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Final HD Shot
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The Beginning of the Shader
Instead of using a Maya shader, I am now going to construct a RenderMan shader to create a photo real look to the Palmetto Plant.
Using the program Cutter, I created a Slim shader which translates to Maya. Below is the shader so far. HERE IS THE CODE. This is what it looks like in Maya.
Right now, this is what the render looks like using the shader. As you can see, its pretty flat though the tips are dark and the translucence is working. It looks far from real. Part of the lack of realism is the 'perfectness' that is provided by the shader. Life is full of flaws, and the shader needs to represent that.
For some strange reason, Maya continues to crash when I render the plant. Therefore, I've removed some of the boxes/branches in hopes that the program will not crash. So far so good! Sadly, my plant looks like it's having a bad day.
Shader Samples The s_freq and the t_freq control the amount of noise. The amplitude controls the Level of the noise. In the picture below you have about 50 noise and 0 amplitude. It appears more leopard print than a plant shader.
This is an example of much more noise and increasing the amplitude. It still looks like the plant is affected by a virus, by its starting to come together.
I had to make some additions to the Slim code so that I had more control of the shader.
THE SLIM CODE And this is what it looks like in Maya. I added the vein_repeats so that I can have control over the texture map. The darkspot is to have control over the noise. Amplitude was changed to noise_amp to make it more understandable to the use.... which is me!
Other issues that I'm suffering through is adding texture map to the plant. The image below shows that the map isn't covering the plant. This render is through cutter.
I wanted to see if Maya give me a separate version, but I have a similar issues where the texture map does not cover the entire plant.
Therefore I took a UV snapshot of the plant...
...grabbed some texture from the reference pictures, and created a texture map that covers the entire UV snapshot.
I changed it to black and white. I am hoping that this is the problem and that now the texture map will cover the whole plant.
And it works! This is my final render so far. You really can't see the texture but its there. The noise is a lot calmer and gives it a more organic feel.
Here is a camera shot further away.
I would like to make this piece stronger. I would like to figure out how to make the veins come out even more. I would also like to make the shadows look better instead of being so pixilated. Some DOF would probably do wonders on this scene. It would also be great to add occlusion so the scene can have a stronger contact shadow. |
Occlusion
Creating occlusion for a 3D scene is essential especially for shadows. Therefore we created an occlusion shader though there were some issues to it.
I used this Occlusion Shader. THE CODE As you can see, it is completely white with no details to the model.
Therefore, I went through the RIB file using WordPad and changed the "int diffuse" [0] to "int diffuse" [1]. However, the results are what you see below. Very strange.
I added a plane, and voila! The Occlusion works great!
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Continue RenderMan Shader
I continued working on the RenderMan shader, attempting to make a believable palmetto plant.
I redid the UVs as well as a new texture map.
The original map is 2048x2048.
I used this Code to create the shader. THE CODE This is what the shader looks like in Maya.
These are the renders with the above RenderMan shader. I believe it is an improvement from the previous images. The translucence textures are coming through, though it is not exactly what I had in mind. I wanted to see the veins which I've drawn in the uv map above, but they don't come through. However, the texture does come through, which gives the plant a more organic look.
Animation The Animation with some lovely DOF:
Fun! Just having fun with my fancy RenderMan Shader!
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