Rendering/Shading Project 3

Initial File:

http://www.3drender.com/challenges/ Challenge #21: The Bedroom

Lighting:

Once again, I went for a more natural look in the same fashion as I did with the King’s Treasure scene using physical sky and portal lights. This time, however I had to use Final Gathering to get enough light into the room.

One note is that if you decide to use an ambient light to brighten an overall scene like I did, turn off its Ambient Shade attribute so objects won’t be affected by shading coming from it:

Texturing and Materials:

Again, the general techniques are the same as for the King’s Treasure scene. One issue one may arrive upon when texturing the posters is that due to the posters’ deformations, the UVs don’t line up with a rectangular image. While doing the export and texture in Photoshop would work for these posters I thought they were too simple and instead directly textured in Maya. To solve the UV problem, select the object and go to Window->UV Texture Editor:

Here when you seelct and stretch your UVs to size, you can see the corner doesn’t form a proper rectangle. You can tweak the UV vertices directly into place in order to rectify this problem. However, have your actual mesh visible somewhere because you want to keep the UVs as close as possible to the relative shape of your mesh to avoid distortion.

Another issue you may run into is that some of the objects come as a single mesh (such as the Laptop). While you could create a single texture for the whole object it is more work and the whole object would still have to share the same material properties. An easier way is to select the object, enter Face mode and select the faces in question. Then, while in Polygons mode, go to Edit Mesh->Extract:

This will split the faces off the old mesh, allowing you to texture these as seperate objects. I usually delete the History on both the resultant meshes, but that is optional for this scene.

Render Layers and Ambient Occlusion:

One feature of Maya is that through the use of render layers, you can render your objects in multiple different ways (or different objects altogether) in one pass and have Maya do a simple composite of them all in one pass. For this project I used a render layer for Ambient Occlusion by selecting all non-light objects and adding them to a new render layer.

After doing so, right-clicking on the render layer and select Attributes. From here go to the Presets menu and select Occlusion. Also, in the bar directly at the top of the render layer section, go to Options and then the settings box for “Render All Layers”. Here you can choose whether you want Maya to do compositing for you or just render the layers for you to take care of yourself. Finally in the dropdown box above your render layers, you can choose the method by which they are composited by Maya. For now, use Multiply for the Occlusion layer.

General Tips and Issues:

My Ambient Occlusion composite makes the scene way too dark!

This happened to my original scene. For some reason, the AO pass had only greys and when multiplied, had the effect of darkening everything. If you encounter this, the easiest workaround is simply to change the compositing mode on the render layer to “Overlay” rather than “Multiply”.

There are way too many objects!

Easiest way to work around this is simply to first determine your camera angle and then texture only the objects visible. However, I failed to follow my own advice and ended up assigning materials to everything.

My textures are way way too bright!

This also can happen. This can be fixed by going to the File node of the material you assigned the texture to. Then you can see a Color Balance attribute category. In here, if you turn the Color Gain down, you can darken the texture. Also, changing the Default Color can make it easier to keep track of which objects in your scene are textured without having to turn on Textures for the viewport.