Len's WIP

Beakers

Len — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 22:35:22 +0000

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)

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Mental Ray test render

Len — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 01:17:18 +0000

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

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Beginning the Iron Giant

Len — Mon, 12 May 2008 23:22:10 +0000

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.

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Compositing update

Len — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 03:57:24 +0000

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That white car

Len — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 23:12:31 +0000

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.

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Got a new mouse, then did some compositing

Len — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 08:22:34 +0000

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)

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Multipass

Len — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 06:46:50 +0000

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.

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Animation update

Len — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 06:23:36 +0000

More timing-tweaking.

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Modeling, texturing, and lighting updates

Len — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 00:33:12 +0000

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

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Lighting test

Len — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 06:49:04 +0000

Real quick update here: just wanted to start re-lighting the scene, making sure the shadows and stuff look about right. You have to click on the image to see a higher res image and compare the differences.

Lighting comparison

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