israelyang
05-08-2007, 06:12 AM
It was a little revelation upon reading Neil Blevins' article on Metals And Reflections.
http://www.neilblevins.com/cg_education/metal_and_refs/metal_and_refs.htm
It kind of made me think more deeply about what make things real more real and not simply jumping to IBL without thinking why it makes the renders look better.
After a few experiments I think (specular) reflection plays a huge part.
In this example, I downloaded a basemesh from the pixologic website and I quickly sculpted it to make it look more personal and arbitrary. I gave myself a goal, to use as few textures as possible after learning many major studios almost do not use painted textures. (which is understandable, with all the textures it'd be really hard to render the scenes out) This experiment is about shader development and not texture painting, so please pardon my painted-in-maya-in-15-minute textures. In total I painted 3 textures: colour, specular rolloff and incandescence (to fake translucency).
In Neil's article he makes sure the lights do not emit specular(because it's a fake) and build real light objects to be reflected on the shader, and turn off spec properties on the shader so the reflection of the environment becomes the true spec of the shader. (I still left a little spec on because if I turned down spec all together then reflection wouldn't show at all)
The lighting is a basic 3 point lighting setup plus one floor light. All the lights are white so I can clearly see the lights effect on the shader.
If I don't use soft shadow the render is pretty fast, less than a minute. In image 9_sw.jpg you can see how it looks like as a straight maya software render.All the other images I rendered in mental ray so I could blur the reflection, I could have rendered out the reflection pass in maya s/w and blur it in pass, but MR does raytrace shadow faster anyway.
This is nowhere close to a real SSS shader and is not physics based, but I have always enjoyed the challenge of attempting.
Comments are welcome.
http://www.neilblevins.com/cg_education/metal_and_refs/metal_and_refs.htm
It kind of made me think more deeply about what make things real more real and not simply jumping to IBL without thinking why it makes the renders look better.
After a few experiments I think (specular) reflection plays a huge part.
In this example, I downloaded a basemesh from the pixologic website and I quickly sculpted it to make it look more personal and arbitrary. I gave myself a goal, to use as few textures as possible after learning many major studios almost do not use painted textures. (which is understandable, with all the textures it'd be really hard to render the scenes out) This experiment is about shader development and not texture painting, so please pardon my painted-in-maya-in-15-minute textures. In total I painted 3 textures: colour, specular rolloff and incandescence (to fake translucency).
In Neil's article he makes sure the lights do not emit specular(because it's a fake) and build real light objects to be reflected on the shader, and turn off spec properties on the shader so the reflection of the environment becomes the true spec of the shader. (I still left a little spec on because if I turned down spec all together then reflection wouldn't show at all)
The lighting is a basic 3 point lighting setup plus one floor light. All the lights are white so I can clearly see the lights effect on the shader.
If I don't use soft shadow the render is pretty fast, less than a minute. In image 9_sw.jpg you can see how it looks like as a straight maya software render.All the other images I rendered in mental ray so I could blur the reflection, I could have rendered out the reflection pass in maya s/w and blur it in pass, but MR does raytrace shadow faster anyway.
This is nowhere close to a real SSS shader and is not physics based, but I have always enjoyed the challenge of attempting.
Comments are welcome.