Fantasy Castle

So to add a little life to my water element, I want it to animate and have waves cascading. What I can do is create a new shader, MIA_X like I did for the other elements but fine tune it’s parameters for water.

Continue reading “Work in Progress, Part 9 – Water shader”

Fantasy Castle

Last time we looked at this piece I had switched to HDR Lighting on it.

The way I had arranged the vegetation on the mountain buttes didn’t sit well with me. It looked too sparse and purposefully placed. Something I wanted to try on this as well as using Maya dynamics, specifically emitting particles on my geometry for the plant life. This would give greater coverage of grass, shrubs, etc. I wanted was to still have control on where the vegetation grew.

I’ve created an emitter with the geometry selected, and click “emit from selected”. This creates an emitter and a particle to work with. I then add an “Instancer(Replacement)” so I can swap out my particle shape to a piece(s) of geometry Continue reading “Work in Progress, Part 8”

Fantasy Castle

Switching to HDR Lighting in Maya

Up to this point I’ve been using the Physical Sky and Sun for rendering out my scene. But it has it’s limitations. One being I can’t easily tweak the sky itself without affecting the sun, or another way to say I can’t easily adjust the sky fill in the shadows without affecting my key light. By switching to HDR Lighting, this will allow me greater control of my scene’s lighting.

First, we’ll need to get rid of our Physical sun node. Select your camera, then go Window—Hypergraph Connections. Select the Physical Sun and Sky node and delete it.

Now you’ll still have the sunDirection light from the Physical Sun node in Outliner. Since we’ve spent time positioning it, we’ll want to copy it’s position to the new Direction Light we’ll now create. Select the SunDirection Light in the Outliner, set a key on it’s values, and then right click to “copy selected” in the Channel Box those positional values.

Create a new Direction Light, and in the Channel Box, “paste selected” into the channels. The new Directional Light is in the same position as our Physical Sun light. Rename the new light “HDR_Sun”. Turn off visibility on our old Physical sun or delete it.

Under Shadows tab, Raytrace Shadow Attributes; Make sure Continue reading “Work In Progress, Part 7”

Fantasy Castle

This week was mostly trying to add more elements using the scene assembly methodology, which worked really well. Each of the mesa mountains now has grass/plant populations on them. I am still tweaking them but the results I’m seeing are very positive. What’s great is the level of polys in my scene are extremely high, but since I’m using instanced geometry with the scene assembly I’m getting very good results. I’m able to make quick changes to each section then open the master scene and render all elements together.

What I did work with was something called Mental Ray Proxies for the first time. Instead of eco-painting with my high res geo, I’ve created a low res/bounding box type of geo that I will paint with and see in my GUI but when I go to render it will be replaced the high resolution object and shader. This allows me to interactively paint quicker instances and seems to have the individual scene files load quicker as well. It’s pretty easy to use.

What I do first is make a simple bounding box shape of my tree.

Select the high res tree, and do a “File– Export Selection”.  Here you will select Mental Ray. In the drop down select “Render Proxy (Assembly)”. I try to name it same as my original obj but as proxy.

Now you select your Low Res object and under it’s Continue reading “Work in Progress, Part 6”