« Posts tagged final

Crow Sculpt Final

Hey everyone, just posting some final shots of my crow sculpt after several long evenings. The major change you’ll notice from the previous update is the feather treatment. On the old sculpt I used the snake hook tool to pull geometry out for the feathers. In the end I wasn’t happy with how this technique looked. For the final I created a few custom feather alphas. I would stamp a row of the feathers and then mask them off and pull out the next row, continuing this process until the entire chest was covered. For an initial foray into Zbrush I am happy with the results here, but I think that I need to learn more about the layers options and morph targets. The undo system seems somewhat tricky to work with and there were several occasions when it didn’t work at all. I also learned that my system can’t handle merging 3 different 13 million poly meshes. I’d chuck more RAM in, but I’m already at my boards 8GB max. I hope you all have a nice remembrance day.

Final crow - perspective (http://www NULL.terrymatthes NULL.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/CrowFinal_persp2 NULL.jpg)Final crow- close up (http://www NULL.terrymatthes NULL.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/CrowFinal_close NULL.jpg)Final crow - centered (http://www NULL.terrymatthes NULL.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/CrowFinal_center NULL.jpg)Final crow - side view (http://www NULL.terrymatthes NULL.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/CrowFinal_persp NULL.jpg)

Apartment Final Render Thoughts

For now I’m finished with this apartment render. I’ve learned a lot, but it’s time to move on to another project. I will definitely revisit this in the future as I learn more about Mental Ray. I think the most challenging part for this project was fine tuning the global illumination and final gather settings. This is the first time I have worked with either. The fur system was really easy to use and while there are a lot of settings most of them just let you add randomization to the basic properties. The fur and fabric shader on the ottoman required a lot of anti aliasing to catch-all the crisp detail.

The final settings for anti aliasing in the “quality” tab were set to “adaptive” and 4. If I did it again I would have set the final quality control to 3 as I found 256 samples is a little over kill and takes almost twice as long as when set to 3. Keep in mind though that the setting is not “mandatory”. That means that not every pixel is getting 256 samples, just the ones that Maya determines need it. I’m not quite sure how the algorithm works that controls this, but it is something I plan to look into. In retrospect I don’t think I would ever paint a room that bright of a green, but you must have fun with these kinds of projects; right? :D

On a side note, I was at the gas station the other day and while I was waiting in line I found a great magazine called “Elle Decor” (http://www NULL.elledecor NULL.com/). I’m pretty sure it’s aimed at women, but it’s got a ton of really sweet interior designs inside that are giving me lots of inspiration. More posts soon. If you have questions ask away.
(http://www NULL.terrymatthes NULL.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/apt1 NULL.jpg)