Thursday, October 9, 2008

Progress and Learning


Continuing with the idea of having kittens in the scene, I decided that I wanted to have 3; one looking up to the ogre, one sleeping, and one playing with a butterfly. This update shows the placement and general posing that I'm going for. Things that are missing or unfinished, are the butterfly and the bedding the kitten is on won't be just a block - I'm just not sure what to make it yet.

Now for things that I've learned during this small step. For one, the smooth tool in Modo is amazing. It will average out so many issues that arise from posing meshes, I only wish I had used it more a while ago.

Also with the help of Christian and Mike I figured out how to make my renders look better. This image (above) is an ambient occlusion render with the white range turned way up to minimize the amount of dark values that appear in the scene. The purpose of this is to take this render, and composite it with a color render (below) using the multiply blend mode in Photoshop to really enhance the shadows of your scene. The result is the image at the top of this post. I will update more soon.

3 comments:

jgiambrone said...

holy crap that's awesome! you can definitely see the difference in the render. as far as the smoothing tool technique you used on your model could you elaborate on what you did and how you did it?

Michael Panov said...

nice kyle. this is looking much better dude! Yeah the smooth tool is quite nice. I made a Shift+S shortcut for the smooth tool with the airbrush falloff, so i can smooth random areas of the mesh quickly. Very useful!

Kyle Van Meurs said...

Thanks guys.

Joe, I'm talking about the smooth tool under the deform menu. I switch between smooth proxy and low res frequently while modeling, and sometimes my low res mesh just becomes a terrible mess (usually where forms bend). So what you can do is just select the polys with smooth proxy on, hit smooth a few times, and it will take that mess and average everything out. It may make things too smooth, but it gives you a very clean surface to go back and rework.