It is reaaaaaaaaally coming along now. See these pictures here for my progress today, it's been great. I read a few chapters in the Learning Maya 5 Rendering book I have had for a while (hehe as you might imagine, since it's a Maya 5 book!) I read some really useful stuff about Caustics and Global Illumination. I am using these two features in the mental ray renderer in Maya. Caustics allows me to get a nice refraction effect on the table when the light bends through the glass material. Global Illumination lets me "indirectly" light the scene through the use of photons, rather than through a regular spotlight. This ends up giving a more realistic lighting effect. Awesome!! I read a bunch of stuff in the book, did a few tutorials to get to know how to use the tools and then applied this to my own scene.
It is looking pretty good now, I've got soft shadows, caustics, global illumination and some other nice effects going on. I am not sure what to do with the background as a lot of the testing I did was with a pretty dark background, and I think I want it to be a bit brighter.
Tomorrow I need to make a Label for my Pop Can (Jutan Cola or something like that), then determine how to change Field of View with the camera to get artistic blurry effects and to focus the viewers attention on specific things in the picture, and then finally I need to make a few final renders to show my Prof on Friday. So that is going pretty well and I think I made good progress today.
Talking about sweet Graphics stuff, I talked to my Graphics Prof this morning and he offered me some great advice for my Raytracer Project for this term. I am planning on implementing some Raytracer Optimizations, along with Mesh-Specific Optimizations, an OBJ File Importer and probably some other stuff like texture mapping, noise, soft shadows, etc. The goal is to be able to import some of my cool models from Maya into my own Raytracer, and then render them out in a cool scene from my own Raytracer. Awesome!!!!!!! I am really excited for this, it will be a lot of work but I think it is going to be really fun to do.
Anyway off to bed. If you are up for commenting, it would be great if you could please let me know what you think of the progression in lighting for these images. Thanks!
First shot at table and wall texture
Some preliminary lighting
Attempt at Caustics
First decent Caustics
Looking better now
Final Caustics
First attempt at Global Illumination
Global Illumination - fixed the bright spots on the wall
Soft Shadows and Caustics
Fixed the reflection and refraction depth limit
Added blue carpet and nicer wall to make it a bit less drab
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