Current project

Here's what I'm working on right now, it's getting close to finished.  Geometry is from a CG lighting challenge, shaders in Mudbox, and lighting (along with geo and shader fixes) in Houdini.  At this stage critique would be extremely helpful, so blast away.

CG Hat

This is another project from the shader programming class.  We had to put an object in a photograph and make it so no one could tell it was CG.  Unfortunately I can't find all of the in-between steps so you'll have to trust me that it looked pretty laughable in the beginning.  Getting a polygonal model to look like cloth by hand wasn't easy.  The hat was mostly modeled in Mudbox using a crazy process which took quite a while.  Shading and lighting were in Houdini.

Original Photo 

Mostly Finished Model and Texture

Final

Finished Berry

Skip a couple days of staring at the computer and one night of babysitting renders and we have a finished berry.

Reference Image

And here's the mess of nodes I made to get the texture.

Tweaking

Continued tweaking of the light model and displacement maps

At this point I moved to a low quality model with vector displacement.  Houdini 12 hates vector displacement, I only got it working with help from Ethan.  It messed with my regular displacement maps, so those need more work.

Light

Add light with a shading model, and tweak, tweak, tweak

Displacement Shading

The next step is to finalize the basic shader and add displacement.

Blueberry progress

Still working on the basic pattern.  At the same time I mutated a sphere in mudbox to get the final model.

Shader Programming

I present for you... a blueberry.

Our first project for shaders class is to make a fruit using mostly noises in Houdini.  I'm going to recreate this-

The fun has been doubled

Here is the second image from my still life assignment.  One scene, one semester, two images.
It looks a bit different on each computer, there should be pure blacks and whites when it's at its best.  The first image is my layout render from the shot, I used it as a guide for lighting.

Drawover

Final image

Done. Mwhahaha

Here is the final image of my still life project.  But it's not over yet, the assignment was to make two renders of the same objects.  I'll post the second image soon.

Occlusion/Beauty Composite

Progress

The last texture to do was the vase, which decided to break.  Any newly created texture just came out black, but I could still apply old ones.  Then all my textures broke.  Not fun, but I did get one last render before everything went bad.

It turns out the Render farm didn't have permissions to some of my files, so I'm rendering locally until it gets fixed.  In the meantime, I had Brent critique and the project ended up ten times better after a few hours of working in his suggestions.

We Did it Again

As texturing continued, I had Brent critique the project again.  He suggested adding more details so the image would be more interesting.  A few hours later and it was ten times better.  Again.

before

after

at this point I started lighting

The Project Continues

The best part about this project is being in Brent's class.  I didn't like the composition very well and asked him what to do.  His answer was to add more objects.  The next day the scene looked ten times better.  With that out of the way, I started textures.

before

after

We Did it Again

Brent saw my progress and suggested more details to make it interesting.  The project isn't due until mid-December so why not?

before

after