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Stanford Dragon

Project 2

Day 1

October, 5, 2018

I started off this project by meeting up with fellow class mates to take reference photos.

The only problems I ran into once I looked at my photos is that they weren't all perfectly aligned with each other. I did not used a tripod so this is why they didn't line up. This could pose a problem when I take everything into Maya and might give issues once I start to align the camera and the key light.

Day 2

October, 11, 2018 - October, 13, 2018

I did have some issues once I started to align everything. I solved this problem by aligning the camera with the cube for the correct perspective. Then I used the ball reference image to align the shadow. I also had issues getting the shadow perfectly aligned due to the reference ball being on top of the bottle cap. I think I was able to get a fairly good match on my ball. Matching the ball as best as I can really helps once I start working on integrating my Stanford Dragon Model. I wont have to worry about the alignment of the light or shadow and spend more time focusing on the shader.

Day 3

October, 14, 2018 - October, 20, 2018

non_reflect.png

This image was the first composite I did with my rock shader that I created using a mix shader. I made a shader that only used subsurface. This shader is where I get all of my blue colors from. I created a ramp that resembled the variations of blues in my rock. Then for my second shader I created a glass material. So far this is a good start I feel like I matched my rock very well but it still needs some tweaking. I rendered out my aov's and split them up in nuke and then did various color corrections to get the match correct to the clean plate image.

reflections.png

This is a later attempt at tweaking my shader. I was trying to match the image of the rock too much and not taking into regards for the true learning process for this assignment which was to have reflections and refraction. I went back into Maya and played around with my glass shader some more. I then did various color corrections in nuke for this composite. I have always struggled with getting my shaders to do exactly what I want them to do. This project will definetly help me in my shader creation. To have more control over my two shaders instead of using the mix shader I created separate layers for each shader and then merged them back together in nuke. I also added a fresnel layer in order to have better control over the amounts of glass and subsurface my model would have. I still feel like this composite needs work and I think that the problems I am having is due to my glass shader.

Day 4

October, 21, 2018

Here is my final composite for my dragon. After much tweaking with my shader and color corrections in nuke I was able to create a shader that is an inspiration of my original rock. I also color corrected my shadow and ground occlusion to match the color of the dragon to better integrate it into the scene. The major change that I made with my shaders was I colored my glass a lighter blue to help the integration and make the whole object feel less washed out. I still feel like I need to make more adjustments but for now I feel like this is a good place to stop until I get some more comments on what I should fix. 

Here is a side by side turntable of my two shaders. I feel like in my breakdown it doesn't fully show the two individual shaders correctly due to the color corrections I had to do correctly combine and color correct the two shaders.

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