Visual Development

This class was immensely helpful in understanding the process of texturing and material building. Throughout this month we used MILA materials with the mental ray renderer to achieve real world textures, and then this combined with batch renders of different passes helped me understand how a proper foundation in the basics of a software can be the difference between a sub par render and a professional one.

The most useful techniques I learned this month are probably the use of the MILA material and advanced knowledge of the hypershade. Before this class, I was mostly using MIA materials for my textures, with minimal, if any, hypershade node editing. After this class, I'm confident in my abilities to use the hypershade (and with minimal to no crashing too).

Warm Light Layer 

Key Light Layer 

Master Layer (Key, Warm, IBL)

Over the course of this class I made my own little experimental scene to test out materials, different bumps, and mess with settings overall to see what I could do.

Test Scene

This is my tester scene. I'll be making changes to it, such as adding different materials, bumps, and props, but its a nice little start to an exploration in texturing.

Project and Portfolio III

This class was very stressful this month, mostly because of the full swing of the holiday season and it starting the week of Black Friday. I was very excited to use a different rig and create my own animation this month, although it has a few things that need to be tweaked. I'm happy with the smoothness of translation, and completing this project has given me a greater understanding of the walk cycle. Here is the Link

I think that this class was valuable for helping me in discerning render time, learning the fine points of the walk cycle animation, subtle animation, and adjusting to new rigs and additionally new problems as they arise. It was challenging to say the least and I had many 5 A.M. nights this month. On to the next!

Shading and Lighting

I found an easier time in this course than past ones, at least in the beginning anyway. I really enjoyed getting to know the lights of mental ray and maya, as well as the powers of intensities and knowing what light relates to certain ambiances.

This was the final pass for our last week, and our job this class was to texture everything on the table (wineglass and bottle, place mat, cheese, knife, cutting board and bread). The hardest part about this class for me was misinterpreting how long render times can be. I had a few 5 A.M. nights.

Final pass for third week. This setup had multiple light sources to set up, and with various lights needing to be linked and unlinked to certain objects, I had some trouble with this one. My favorite parts of this are the eyeglass case and coffee mug. I like how those textures and reflections turned out.

This render is darker than I wanted. I had a lot of problems with the IBL and tweaking its brightness and color gain. I think problems with this ultimately made my scene darker than it should have been. Despite this, I like how this turned out.

The Cornell rabbit. Probably my most adorable project thus far, it was an excellent opportunity to study lighting and light linking. I very much enjoyed this exercise.

I had many late nights this class, as it was difficult to find the time to allow for rendering. I learned that it's much better to use low render settings to get the initial look of the reference, and then do a higher quality render when you think an aspect is finalized.