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Student Work - Marco Firme

3RD Semester Student Marco Firme explains his work on the piece "Dwelling"

Concept by:  Jonas De Ro.  

Modeling and Texturing: 

In this project the focus was to realize in 3D the illustration of Jonas De Ro. The challenge in modeling and texturing was to show an impressive amount of detail to give the piece realism.  Before modeling began, research was done in how household objects are manufactured; collecting and studying photographs as well as using the actual tangible objects as reference for modeling and texturing.

 

The first step was to block out the scene with primitive shapes and planes and to match the camera to composition of the concept art.  From this camera it was possible to determine what needed more attention in the modeling and avoid wasting time on modeling parts that were not visible to the camera.
Next, individual objects were modelled from the primitive shapes.  The research and reference was essential for creating believable details and and visual interest in the models such as weathering and warped qualities.
After UV unwrapping, texturing started by downloading photographs from online databases such as CG Textures as well as using personally taken photographs. The diffuse textures were created from carefully layering and manipulating photographs and hand painting some details in Photoshop, look of the objects in the concept art.  By working in a non-destructive way, bump, reflection, and gloss maps were extracted by modifying levels and colour from the diffuse map.In this project the focus was to realize in 3D the illustration of Jonas De Ro. The challenge in modeling and texturing was to show an impressive amount of detail to give the piece realism.  Before modeling began, research was done in how household objects are manufactured; collecting and studying photographs as well as using the actual tangible objects as reference for modeling and texturing.  The first step was to block out the scene with primitive shapes and planes and to match the camera to composition of the concept art.  From this camera it was possible to determine what needed more attention in the modeling and avoid wasting time on modeling parts that were not visible to the camera.  Next, individual objects were modelled from the primitive shapes.  The research and reference was essential for creating believable details and and visual interest in the models such as weathering and warped qualities.

After UV unwrapping, texturing started by downloading photographs from online databases such as CG Textures as well as using personally taken photographs. The diffuse textures were created from carefully layering and manipulating photographs and hand painting some details in Photoshop, look of the objects in the concept art.  By working in a non-destructive way, bump, reflection, and gloss maps were extracted by modifying levels and colour from the diffuse map.

Lighting and Shading:

 

Lighting and shading step was integral to match the look and feel of the scene and research again was invaluable to creating believable materials and realistic lighting.  The light setup was a round Mental Ray area light to represent the sun, and an environment to provide ambient light that represented sky light.  A Mental Ray Portal Light was placed on the window to aid the indirect illumination from the sky light.  The challenge was balancing colours and the contribution of the light sources to match the concept art and at the same time, making it believable.  For look development, the Mental Ray Architechtural Shader, a monolithic shader able to simulate a wide variety of surfaces, was used for nearly every material in the scene.  The shader allowed very precise controls in reflection and refraction qualities of objects and was useful to simulate the qualites of different metals and glass materials. Research and tutorials in how to create different materials were very important in this step.

For secondary small objects in the scene, mixed and layered procedural textures and spatial unwraps were used.  In this method, time consuming unwrapping and painting textures was avoided for small objects.

Rendering and Post Work 

The focus in rendering and compositing was to render out seperate passes that allowed for more control in compositing to save time; as well as to dial in colour corrections and levels to match the concept.  Using the passes in Softimage, it was possible to isolate elements and channels to render in a non-destructive way and saved some time when changes had to be made to  models and material.  Effects such as depth focus (that blurs objects out of the camera’s focus area) and bloom (a soft halo of light around bright areas) were done in the compositing program Fusion to avoid costly render times. This gave the image a bit more realism by simulating camera phenomena.  Seperate passes were also rendered for volumetric light and dust particles for precise control in compositing in Fusion and to dynamically change in a camera fly through.

Posted by Joe on Aug 17, 2011 in General