here is a short workflow / write up on my experience working with image based lighting and final gather, hopefully you might find something useful out of it.
It all started when I created this image.
The cg was rendered with mental ray’s final gather and a dodgy image based lighting setup by mapping a 8bit image onto a sphere all in the one pass. There are obvious problems with the lighting and also there was no alpha matte which captured final gathers ambient shadows. The image was very roughly comped in photoshop and I had to manually mask in the ambient shadows, if you look closely at the hi-res image you will see what I mean when I say it was dodgy.
So it was decided that I should fix this image with a realistic lighting setup and to be able to get an alpha matte straight from maya which included all the shadow information.
Here is the final result with color & level correction, beauty pass rendered with Mental Rays IBL node using a 32 bit HDRI + an occlusion pass using final gather.
In my opinion the result is a much better composite with realistic lighting that matched the background plate. So onto how I did this;
Been trying to get my head around a linear workflow in Maya / Toxik / after effects / Premier. The theory behind linear workflow & Gamma correction is mind boggling. There is a lot of science involved in this topic, so I thought I would share some good resources I found on the subject. Questions are welcome, but bare in mind I am still learning.
Made this on the weekend with Maya 2010, custom shaders with HUD projections. The way the projections are setup means it can be animated using flat 2d images.
This is inspired by the Holodeck in Avatar and also Final Fantasy Spirits Within.
The animation was rendered in Maya Software with surprisingly fast speed. What I am discovering is that Maya software is really good for effects driven renders, lots of color, lighting information can be rendered quickly. However Mental Ray is great for photo realistic renders and generating advanced lighting environments.
The animation was comped in Autodesk Toxik / Composite, with only a zdepth blur applied using a luma pass.
Any questions or feedback, feel free to add to comments.
On the weekend I had the chance to use the FiMO clay to model my favorite character ‘ Doctor Zoidberg ‘ from the brilliant TV Show ‘ Futurama ‘ which gave me the inspiration to start story boarding for the video art assessment ‘ Orange ‘.
Today I want to show you some photos and steps to achieve the final product of my clay modeling.
Step 1 – Prepare the FiMO. Not as easy as you think, this stuff is like rock hard not like normal plastic clay. Break the large chunks up into smaller thumb size pieces, hold the clay in a clinched fist to warm it up until its malleable than you roll that piece of clay in both hands until its nice and soft and in a ball shape.
Step 1.
Continue reading for steps 2 – 6 and youtube video of the finished product.
