Lighting and Rendering: Lighting Tests

Here are some tests for the daytime lighting of the writerRoom environment.

There's still a lot to do: some banding on the walls, grainy edges to the window shadow on the floor, some jaggy edges (sighs).

However, the overall look is getting there.

In general there are so many different approaches that one could take to lighting any given scene that as a beginner l feel a bit like I'm groping in the dark (sorry for the pun!) I wish I had months to explore lighting but I'm going to have to make a choice of approach and stick with it so that I can move on with the project.

This particular scene was lit using physical sun and sky with a spotlight portal light in the window and Global Illumination and Final Gather enabled. I've upped the haze value on the physical sky shader to 1 to warm up the light a bit as it was originally too blue. At the moment raytrace shadows are enabled. Next up I'll experiment with depth map shadows to see what results I get and how it affects render times and will also look at tweaking GI, FG & shadow settings with the hope of improving quality and / or bringing down render times.

Render times are currently just under 3 1/2 minutes. Here are the images. Any comments would be very welcome :)

Modelling: final Margarita model

Here's the finished model for Margarita along with some scanned book pages that I'll use for texturing:

Tech Tips: Render Progress Messages

Gah - why does maya offer you options that don't work?!

I spent ages trying to set the Render Verbosity to "Progress Messages" through the mentalrayGlobals tab in the attribute editor, but it just kept reverting to "Warning Messages" every time I hit render.

It turns out that in the menubar you need to go to Render -> Render Current Frame and click the option box next to that. It seems that the settings here override the ones in mentalrayGlobals.

Here's the forum where I found this lifesaver: http://area.autodesk.com/forum/autodesk-maya/lighting---rendering/render-verbosity-wont-stay-on-progress-messages/

Modelling - Margarita

. . . and here she is with some hair and eyelashes:

Modelling - Margarita Head

Phew, at last I feel as though I'm getting somewhere with modelling Margarita's head. The model has been about 80% complete for weeks and weeks now but I just couldn't seem to get my head around how to model the head with the right contours and "seams" to make it looks as though she could realistically be made from paper, but at last I think I'm beginning to crack it :)

Now I'm looking forward to modelling her hair: can you remember as a kid making paper curls by running the blade of some scissors along a strip of paper? Well, that's the plan for the hair :)

Tech Tips: maya move pivot mac

Whenever I switch to a mac I seem to forget how to move a pivot in maya so here's a reminder for myself . . .

d OR fn left arrow both do it :)

Tech Tips: Global Illum Photons Greyed Out?

Gah, maya is so buggy . . . but this just saved me :)

http://forums.creativecow.net/thread/61/858115

Thanks Francois :)

Layout - initial shots

3D layout is coming on well. Lots of the shots sill need work but here's the opening sequence. More shots to come as I fix uncooperative cameras and gimbal-lock-induced cerebral palsy in my character!

ZBrush - hide lightbox

Every time I've been away from ZBrush for a while I seem to forget how to toggle the lightbox along the bottom on and off . . . . "," does the trick :)

Rigging: Blendshapes

Here's a quick preview of the blendshapes that I've made for my rig. By combining two or more in animation I can get a pretty good range and variety of expression :)