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bengotow
11-07-2005, 11:21 PM
Hey everybody! My school is putting together a movie based on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and I'm working on an opening sequence with a flythough of candy bars being produced. (similar to the one in the actual movie, where the bars travel through a huge system). The end product needs to be about a minute and a half long, and I'm planning for it to end with a shot of a candy bar reading "Senior Slideshow" lying face up in a box.

You can see a preview render of what I've got so far over here. I'm using Maya 6.0 and all of the rendering is being done in Mental Ray. There's probably gonna be a dirtmap layer multiplied over something like this in the final version.

http://www.gotow.net/creative/internal/followCam_s.mov (9MB)

I'm also working on a few exterior shots of the chocolate factory. During part of the movie, the main characters drive past the chocolate factory and look out the window at smoke billowing from the chimneys. So far, the plan is to mask the 3D factory over an existing factory (the compositing is out of my leauge). Here's a frame I've composited (though badly) in photoshop just as a proof of concept.

Original:
http://www.gotow.net/creative/internal/corning1small.jpg

Composited:
http://www.gotow.net/creative/internal/corning2small.jpg

and the factory model (ambient occlusion - pink by accident ;-) ):
http://www.gotow.net/creative/internal/render1.jpg

I've only been using Maya for about 9 months now, so this may all look very bad to you guys. Any criticism or suggestions would be appreciated! I have a feeling there are a lot of techniques I could be using to improve my texturing. I understand the shader networking system well, but maybe some veterans might know better? :rolleyes:

Thanks in advance everybody!
dbates
11-11-2005, 01:29 AM
I like it! Love the concept for the chocolate-bar-making assembly line.

By the way, would you (or someone else) mind educating me on dirtmaps? I tried a quick Google and just pulled up things like "how to implement dirtmaps in the shader network". Not quite what I wanted!

--dbates
jamagica
11-12-2005, 01:31 AM
that is actually very good (to me, at least)...looks exactly like what was from the movie. (the animation you posted). Haha...the chocolate factory is by a gas station. (That's why those stations always have the most candy around ! )
Akoa
11-12-2005, 10:25 PM
As far as the composite picture goes your modeling is very good, but I would work a little more on the textures of the factory and making sure the lighting of the factory match the lighting of the picture you are putting it into.
bengotow
11-14-2005, 01:52 AM
Wow - thanks for all the comments guys! I agree, the texturing does need some major improvements, and the lighting in that render was just a quick photoshop job :-) hopefully in the end i'll be able to work it out a little better... I should have some new renders posted soon. I've done some work on the texturing over the weekend.

A dirtmap is actually just an ambient occlusion pass (I guess people just call them dirtmaps because they're useful for making things look dirty :-) ). Basically, the amount of shading is based on how close an object is to other objects. Corners and edges are darkened, while everything else is white.

When it comes to Maya, there's a plugin that you can download that allows you to render a dirtmap (ambient occlusion) pass. I think Maya 7 now has an occlusion shader of it's own, so it might not be necessary anymore. But for people with older copies of Maya, you can get the plugin over here:

http://animus.brinkster.net/index.html
Note: this is the windows version. there IS a mac version too - it took me forever to track down though ;-)

Once you've got it all setup (the readme in the download should get you through the installation, otherwise there's lots of stuff on here), the dirtmap plugin shows up under the mental ray>miscellaneous section of the hypergraph. From there, you can attach it to the ambient color of a lambert shader or the color of a surface shader. Apply that shader to everything in your scene, and you've got a pretty cool looking render :-). The plugin has a couple options that allow you to change the quality, and you can also apply it to your materials using the add-subtract-average node so that you don't need another pass.

I usually just make separate versions, one with color/textures, etc... and one with the dirtmap, and then do a multiply overlay in final cut. :-)

hope that helps, and thanks everybody for the comments
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