Problem
For this project, I needed to find an image of a scene and attempt to recreate it as closely as possible in Maya by modeling, surfacing, lighting, and rendering. My model can be found here (email me if you need access to the drive folder).
Solution
For my solution, I started by modeling the tables that all of the objects were placed on, and arranging them so that they would be lined up properly to recreate the shot. The tables themselves were fairly simple, only comprised of a series of cylinders and toruses that were slightly modified.
After the tables were complete, I moved on to the flask/vase (?) on the bottom left table. I modeled this out of a sphere, slightly deforming it until it was in the shape that I wanted. Then, I modeled the candle, which was three different cylinders. Next, I modeled the clay vase, which was another cylinder that I shaped, then added ridges to the outside of so that it would look more like the reference image.
Next, I modeled the glass bowl, which was the second hardest object to model. I started with a cylinder and created the overall shape of the bowl, then I poked all of the faces around the outside of the bowl, creating a diagonal pattern along the outside. Then, I added a few more edge loops that gave me the geometry to create the alternating divets of the bowl from the reference photo, this was challenging, and the bowl didn’t end up exactly right, but it was fairly close to the reference photo.
After this, I modeled the glass pitcher, which was fairly easy. I once again started with a cylinder, got the basic shape, then prepped it for smoothed mode. Then I modeled the brush, which I created by using a sphere for the handle, then a cylinder for the brush itself. Lastly, I modeled the copper pot, which I had the hardest time modeling. I started with cylinder for the base, used a sphere and a cylinder for the lid, and two cubes that I extruded to create the handle and its mounting bracket. I was trying really hard to get the pot to look clean and well defined, especially the spout. In the end, I mostly succeeded, and the topology stayed relatively clean around the spout. The last modeling I had to do was to add five planes for the floor and the four walls of the room. With that, the modeling was complete
Next, I added a few lights to the scene for help seeing my shaders, then moved on to shading. For this project, I primarily used Arnold’s aiStandardShader, for all of my objects. I started by creating a glass shader for the glass bowl and pitcher. I did this by making the glass fully transmissive and decreasing the roughness of the specular highlight. This achieved the effect I wanted really well, creating a clear glass that distorted what was behind it. I also attempted to add caustics with this glass, which partially worked (see challenges). After the glass, I created a red liquid material for the liquid that (I assumed) was in the glass bowl, to help get the red coloration you see in the reference image (see challenges). This material was very similar to the glass, with less transmissive color, and slightly more roughness.
After those shaders, I moved on to create shaders for the tables, creating a smooth ceramic for the table tops and a painted metal shader for the table legs.
After that, I created a more silver metal for the table feet. Following that, I made a brass material for the flask and a copper material for the pot. These three materials were very similar, mostly differing only in their base color.
After that I textured the clay pot, which I made very rough so that it appeared more diffuse. I also applied a bump map out of fractal noise to make the pot look rougher and unfinished, like in the reference. After that, I textured the brush handle and the handle of the copper pot. I used a black plastic looking shader with medium roughness to diffuse the specular highlight, which seemed to work well for the material. After that, I tried to texture the brush in a way to preserve the appearance of bristles (to little success). To do this, I applied a texture with a high roughness, then linked the color to a fractal noise that I distorted to give the appearance of random, mostly horizontal lines around the outside (this worked out very interestingly. It looked more like wood grain, but it was procedural and very easy to make, so this is a pretty neat trick! Unfortunately, it didn’t work quite as well as bristles). I then created another fractal noise with the same parameters, and linked it as a bump map to give the bristles texture. This didn’t work as well as I had hoped, but I couldn’t think of a better solution.
After that, I only had to texture the floor and the walls. These were both actually really fun, as they had a pseudo noise pattern that was fun to try to get right. For the floor, I ended up using the marble texture scaled up to get the pattern of the floor, then I gave the floor a medium roughness to get the reflections of the tables to look right. For the walls, I used the cloud texture, which I manipulated to have similar splotches to the wall from the reference image, and I gave the walls a high roughness so they wouldn’t reflect anything. With that, all I had to do was prep the scene to be rendered.
First, I had to set up my lights, which was quite challenging, as I couldn’t quite tell what lights the photographer used for their setup. It really seemed like they only used one light, but I couldn’t achieve a similar light setup without multiple lights. In the end, I used two Arnold area lights, with only one light casting shadows. After I did this, I created four different cameras to render each of my rendered shots for the scene.
I rendered using the Arnold Renderer in Maya. For my render settings, I chose a sampling of 6/6/3/3/3/3 (I increased camera to increase the quality of the anti aliasing, and diffuse to get better caustics, which only sort of worked). However, the first image took a very long time to render, so I lowered this to 3/3/3/3/3/3 after the first render (which was based on the reference image). I also rendered all images as HD 1080 and had all of my light sampling set to 5.
Pictures
Challenges
Over all, this project went fairly well. I only had some minor challenges crop up while I was working, but I couldn’t figure out good work-arounds for a few of them.
For modeling, I had several small issues. First, I misjudged the foreshortening of the table legs with the front table, causing the legs to be a bit too far apart. Second, I made a few minor modeling mistakes with the glass bowl, causing the dimples to not be perfectly uniform between rows. I also realized too late that, in the reference photo, the glass bowl doesn’t have any liquid in it, and the glass itself has a gradient color to it. I could probably have fixed this by using a ramp shader on top of the glass shader, but I had noticed this too late to fix it in time. Lastly, the copper pot gave me a lot of issues when I modeled it, and while I fixed many of the topology issues, there are still a few minor problems with it. For example, I had to add several edge loops to define the edge of the spout of the pot, but I couldn’t add these without causing hard lines along the length of the pot (because I had to add these edge loops, they affected the geometry where I didn’t want them to, but if I tried to isolate the edges I was adding, that would have caused several other topology issues). This didn’t affect the model too much, but it is noticeable if you look at the pot along the side that the spigot is attached.
Texturing went surprisingly well this time. I used the Arnold shaders, and looked up a few tutorials on how to achiever certain textures, and I got pretty close with most of them. The hardest one was the brush, and I couldn’t figure out how to get the bristles to look right with the methods I chose. I probably would have had to either look up how to do hair simulation, or maybe used a texture map to get closer to the product, but I don’t think I could get the brush to look much better with my current approach.
I also didn’t leave myself enough time for the lighting, so I realize now that the lights aren’t very accurate to the reference scene. I tried using Maya spot lights at first, and had the lighting set up fairly well with them, but I couldn’t get them to work well with shadows. Because of this, I tried using Arnold area lights, which worked a bit better, but it was harder to get the lights to work exactly the way that I wanted them to (orienting them and controlling where they stopped was confusing, so that is probably the cause of most of the lighting mistakes in the scene). In the end, shadows still proved difficult (I couldn’t get rid of the hard edges on them), and the lights themselves didn’t cover the whole scene as well as I had wanted (for example, the copper pot ended up pretty dark).
I also tried to get caustics to work, but the render times to get decent caustics ended up being too long to get any good images of them. I think my caustics would have turned out better if I had gotten rid of the liquid in the glass bowl, but I was never able to get my caustics to look like the reference image.
If I had left myself more time to try rendering out the caustics and play around with lighting, I might have been able to fix these issues, but I forgot to account for how long rendering can take.
DPA 8070 Exercises and Projects 