Opaque3D | Blog

I posted another article on the Renderosity Front Page news this week. On this article I give a brief explanation on how to use the render layers system in Maya 7.

You can read the full article here.

Well, I had been working on her for several days and she is finally ready, for still images, at least. I give you my Miss Digital World contestant: Arianne.

Arianne is a sweet 26 year young girl who likes swimming, dancing, watching movies and reading novels. She is lovely and has a good sense of humor but sometimes she can be really stuborn and capricious.

Ok, enough for the “oh! she’s so lovely” crap. Although she is ready, I still have to work on some deformation issues on her limbs. In the meantime I will continue working on her portfolio and when I actually have something to show I will post it on the new subdomain: athena.digital-opaque.net

The character-rendering part of the pipeline didn’t work so well so I had to go back and check what was wrong with it. It turned out that the environment was making the skin too hot, yielding this “sunburn skin look”. I desaturated the IBL map and then I created another light dome using the new IBL map.

As you can see, the resulting image was a more accurate and uniform skin. I also made some improvements on the hair rendering. I daresay this new system is ready for animation

You may or may not know (most likely you don’t) that I am in the process of producing another short film. This time around I plan to use the “fancy stuff” when it comes to lighting and rendering, however I had to make a “proof of concept” just to know that the pipeline that I had planned would actually work, so I made this little test.

I figured that the best way to test the pipeline was with an actual shot of the film, so I made a motel room that appears on the opening of the movie. I dressed it using some free props that I found at Turbosquid and then I rendered the scene using GI. The second part consists on creating a panorama of the scene so I can lit my character with it.

Using the LatLong Mentalray lens shader I rendered the panorama on the image above. I then used that as an IBL pass for my girl. Using HDRShop and the LightGen plugin I also made a 26-light dome that I used for a diffuse pass. After rendering layers upon layers of skin effects, I reached the image below. For part two of my test I will animate her delivering a couple of lines.

I got an invitation to join a virtual beauty contest called “miss digital world” a while ago. I went to check their website and the concept behind the contest is really interesting. You can check it out at http://www.missdigitalworld.com/

At first I was thinking on using Marion, but I think I will aim for realism instead. I relied on the old-friend Poser to customize the model. After some modifications I got a look that I liked. The image below shows a not-so-quick Poser render of what the model will look like.

 

The model was then rigged in Maya and now she is fully animatable. She has joint controls, facial expressions and all that. I am also going to use Maya hair to make realistic hair for her. For this specific event I chose a hairstyle that I found at some modeling agency, however I plan to have different hairstyles for her that I can switch to make her a little bit more versatile. 

I’ve been working a little more on the character tests. For the first scene of the shortfilm that I will begin producing soon, I need my character (Marion) to wear some semi-transparent sleepwear. My tests so far included only “solid” clothing so I had to test if the semi-transparent clothing would actually work on my current skin shading pipeline.

Since I had this file already setup in Maya I figured I could just test the same figure using semi-transparent shaders for the clothing. I rendered a first version using a plain value for the transparency and the result is on the image below.

I then used a ramp texture to drive the transparency so that it would resemble those lingerie sleepwears. The next image shows what I got this time.

As a final test, I rendered another turntable video using the same setup as for the last image (no hair or background were included on this video).

Right now I am working on a “proof of concept” for the film. I will be using different light setups for my rooms using GI and all that, and then I will work on a technique to lit my characters using the surrounding envoironment. I don’t expect to have anything by next week, though.