Glass Project

After seeing this awesome piece of work on Reddit I was inspired to have a go at some of the techniques in that image. Mainly the glass shader, in particular I was keen to try the finger prints and roughened style as its a nice detail.

 I've rendered out two different variations with slightly different framing and a different focal length.



After trying to work procedural for the dirt map then with a photoshop texture I created, this wasn't working either so I ended up creating the dirt map in mudbox using the fingerprint filter and some built in ones to dirty up the glass. This was then blended on top of a glass PxrSufrace very subtly. The floor was seamless from Textures.com, which I used to generate a bump map.

I took some inspiration from this article about photorealistic lighting and compositing techniques used in The Lego Movie. Because of the focus on the blackness inside the glass I allowed the white floor to be overexposed, through lighting and compositing, to make it seem more like the image is a photo. I also used my lens gizmo to add, chromatic aberration, vignetting and glow and dust all of which add towards a more believable image.

Here is the compositing breakdown:


I tried to carry over the mysterious nature of the inspiration image whilst keeping the focus on photoreal as best I can, I want to continue to develop my abilities in this area and get into more texture painting with Mudbox.

Popular posts from this blog

Particle Fluids

Image
I tried to follow this tutorial  to create a CG Tornado. I'm still trying to replicate the effect in the video but outside of the tutorial I had a play with the Expression editor and things I had seen in the video to create this: Its very rough around the edges. I wont carry on anymore with this scene file, I'll go back and watch the Tutorial over and over until I can get a good grasp of it. Doing this has given me another idea for possibly a more simple smoke effect that doesn't use particles
Read more

Game Of Life Render

Image
Having completed my game of life script I wanted to get a nice render of it, which I've finally gotten around too. I wanted to make a grid of marbles, each different colours, however having around 2000 in total in the scene that was not gonna happen by assigning them manually. After a lot of trial and error I found a way to get what I wanted. First I created a procedural texture of squares, each different colours from the 6 base colours I chose. I then positioned this under the spheres. I gave every sphere a completely see through glass material, and disabled primary viability of the plane. This meant the refracted colour of the plane could be seen in the marbles but not the marbles themselves. I think this worked pretty well, definitely more efficient than  assigning  all the objects a material.
Read more

"Tails" in Obstacle Course

Image
This is an update on the Bouncing Ball animation. I animated him jumping up a spiral staircase and over 2 gaps, finally getting squished. I tried to focus lots on the movement on the tail and giving the end of the tail delay so it swished behind the ball quite nicely. I spent a lot of time in the Dope sheet moving frames around to tweak the animation. I still don't think its showing enough personality, the ball is just bouncing through the scene, I would like to make him more of a quirky character who shows some emotion.
Read more