Len’s WIP

Nothing special here. I modeled some beakers and played with lighting and caustics. It could use a bit more work. The whole thing was done in 7 hours using LightWave (render time = 15 mins).

Beakers (click to enlarge)

Today is the first time I poked around the Mental Ray renderer for Maya. It’s also the first time I fudged around with HDR images and lighting. This image is the result of those tests. It’s a bit more washed out than I’d like, but whatever. At least I learned something.

Lonely cube

Iron Giant - update 1

I’m starting this CGSociety challenge that began about 2 weeks ago, so any updates will be found at this post at CGtalk. Hopefully I’ll finish this by the June deadline.

Work has picked up so my time on Tankor has been limited. But today my boss was “working from home” again so I spent a little time on this. I noticed that the white car in the foreground didn’t have a reflection of Tankor as he passes by. I modeled some fake car geometry to catch those reflections.

Faked in car geometry

Also, my buddy CM and I discussed Tankor’s size. In my last update, his tank mode looks shorter than the white car. If he is a tank he should be way bigger than that. He is now quite huge. I’ll render these updates with the new reflection pass tonight. Hopefully when I check on the frames tomorrow they will be beautiful with no problems.

Here’s a compositing update, done using my new Logitech MX Revolution. And After Effects. I rendered this in glorious Quicktime so you can pause it and scrub frame by frame with your mouse or arrow keys.

(UPDATE 04-13-2008: I masked out the car in the foreground, and added some motion blur to the transformation)

Every time I think of multipass rendering I hear Leeloo’s voice. Anyways, today I did minor modeling and more texturing, and I started to set this scene up as multiple passes for compositing. I’m not going to explain it; instead, I’ll let the pictures do the talking. I’m still working on this so it’s rough and needs a lot of work.

Renders in multiple passes

Why do it this way instead of a straight render from LightWave? Because in case any of these elements need to be changed, this method gives individual control over those elements, instead of re-rendering the whole image over and over again.

A more detailed explanation of this process is explained here.

More timing-tweaking.

I did some more detail modeling, although they’re not apparent in this shot. I also decided to give him colors similar to the cartoon version since that’s the version most people would recognize. The body is still based on the toy though. I added a bit of depth blur to hopefully better integrate him into the scene. This is a render fresh out of LightWave, not a composited shot. That’ll come later.

LightWave render