacement Shader

Progress Images:

 

Final Image: 

Marie Jarrell; The King's Treasure; Due Tues. 4-23-2013

Description:

For this assignment we textured the "Challenge #19: The King's Treasure" scene from the 3Drender.com challenge website (http://www.3drender.com/challenges/). Including reflection, refraction, caustics, and bump mapping on appropriate objects, with mental ray. Concentrating on texturing the scene using techniques that would result in realistic and interesting shading and texturing.

Problems and Solutions:

It took me a great deal of time to work out how to get the caustics working and making the gems look nice. I used maya's mia material shaders to get better metal shaders and found a copper tutorial in the DPA809 folder which contained a beautiful fabric shader which I manipulated for the crown fabric and gave me a better understanding on what attributes affect how a metal looks. This helped me a great deal when I was manipulating the coins. For some reason I couldn't get my shadows to wok the way I wanted however, I found a tutorial on line on how to composite using photoshop. This allowed me to try my hand at using ambient occlusion. 

 Texture Images: 

Used to create crown fabric texture                                                 Image for Coin Bump Map

Progress Images:

Final Image Before Critique: 

Marie Jarrell; Fruit Bowl; Due Tues. 4-2-2013

Description:

For this assignment we textured the "Challenge #1: Fruit Bowl" scene from the 3Drender.com challenge website (http://www.3drender.com/challenges/). Concentrating on texturing the scene using techniques that would result in realistic and interesting shading and texturing. Also, we were to implement good lighting for the objects in the scene.

Problems and Solutions:

The biggest problems I faced were all based around lighting, either giving the fruits definition through lighting or dealing with shadows. For example, while working on the orange I had to find a way of lighting it and revealing the shape and dimensions of the fruit without disconnecting it from the plate. The orange required several special lights to create shadows and bounce back light from the plate to keep it from being too dark.

Working with file textures didn't cause me too much pain as I was able to use several techniques from class such as using layered shaders, and editing UVs to get the textures and gradations I wanted. However, there was a constant struggle to get these textures to work with the shader type, and lighting to remove the fruits original metallic appearance. I was able to do this really well with the bananas, but once again the orange, and even the grapes turned out to be really difficult to work with. For the orange I tried to solve this with the lights and for the grapes I experimented with the attributes and tried to use translucency to get a more organic looking piece of fruit.

Research Images: 

 Texture Images: 

Progress Images:

 

Final Image Draft 1: 

Final Image: 

Marie Jarrell; Architectural Lighting; Due Tues. 3-5-2013

Description:

For this assignment we textured the "Challenge #17: Natural History" scene from the 3Drender.com challenge website (http://www.3drender.com/challenges/). Concentrating on creating a realistic environment, using lighting methods discussed in class.

Problems and Solutions:

This was a large disorganized file, every stair step, colum, block or decoration was its own geometry and the overall size of the file made work slow and prone to crashing. I first had to spend a great deal of time grouping and combining items, deleting items that were not visible in my scene, and generally just trying to decrease the file size.

Still no matter what I did I could not load texture files on anything but my own laptop. The walls and columns of the museum refused to load texture files no matter what I did. So, I simply used the texture supplied by the file and manipulated the attributes of that texture.

Finally for the floor, I liked the texture but was seeing some pixelation in my renders. 

To fix this I increased the number of pixels in the image  and the resolution of the file.

Research Images: 

Texture Images: 

Bone                                                                                                          Flooring

Display Texture                                                                              Display Texture Bump map

Progress Images: 

Final Image 1st Draft: 

Final Image: