Just a quick bit of animation here. I'm not pleased with the turn, I didn't think about the inbetweens as much as I should have so the spin looks kinda odd. I'm more happy with the actual run though.
For look development on The Big Top I have been working on shader tests for plastic materials, in both Renderman and Arnold, these first 3 are rendered with Arnold. We are taking reference from Evil Corp who make great plastic style CG models that look very realistic. The key things I picked up on was the subsurface scattering, and the amount of specular on the skin, so before we get some models and textures I am experimenting with these properties on this model. I played with getting the scattering correct, which you can see working on the ear. I then played with varying amounts of specular and reflection. I don't think any of them are quite right yet, it will be easier to play with shaders once we have some textures painted. I do like Arnolds ability to add lights for specific attributes, for example subsurface scattering, although its not physically plausible sometimes you want that control to push an effect in specific areas, although this could probably be...
I have gradually been building up my material converter script, I have re-written lots of it over the past week, changing elements and making it work better. In it's current state it detects the type of material and assigns a similar type of Renderman Material, currently this only works for lambert and blinn, so I need to add some 'else' statements to include the other types of material. I also added, and then removed connecting transparency, because Renderman doesn't have it in the same way Mental ray does, I did try plugging the transparency into Rendermans presence, but this was not reliable depending on how the mental ray material was set up. I have also added in the ability to copy over diffuse colour values to materials without textures, so it is more of a complete conversion. It needs more work, but it is coming along nicely.
I have revisited making XGen Topology the last two days, I had always intended too, now that I know much more about compositing CG scenes together. Here's the work from before . And here is the new image, with some more compositing involved, including depth of field, added grain, and some mist effects, as well as general adjusting of passes. I think the result is quite nice, although the composition is letting it down slightly, it's definitely something I overlook from time to time even though it has a massive effect on the image. Composition and cinematography is something I want to look at more, I know some of if from Uni seminars, and from photography knowledge, but want to apply that more in Maya, using camera rigs and setups to help create nice shots, and thinking more about how I am framing what I make.