Week 11: 11/10/14

Sorry about delays, I haven't been feeling very motivated lately.  Besides the heavy work load from other classes and digging a hole way too big to fill, I have already begun the trend of hating my thesis.  Everything about it annoys me, and I almost want to forget about it entirely and come back to it at the start of next semester.

 

But I can't.  I can't allow myself to fall behind like that.  After having a conversation with Meghdad today about what's been going on, he reassured me that this crisis happens to all 3D and design personnel.  If I don't hate my project by the end, I clearly haven't put in enough time and effort for it.

 

And so I push on.  Tonight, after my classes finished, I, with the help of my friend, Tom, setup distributed rendering with V-Ray in Maya.  After a couple hours and some in-depth testing and analysis, the service finally works with very few problems.

 

In this image, you can see the separate nodes working together to render the final image.  It contained 12 passes and 3 render layers, all composited within Maya.  At this point, about 5 min have passed.

This is the final image, with all the rendering complete.  All the shadows, lights, reflections, AO, GI, etc. have been added.  The total time, 9m 57.2s (as seen on the bottom of the image), a serious improvement from a 22m render prior to using distributed rendering (DR).  Though this scene isn't my thesis (it was from a group project earlier this semester), it is a nice test for covering the DR bases.  This can definitely be utilized in the very near future.

Week 9: 10/24/14

I've been playing around with different lighting shaders and toon materials with reflective and/or transparent qualities.  The results will continue to be tested in the upcoming weeks as my models are built.

I also made a discovery yesterday that our department actually has a room dedicated to electronics and audrino equipment.  This makes modeling these types of objects much easier since I can observe them firsthand (as opposed to images online) and I can pick them up and physically understand their design.  I will be visiting this room daily from now on so I can work on modeling these objects to their most realistic qualities.  I have a reason to be on campus again.

Week 8: 10/19/14

I've been working on lots of other work this past week and went home for the weekend to visit my parents (since I won't be seeing them for quite a while again).  

I started playing with some of the toon shader effects in Maya and found some cool results with the "light based shader" or LBS (as seen below).  I will continue to play around with the LBS and the toon outline until I find some results that really suit my needs and design direction.