Visual Confetti!

Now let's make this as visually appealing as the renders...

Well this month at Full Sail has definitely been a hard one. I had two classes this month; Visual Development and Mocap (Motion Capture). Visual Development would probably be the more enjoyable classes of the two I was partaking in; I had a lot of trouble in Motion Capture because of certain animations breaking constantly throughout the month.

I had a lot of meltdowns...

So since I enjoyed Visual Development so much I though I would share one of the projects I worked on; we did 4 projects total, but it was the last one that I enjoyed the most. Why do you ask? Well we got to work within two programs to create one image; Maya and Nuke. First, we established the shot in Maya; I applied a texture that I created within Photoshop to the gear asset, along with bump maps and other nodes to make it look like the rust is actually peeling away the blue paint. Then their was already an applied texture to the box, so I then put in a projection node to create a blood splatter affect upon the sticker I also applied to the box. Using different tricks with the Hypershade and Render Settings I was able to create different looks to different assets to make it more "life-like" in a sense.

With all these tips and techniques that I learned throughout this month I was able to produce a better render than I though I could. Though I wasn't done; I soon had to use Render Layers to produce several different images. A Key Light, Warm Light, and Cool Light; with these specific rendered layers I could put them in Nuke and with a couple nodes I was able to produce a final render that was a lot better than the ones that I could produce within Maya.

Here is my process:

 Here we have the Warm Light Render Layer.

 Next we have the Key Light Render Layer.

 Last, but not least we have the Cool Light Render Layer.

AND...

We have CONFETTI!!!!

(Just kidding; that's just a software bug found on every student version of Nuke)

And with these layers merged into May and tweaked just a little bit I was able to create this image you see above. (Don't mind the confetti type particles upon the image, they are just the result of me using a PLE version of Nuke.)

Honestly, I'm really happy with the way this rendered out in the end. It turned out to partially look like an Instagram photo, which was what I was going for in the end. So I guess I did a good job. I think this class really did change my views upon the Shading and Lighting classes I have taken in the class.