Two weeks ago, I spent 6 days straight completing an art test as part of an internship application. It was a lot of fun. Below are the results and some of the breakdown. Note: the model isn’t mine. I did UVs, Materials, Textures, and Lighting. The assignment was to clean up the scene and render photo-real day and night lighting.

The scene was originally in complete disorder,  almost no named nodes, no hierarchy, no groups, almost no UVs. I named all of the objects, organized them, creating lighting, UV layout, and added notes (such as the one visible). I’m pretty happy with my submission, especially the Moon shading network.

The Moon took a lot of troubleshooting (in part thanks to Maya’s occasionally buggy node network connecting/disconnecting), but I got exactly what I wanted in the end: I turned a mediocre image into a flexible shading network.  The hard part was essentially un-pre-multiplying the black from the image, using only the original image and an outline mask. The Moon is a card / image plane that is rigged to move to any position in the sky, the same network was used in both shots, with only one small adjustment made.

Oh yeah, and here’s some of the textures, at 1/8th resolution (after clicking full view). I also had bump and spec maps. I ran out of time before I got to displacements, I’d like to go back and do them…

Quick change to design, now there’s a background image on my website. Removed a few old works and added some new.

Renderman section is now back online.

Next I’ll add back the photography section I think, nothing major. I’ll be reworking my entire website in Fall 2010 during Portfolio; I’ll also have a demo reel online by then.

It’s now week 7 of the quarter, or something like that. Still in vsfx319 (Renderman) vsfx270 (compositing) and vsfx350 (Houdini). After I collect things a bit better I’ll post what I’ve been up to.
Mostly renderman. The class page is here
Houdini and Compositing might make an appearance later.

Sleep is such a good reward.