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VSFX 319 - SPRING 2020
The goal of this project was to become familiar with Pixars' Renderman package. The project itself was to create a popup book. For my project, I wanted to create a fantasy forest. I focused on creating dainty lights and seemingly giant mushrooms.
This project brought up many challenges along the way. It was interesting troubleshooting the textures and lights to find the best results. As of now, this is my Pop up book project!
FINAL RENDERS---
These are some of my final renders. I picked angles that I thought would be pleasing to the eye and would show a nice flow of the scene. In these renders, I also wanted to display the proportions of the objects displayed.
There are many things placed through out the piece in order to create a smooth flow of the eye. I especially like the fairy placed at the edge on the small waterfall. I feel that she adds a nice two-dimensional contrast to the pop up book.
PAPER MODEL PROTOTYPE---
These images show my initial idea for the project. I knew from the start I wanted it to be a more magical and playful scene, so I brought in a fairy, big mushrooms, and a cute little snail. This first model was also a starting point for me to see how the scene would look all put together. As this project carried on, the concept developed more and more. This development came from inspiration, complications, and new ideas for the scene.
REFERENCE IMAGES FOR LOOK DEV---
These are some of the images I drew inspiration from. I wanted to create a moody scene with a magical feeling. I took a lot of inspiration from the images of fireflies and toadstools. With the pop up book assignment, I found the idea of blowing up a fairy tale would be a fun idea. One of my major goals for this project was to mess with proportion. This was mainly done with the mushrooms, but I also added a snail to try and bring home the idea.
MODELING AND LOOK DEV---
This is the first 90 degree shot I did of my project. During this render, I wanted to add in more of a background and a small pond on one of the pages. Later on, I would find out that these made the pages look very cluttered and strange.
I eventually decided against these two ideas and changed a few design choices for the final model.
In these last few images, the subtle concept changes can be seen. One of the bigger changes that was made was in the big mushroom top. This mushroom was originally squished more, coupled with hanging moss. In this new scene, it is larger and has gills added underneath.
Another thing that was changed is the removal of the pond. This was mainly due to technical problems. When the textures of the pages would get added, the faces would pull together at a single point. Aside from these things, the general layout stays the same.
At the end of the modeling process, I reached a point where the model reached a fairly balanced spot. The mushrooms framed the book and the fireflies added visual interest.
On top of these things, the grass and extra roots around the book helped frame the scene. I think that there is always room to keep adding to a scene and make it better and better, but for now, this seems to be the scene set up that is most visually appealing.
SHADERS AND SETUP---
During this project, I found organization to be very helpful. Taking the time to rename objects and clean things up drastically improved my workflow. I was able to find the shaders, lights, and assets I needed very fast. This organization became super helpful especially, when the scene became more complex. When the number of small fireflies and mushrooms went up, having objects grouped together helped me find what I was looking for faster.
Along with this organization, I found that also naming the shaders was even more helpful. In hypershade, having the texture named the same as the assigned object was very helpful. This meant that I could easily and painlessly find what I was looking for and do the changes I needed.
In this project, I experimented with many different methods of how to go about texturing the models. Eventually, I landed on a half story book texture. I wanted to combine the pages with "reality" and to do that I had the texture for the paged go up the mushroom stalks, cover the snail shell, and I also had it appear on the rocks.
Along with the page texture, I also implemented presence mapping and bump mapping. These allowed me to get more organic forms into the scene, while keeping my poly count lower. I especially used presence mapping to add the two-dimensional look of the grass and fairy. These gave contrast and a nice clean cut out look, while not taking away from the rest of the scene.
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