In class, I looked on pinterest for inspiration for my Still Life. Below is a screenshot of my pureref:

I am drawn to semi-transparent coloured glass and how light casts coloured shadows. I especially love the look of rainbow reflections off CDs and other holographic/rainbow shadows and light. I'm pretty sure this would be difficult to achieve in Maya, but I would like to challenge myself and attempt to create coloured shadows and possibly rainbow reflections off glass/metallic surfaces to create interesting compositions.

I love how when different coloured light passes through the ridged glasses (seen middle left), the different coloured reflect off the ridges and contrast to the solid background colour.

I love the composition of the glasses and other objects sitting on the window-sill and the way the light rays flow through the windows onto the objects, as well as how the glasses reflect the other objects around them. I especially love the pattern of light filtering through the window in this image, the shadows and light create interest in a relatively simple image. I also have found through looking at images and while create my renders that I am quite fond of square framing:

I don't have any solid ideas as to what I want my composition to be, but I am thinking of possibly doing something similar to the top left images in my pureref references, with an assortment of brightly coloured glasses and jars (maybe some filled with water?? but that might be too difficult) arranged with some plants and flowers and possibly some brightly coloured fruit and vegetables as well, such as tomatos, apples, oranges and bananas to create contrast with rougher textures compared to the shiny glass, as well as having an object that can be reflected into the glass. Light can stream through the window and I want to have a large enough table to allow for light to cast interesting coloured shadows and overlap to create new colours. 

Unfortunately this week I wasn’t able to do much work on my assessment as I was busy with other assignments, but I was able to follow along with most of class.

10th March - made a practice render with quixel bridge assets. Tried to get the tree shadow lighting to work but wasn’t able to. I based the composition of the work off the first artwork below:

Realised that I’ve been using the wrong lights (area light instead of the Arnold area light, which has exposure). I had to recreate all of my lights and line them up with my old ones.

Using my file from the practice render, I started finding and importing models from sketch fab. Some of the assets I wanted to use didn't work properly.

I decided to create a similar layout to Scott Priors paintings, seen below:

The first thing I wanted to try and get working was the tree leaf shadows. I used photoshop (went through a basics on photoshop video and practised a bit), using downloaded leaf brushes to create a texture I could use to make the shadows. 

Watching through the past lecture, I realised my mistake with getting the tree shadow to work was I was using aiStandardSurface material instead of just the normal standardsurface material. Once I changed the material, light was able to pass through and the shadows worked! I experimented a bit with the angle and position of the plane and the light shining through to achieve a look I liked.

My idea includes looking out a window at some trees/bushes, and I didn’t want the shadow plane to be seen so I looked through the attribute editor and found a setting that turned off the visibility of the plane in the Arnold Renderer while still keeping the shadows I wanted.

I used pureref with a few beaker refs to create an accurate beaker shape. I experimented with a flare to see what it could do in terms of getting a different shape for the beaker. I didn't end up using the flare though. 

To model the water, I didn’t remember 100% how to make the liquid inside of the beaker, but I did have a slight recollection from doing liquid inside of the first proper 3D model I made, my Mushroom Potion bottle in trimester 1 2021 for 3D Asset Creation. I found a video explaining it, which was the same technique I used for the potion bottle:

As a refresher, I followed this tutorial called "UV Map Anything in 5 Minutes with Maya": 

This was helpful for reminding myself of the basics of UVing in Maya.

I had an issue where once I unfolded the first part, the rest of the UV’s seemingly disappeared, I then found that it unfolded everything and they just went super tiny and killed them (as seen in image 6 and 7 below) so I started again, cutting everything before unfolding.

I created the beaker textures in Substance Painter, as I wanted to add the numbers onto the beaker to make it actually look like a beaker.

I had problems getting the opacity for the glass to work in Maya. After extensive research, I found you need to set the Template to PBR - Metallic Roughness Alpha-blend, as well as when exporting you need to create a new output map that is opacity and set the opacity (Grayscale). Once it gets imported into Maya, I needed to connect the opacity map into the opacity in the hypershade. 

Before I got it working (I didn't have an opacity channel) it looked metallic (see images below). 

To texture the beaker, I used alphas and masks to create the shapes. To create the lines, I had to use brackets and minus alphas, and manually click and line them up. It's not perfectly straight lines but it works for what I need it to be. I also had to manually line up and change the numbers each time when doing the numbers.

After gradually adding more models to my scene (from Sketchfab and quixel), I set my mind on creating an image very similar to the artworks of Scott Prior. 

I was using quixel bridge assets for the window frames, but after deciding on having a similar style to Scott Prior, I wanted to create window frames that better matched the aesthetic. The quixel window frames were too damaged.

