Joseph A. Brown|

Final Post, first half is about lighting/rendering while the last is all about composting.

Lighting was a pain due to the scene being set at night. So I had the challenge of revealing enough to show off detail, and not enough to keep the scene in darkness. I went through an array of lighting set ups as shown above until I came to a set up that I liked. An area light to light the overall scene. One spot light to lighten the entire scene, and show their shine, and two spot lights that is mainly for the right side of the wheel. The final render is presented above.

Last came compositing. I first took the original photo and cropped out on the part that I wanted, aka the water. I then realized I needed something to fill up the space in the background, so I went out and took another picture as above. I positioned that and applied some filters in order to the desired effect that I wanted. I then placed the rendered png filed on top and began to manipulate it so the rocks would not just be floating on top of the water, but rather inside the water. Same goes for the wheel.

The final result is the last photo as shown.

Alright this post is mainly going to be about texturing and how much of a hassle it was. Due to all the models being NURBS I had to abandon my original idea of going into Substance Painter and painting the wheel. So I did the next best thing, went outside, found an old looking tree and took a picture. It worked fine for the wheel texture. I worked well for a bump map meaning I had around 3 different wood textures, all varying in their gloss.

The rocks were the easy part as I just had to create a simple bump map by hand. I found a tutorial on how to create a bump map for rocks, created it in photoshop, and ended up creating 3 different materials for the rocks.

The pictures I have above are most of my materials that I am using, the models with the textures/materials put on them, a render (with bad lighting) to show how they look, the bump map of the rock, and the texture for the tree.

The last post will be all about lighting and compositing since I will have to use multiple layers of the same photo in order to get the effect of the rocks being submerged underwater.

Apologies for the late second part. I ended up finishing the modeling on Thursday but I received decent feed back from the professor.

The rocks are on a good path but I had to rework parts of the wheel. This included reworking the panels and making the pivot and poles skinnier. The cube is suppose to be a house like the original image. However the house is obscured in darkness and trees so it is going to be mainly just obscured and only there to fill up space.I added some more poles and wood pieces between the cube and wheel than on the picture above.

I also began to experiment with lighting in Maya and managed to make something I believe is a decent starting point. I have begun texturing and adding materials to all the models.
The rocks themselves are done and I will an entire blog post dedicated to texturing. However I imagine it will be a pain to texture the wheel because each plane is kind of its own individual mesh. This is my first time modeling and texturing with NURBS so it has been an… interesting experience.

This is the start of a WIP blog for VIST 372 Digital Environments. For project 1 I decided to remake an image from Seven Samurai, part 2 to be precise. I went out on a rainy day and took a picture of a gutter close to the floor. I then went into photoshop, grey scaled the image and mess around with the settings to get a similar lighting scheme.

I then began to model and recreate my scene, first was the wheel. This was the first time I ever modeled anything with NURBS, I mainly used them to create rigging controls and modeled with polygons. I then went to find a reference for a Japanese water wheel and tried my best to recreate it in my model. Of course it is very uniform at the moment, but I will be able to move and remove certain poles to get that destructive look. Right now I have the Full_wheel grouped, the propels are all grouped and the things are the poles coming out of the axis.

My goal is to have the rocks and other wooden poles modeled by Wednesday.