Lotus leaf overhaul

I wasn't pleased with the look of the lotus leaves, so they have new geometry and new shading. The new versions look much more full and painterly, and I'm very please with how they look in the layout.


This is how they looked before,













and after.
















And in the current layout:

New layout

Took a step backwards to the layout stage.  I wasn't pleased with the minimal amount of parallax I was getting from the previous camera motion.  After all, the point of this project is to reveal depth through movement and parallax, so I scrapped that camera completely and reanimated.

In this test you'll see I've turned on the depth of field, which is working very nicely.

Not totally happy with the lotus leaves at the moment.  Too many harsh lines and noise in the textures.

Depth of field and Zdepth

Finally managed to get a Zdepth pass working with a script from this wonderful person who wrote a .mel script specifically for use with Maya and Renderman.  The script preserves the displacement (wow, so rare) but unfortunately not the alpha.  With some tweaking I managed to get a working zDepth map that has both, so now I can control the brightness values of my images.

Chinese paintings typically show background elements blurrier and more washed out.  With my Zdepth map I can manage the washed out effect, and by adding depth of field to my camera, I can acheive blur.

Zdepth pass with DOF

Color pass with DOF and Zdepth mask

 

Cam test for Cherry blossoms

First full render of the two blossom bunches.  I will need to change the camera so it lingers longer on the subjects while they are in frame.  I also want to get more parallax in the movement so I'll need to rotate the camera around the subjects more dramatically.

Cherry blossom population

First set of branches is done being flowered.

Camera Test 03

Here is the full camera motion.
Now I can really work on scene population.

Camera Test 01

Initial Camera motion test with about 60% of the final length.

Lotus flower complete

Lotus flower is complete!

Lotus stem spots

It is common for Chinese paintings of lotus plants to have small black dots on the stems of the leaves and flowers as you can see on the example to the left.


I had to find a way to create these spots efficiently and so that they would move with the gentle sway of the objects.  Paint Effects once again!  I created a brush that would spawn these tiny black dots and used the "Paint on Surface" feature to stick them to the stems.  This allowed them to move with the surface of the stem as it was animated.

Cherry branch

This turned out much better than I thought it would!  I built the branch using Paint FX Tubes and then converted them to polys where I could modify them further.  The problem I was having with my original model was that the branch was one single piece, which made UV unwrapping illogical and difficult.  By breaking up the branches and twigs into separate pieces, I was able to texture them much more easily.

The use of a displacement map is very important here. It gives the edges some of the bleed effect that happens with ink on rice paper.

Cherry Blossom Paint fx revisited

After learning more about Paint Effects, I decided to revisit the cherry blossom using a different approach.  Instead of building each blossom petal by petal, I used PFX's intuitive Tubes system to build a set of flowers and pollen that could be quickly and easily generated.



These are what the petals look like with the default shading:

And here is what they look like after I've treated them which involves converting them to polygons, adjusting the UV maps, applying shaders and smoothing.

The petal texture needs to be more subtle and variated, so I will be working on that next.







Here is what they would look like in the final animation with the rice paper background.

Toon shader refined

 I've further modified the toon shader so it has a "bleedy" edge effect. I can now manipulate the color, opacity, edge thickness, noisefrequency and filterstep amount as attributes in Maya.

Still a bit strange with the lines moving so much, but perhaps it won't be as obvious in the final animation, which will have much more subtle camera motion.

Toon shading

Left: with toon shader
Right: Painted textures







I modified a version of a cel/toon shader from the "Advanced Renderman" book by stripping away the fill-color functions and replacing them with an opacity and color texture map read function.  I had to add some texture manipulation functionality since my maps kept appearing upside down.  The outline function was largely left the same, with some slight modifications to thickness.

The results are interesting.  I'm not sure if I like the outline effect as it seems a bit distracting to the eye.  Below you can see two test renders.
On the left is the toon outline shader over a texture that has outlines manually painted on the map.  On the right is just the fill color with the toon outline shader applied.

Wind Test

I've been testing wind effects using nDynamics. By constraining components (leaf, stem) and attaching them with springs, I can use the nucleus node to create an environment to gently buffet them with a breeze.
The leaves in this render are a bit too fluttery. I will be reducing the wind noise.



UPDATE: After hours of tweaking, I finally found a balance of zen and realism. The first test was too "zen", and subsequent tests where I tried to make a more realistic sim were too harsh.

Lotus leaf

The previous lotus leaves looked very flat when in motion. Here is a new version where I've broken out the individual brush strokes and arranged them together. The resulting leaf looks much more shapely when in motion and still maintains a painterly appearance whenever you pause the animation.

I also added a displacement map to give it even more texture. Though some of the effects were not expected, I think it gives the leaf an even more organic quality.
Accidentalism in 3D :)

Lotus test render

Here is my latest rendering test. This should give you a loose idea of how I want the final to look.
Right now I'm working on making things a little more painterly. Perhaps I'll take a page from Disney's paper with the painterly effects they used in Bolt.
UPDATE: The painterly technique used by Disney involved roughening up the normals of the object so that it reflects light differently. Since I am not using any sort of lighting, this probably won't be the right solution.

Lotus Flower

Initial render of the lotus flower I've been working on. Need to add variety to the brush effects and some more alpha to make the edges less rigid and defined. I also plan to vary the geometry of the petals to make them more organic and lively.









Texture painting done with watercolor, ink and brush on rice-paper















Original reference painting done with watercolor, ink and brush on rice paper.

Paint Effects or no

Paint Effects Update:

I decided not to use the custom brush for two reasons:
1) Not compatible with Renderman, which I am comfortable working with and with which I and trying to get more experience in before starting my job.
2) Unpredictable results when camera is in motion, i.e. crawling textures

I may still be using Paint Effects for other small insignificant pieces of the animation (grass).