Final Project Idear (sketch)

I think this is self explanatory. My six image ideas. I know the sketch is a little everywhere ( a cluster f@ck of lines and scribbles). I want to basically have a shot into this "magical" forest where a character of mine lives. It's part of my senior thesis project, so I will work harder at this to make it look good, meaning most plants will probably be sculpted. I will be using matte-painting so please don't look forward to seeing that. This project should be very annoying, and very difficult, but very well worth it in the end, so I hope. I believe there will be if not at least close to 20 different models in the foreground the rest will be images in layers overlapping each other. (remember, this is part of my senior thesis, it will be in an animation so this -will- be needed).

p.s: Yes, the rain forest will have glowing plants, it's magical.

p.s.s: Hurray for duplicated models!

Ambient Occluded Kitchen

In class today I quickly showed how to create Ambient Occlusion passes, referring to this tutorial. Building upon that, here is how to use photoshop to composite the passes, giving you more control that simply multiplying them directly in Maya
To the right you see the basic lit black and white kitchen

 

Here is the Ambient Occlusion pass, using the default settings

 

Simply multiplied on top, the way too dark ambient occlusion pass makes the entire image black. Not quite, but close

 

In Photoshop, I brightened the Ambient Occlusion render using curves. This clearly reveals the noisiness (click on the image to see that in a larger picture)

 

So next I apply a smart blur to the image

 

Multiplying the images was still making it to dark, so I added the Ambient Occlusion image to the normal render. Add is called Screen in Photoshop, and I set the Ambient Occlusion layer to 22%

 

Finishing touch: changed the outside color, using the alpha channel that was saved with the tiff images

Kitchen progress example

I showed this example in class: the black and white kitchen work in progress entry by Jennifer Cram: Kitchen 2.0"