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.

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 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.

Paint Effects: Maya Software vs. Renderman

I started attempting to customize a brush in Maya Paint Effects. The results were surprisingly lovely! I referenced a texture map as a starting point, and Maya Software handled it very well; it looks natural. Unfortunately when I attempted to render the scene with Renderman, I got a very different result (see below). No amount of brush tweaking has gotten me close to the Maya Software render. While I am much more familiar with Renderman than Maya Software, I may have to use the latter since the resulting renders are so beautiful and paint-like.
More testing is in order.

Texture map with alpha























In motion, the brush strokes look a bit strange. I seem to be getting some "crawling" textures.
HI RES