Mental Ray Materials

Our task was to create a given list of materials using mental ray standard materials as a base

Here is my attempt below

I used mia material x passes as a base for metals and fast skin sss for skin and candle wax.

Thank you and comments are welcome and appreciated

Render layers and passes

This was the shot given to me for this particular assignment

And this is my attempt at recreating this in maya below-

I have used both render layers and render passes to render the above  scene and then compiled them in photoshop

Render Layers

Render layers help in rendering a large scene or scenes with multiple lit objects.Each object can be separated and grouped into different layers and rendered to their particular render requirements

Render passes

Render passes render the  different attributes of a scene separately,such as Beauty pass,shadow pass,specular pass

screenshots

Thanks and comments are welcome and appreciated

Refractive caustics

When Light passes through any transparent media like glass or water it creates patterns which are known as Refractive caustics.

The above image is an example of refractive caustics

Here is my version of Refractive caustics below-

Rendered output

Thank you and comments are welcome ad appreciated

Fight sequence animation

             
This is my first attempt at an action sequence animation. I have tried to recreate a fight sequence from the movie  drunken master 2. Hope u like it.
                        
                                        Comments are welcome and appreciated

Explosion Effect

                        This is an exercise in dynamics created using 3d fluideffects

Comments are welcome and appreciated

                                    

Character rigging - Part 1

                                                     
This is a character rig in progress. This post shows the leg rig of the character.

The below screenshots show the different stages of the rig

The above screenshot shows the joints inserted to the legs

This one shows the IK handles for the joints

Shows the controls for the legs and knees

And this final screenshot shows the rig in action

Thank you and feedbacks are welcome and appreciated

Final Gather

Final Gather is an indirect lighting method which illuminates a scene without the requirement of using a light. It is also a key to simulating realistic indirect illumination. Final gather uses the objects in a scene as the source of light.

The above image shows my scene where i created 3 simple characters using primitives and created

a setup for lighting.

 I placed 3 simple planes above the three characters respectively and added the primary colors(RGB) to them.

After enabling final gather, i adjusted the accuracy, point interpolation and primary diffuse scale to get an optimum output.

Rendered output

Thank you, comments are welcome and appreciated

Run cycle

                                                                   Run cycle

This is my 3d run cycle.I had previously done run cycle in 2d and enjoyed doing it. Doing the run cycle in 3d was a different experience.

Here is a screenshot of the character i  used for my run cycle

For understanding the key poses i took the below reference

I also referred the movie The incredbles  for some run cycle references

Playblast

Thank you, comments are welcome and appreciated

Global Illumination

Global illumination is a type of indirect lighting which calculates how light is bounced off other surfaces and also calculates color bleeding.

Here below is a screenshot of my attempt at it.

I placed three simple modified polygon primitives and placed a spotlight on top.

In Global illumination,illumination depends on amount and intensity of photons emitted in the scene.

I controlled the settings of global illumination and photon emission settings in the spotlight to get

a realistic and credible output.

Here is a video of the rendered output

Thank you, and comments are welcome and appreciated

Lambert Lighting

Lighting is an important stage in the long process of making an animated film. It defines and sets the theme and mood of a particular shot highlighting and drawing the audience to what is important in a scene.Therefore,it plays a crucial role in visual storytelling.

In the above image, i have created a simple scene,where i have used a directional light as a

key light, that acts as the main source of light in the scene.

I have used other Area lights to light the scene and enabled depth map shadows for directional light

Here is a video of the rendered output below

A plane has been placed outside the window with mental ray black body shader connected to it,which

simulates the temperature of sun light.

Thank you and all comments are welcome and appreciated.

                                        

Cartoon tree

                                                          Rigging a cartoonic tree
This was a fairly simple rig compared to the previous ones(especially the book rig).

The Trunk was rigged first using joints and skinned and ik spline was used.

A volume preservation formula was used to maintain the volume of the trunk when it was bent or stretched

joint scale ratio = current length/default length

The current length of the trunk was calculated by the curve info node,which can be accessed by the script

arclen-ch-true   ('ch' is construction history)


The leaves were rigged using joints and ik spline was used. A curve was also created for each leaf
for adding the dynamic simulation using  ndynamics.

All the curves of the leaves were selected and were given dynamic simulation by going to
ndynamics -> nhair-> make selected curves dynamic

Master control as well as controls for the trunk and for  dynamic simulation of leaves were created.

  Here are some screenshots below
    

                                                                        

                                                            playblast

Thanks and comments are welcome and appreciated

walk cycle

                                                     animating a character walk cycle

This is my first walk cycle in 3d animation. I had previously done run cycle  in 2d using flash and it was a great experience.

Animating a walk cycle was a vigorating and challenging. The best part about this was figuring out the graph editor.

I took some reference for the walk cycle,so as to understand the key poses . Here it is below

Here is the playblast below-

                                    

                                    Thanks and comments are welcome and apprciated

Dynamic poses

   This was done as an exercise in our animation class. We had to make 5 poses taking a 3d character model.

1) reaction pose                                                                             2) Observing pose
                                    

                 

3) Looking up pose                                                                            4) Casual pose
      

                                                          5)  Punching pose

                                                         
                                                       

                                                                             

                                              

                                         

                                                            

Thanks and comments are welcome and appreciated

                                                       

Dynamic expressions

                                                             Basic expressions

This was done as an exercise in our animation class. We had to make 5 expressions taking a 3d character model.

  1)        typical serious                                                                              2) crafty     
     






3)            nervous                                                                                      4) confident
                                      
                                        
                                                                   5)   sad
                                                                  

This sad expression was inspired by laurel of the laurel hardy series.

Thanks and comments are welcome and appreciated

        





                                             

Book Rig

Rigging a Book

This was a  challenging rig, as it had lots of steps to get it done. The rig procedure is as follows-

The first part, is to rig the cover of the book by placing joints and skinning them to the cover

Then, giving joints to the book and skinning them to the book

The third part was using corrective blendshapes to position the vertices of the book and correct its shape when the book is open or closed.

Then a loose page had to be rigged and page fanning had to be created. The loose page was rigged using blendshapes to get the different positions of a page when its turned.The rigged loose page was then imported into the file to get multiple pages for the page fanning.
The page fanning was done using the midpoint formula:-
                                     
(x2,y2,z2) = 𝑥1+𝑥3/2,𝑦1+𝑦3/2,𝑧1+𝑧3/2

I had imported and used 9 pages for the fanning.

The last step was to create controls for the book rig. Here are some of the screenshots of the rig below-
                              

playblast

                                         

                                    This video shows the controls created for the book rig.

            Thank you, comments are welcome and appreciated