Dinosaur Revolution Images
Here are several snapshots from the Discovery Series "Dinosaur Revolution" I worked on. Most of the dinosaur assets I worked on with the exception of a few.
At first I was tasked with the texturing of the assets, but somewhere near the beginning it was apparent I was faster and a little more adept to setting up the materials and rendering the look dev examples. Soon I was deep in shader trees, defining skin, keratin, and other delicious dino materials.
Most of the assets above I created secondary or utility maps to assist in describing the materials rendered, however the primary diffuse maps were shared between Angie Rodrigues, Aaron Hamman, and Kris Kelly.
Dinosaur Revolution Turntables
Here are just a few of the turntables for some of the assets. It is sad that 2 full episodes worth of assets got cut towards the end, for, there were some cool and gnarly beasts going on. Enjoy.
.........................................................................................................................................................................
Current Demo Reel
Mauler ::
Texture Creation
Creature textures were all hand painted using a number of different alphas in ZBrush. I used the Projection Master method of painstakingly picking up and dropping the model to paint. After texture export much cleanup was done in Photoshop to correct stretching and projection smearing.
Shading
I used a number of different shaders on this asset. Mental Ray’s skin shader, the mia_material_x, as well as blinns, phongs, surface shaders for utility purposes. Some procedurals were used to break up other attributes such as reflection and specularity. Mental Ray and Maya shaders were used.
Lighting
The lighting in this scene was nothing complicated just some practical lighting to create a little mood. There is a key light, 2 fill lights, a rim light (all spotlights, except rim) and indirect lighting utilizing Final Gather.
Compositing
I wanted a lot of control so I set out to make this as efficient as possible. A light pass was rendered per light, subsurface layers, as well as diffuse, specular, and reflection passes for most elements making up the asset. Additional control passes used were light control, ID mattes, fresnel, and luminance depth (linear DoF). At the end of the day I wound up utilizing around 20 rendered passes for this asset. Nuke was used for overall compositing. Texture card swipes were created in After Effects for its ease of card system setup.
Asian Scene ::
Texture Creation
For this asset I wanted to push procedural texture utilization. The only textures I photo sourced was a wood texture for the floor, a wood texture for the table, and a wood texture for the platter on the table. Wood textures were treated in Photoshop.
Shading
All shaders used were mia_material_x’s. I really wanted to push realism for this project so opted for physically correct solutions. Maya’s Mental Ray was used for shading.
Lighting
I used Mental Ray’s Physical Sun and Sky lighting solution in conjunction with portal lighting to assist with the bounced indirect lighting. Blackbody nodes were used to determine lighting color.
Compositing
Like the other assets I wanted control but could not find a way to break the PS and S system into passes. This asset was rendered without the SP1a raytracing corrections as I found myself having issues with the mia_material_x_passes shaders breaking on me. I wound up rendering 32-bit
