Topological Art

After looking at work by Lee Griggs I took a look into creating the effect myself. 
I watched as many tutorials as I could find to create the effect with Mental Ray, but spent a good few hours trying to get around problems caused by Mental Ray no longer bundled with Maya in 2016.

Getting the image to drive the height of the cubes is relatively simple, you convert the image to black and white, altering the balance as you need, and plug this into an XGen expression.

 The main problem I was trying to get past was getting the image to drive the colour of the cubes in the render. Firstly I had to use XGen in a roundabout way to convert my original texture into a Ptex file, but applying this the normal way still wouldn't render. One of my lecturers pointed me towards some new nodes in Mental Ray 2016 that allow you to manually load the Ptex file XGen creates, and then I had to plug it into the right node.

 All of the effort was definitely worth it because now I know the workflow I'll be able to use any image.


This is the image I started with, and the black and white I created from it with photoshop. This image in particular is used as an Android wallpaper, the series of images comes from Googles Earth View site. 



The black and white is then used to drive the height of the cubes, and the colour image is assigned to the cubes afterwards.

As a first test I think these are pretty good, they almost look like skyscrapers on a shoreline which is interesting.

I think the post production work that Lee Griggs did on his renders was important to the style of them, so it'll be the next thing I look into, although I would like to make something a little more unique.




Popular posts from this blog

Big Top Plastic Shaders

Image
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...
Read more

Completed Title Sequence

Image
Our title sequence project is now over and we have handed in the video! I'm really happy with how the project went and how we managed as a group despite the setbacks we had, in terms of idea and development as well as design and problems when we were animating. I think what we made is pretty good and I'm really proud of the work and what we managed to achieve as a group. The two links below take you to my other posts about the development of this project. Post 1 - Development Post 2 - Showreel
Read more

Life Drawing - Session 1

Image
I took these after my first life drawing session. Life drawing was difficult to get used to at first but I found it much easier by the end of the 3 hour session. I think my drawings improved over the duration of the session. I think the white chalk exercise was the most successful and was the best drawing I produced however I wasn't happy with the head. The aim of the exercise was to capture light falling on the model instead of trying to simply draw the figure. These are my very first drawings, they were all drawn in between 2-3 minutes. My main aim to focus on for the next session is really looking at the shape of the model to make it as accurate as possible. I found drawing with chalk very much helped my ability to draw the smooth lines and shapes needed for life drawing, I think the session was far more successful using chalk than if it was done with a pencil. The image below shows my negative space drawing. We were to draw o...
Read more