Using the window frames in Scott Prior's painting as a reference, and semi-following this tutorial "Window Maya Tutorial" to start, I modelled the window frames:

Some of the faces were being weird (see images below), and Andrew suggested hardening the faces and that solved the issue :) 

I wanted the window frame to be even so after mirroring the window, I was able to get it symmetrical and I am now able to use the symmetry tool. (which didn't end up mattering in the end because I deleted half of the window because you won't be able to see the outside of the window in the render, as you can see in my third last progress photo).

I finished making the windows, then lined it up with my scene.​​​​​​​

I spent a long time trying to UV the windows, it took a while trying to figure out the best way to cut it. It was a long and painful process (mentally, not phsyically lol).

I manually lay out the UV's to match how it looks on the window so it could easily be textured. 

Unfortunately I didn't end up using the UV's I created for the window except for the window panes, which I extracted from the window and had the UV's now seperate. 

I added some dust to make the scene more realistic. I added multiple different layers of dust and handpainted the edges of the windows with a textured brush to emulate dirt building up around the edges of a window, much like in Scott Priors still life artworks.

My overall goal for my image was to replicate the warm light streaming through the windows and creating a peak in the middle of the image with the height of the bottles and flowers creating a rough arc, to allow a focus to the middle of the image. I love the warm, sunny look and the bright colours bouncing off each other with glass and fruit and opaque cups reflecting in glass, and I wanted to make sure that was part of my image. I also wanted to make it look like a still life but also at the same time random enough that it looked realistic and not super staged or rigid. 

To achieve this I made sure that I rotated and stagered the objects. You can see through my overall render progress how I went from a few objects in a straight line with huge gaps, to referencing how the glasses were almost touching each other in Scott Prior's work, clumping the glasses together which gave a more unified look. The glasses were now interacting with each other. 

I originally had quixel bridge bushes in the background, and attempted to use some low poly tree assets instead because the high poly bushes were taking too long to render and I also wanted objects that were more like autumn trees. The low poly trees didn't have alpha maps and weren't transparent, and they didn't look good overall. I ended up going with images on planes, which worked well because I blurred them using a lens blur in photoshop to emulate the depth that a camera would have when taking a photo in real life, overall it added a stronger sense of realisim to the image. It also worked well because I was able to choose two different images for my sidekick renders and therefore helped me create two completely different looks.

I spent a few hours compositing my final image. I accidentally rendered my final render incorrectly, it didn't have the dust or table textures loaded in properly so I had to redo the render. I didn't realise until after I had composited the image for an hour or so (see the original composit in the first image below, you can notice the lack of textures, and therefore the lack of warmth without the brown wood of the table to reflect and bounce light on the other objects). After it had rendered properly, I copied and pasted the previous changes I made to the incorrect render and went from there. I wanted to recreate the warmth in the beauty render but make it softer and more glowy, to emulate that homely, warm sun streaming through the window look. 

I was going to blur the image using z depth and a lens blur, but found that it didn't need it as I already blurred the background image, and the blur made the sharp highlights on the glass too blurry. I did experiment with different types of z-depths though to try and get the right look.

Comparing my render to my original references with the Scott Prior painting, the paintings had a more green look. I experimented with that but after asking for advice I decided that the warm tones worked better overall with the red tones of the cups/glasses and the leaves in the forest. 

I also decided to add a lens flare to the top of the sunflower to create the look of the sun shining brightly through the window, which lined up nicely with the background image and also with the highlights on the sunflower, adding to the realism of the image. I added a subtle vingette to finish off the render. There were also many other tiny decisions I made such as deciding between having a more saturated in colour but less bright specular highlights being the blur/glow effect, or having the original brighter white specular for highlights. I decided on the more saturated in colour for the base specular with the brighter white blurred glow with lower opacity on top.

Overall, I am super happy with how it turned out, I think I matched the vibe of what I envisioned :D

For my Sidekick renders, I decided to create one similar to my original, and one completely different. Below is my neon render progress, I really like how vibrant the colours are. My favourite part of this one is the blue and pink on the middle flower to the right of the sunflower. I used lens blur to focus on the beaker with the poppies, as that was where your eyes are drawn to naturally due to the amount of light there.

I found that the light underneath the beaker was way too bright, so I used a layer mask to erase (with lower opacity eraser) the brightness in the specular layer to make it less strong. 

For my other sidekick render, I decided to aim for a sunset look. I wanted to create this by having it overall dimmer/darker with deeper orange tones. I'm not sure if I completely got the sunset look, but I think it still looks pretty :) I like the sepia tone that came through in the beauty render, and so in the final render once I merged the composite I added a colour balance to bring back some of the cream/brown tones instead of so much yellow. I also added z-depth and used a lens blur so the background was more blurred and the focus was on the sunflower.

The original beauty render (first image) came out really dark and also because there weren't enough samples, then there were some light artifacts on the left hand side of the window frame. I used the stamp tool to manually go through and fix all the tiny little bright pixels, because I didn't have time to re-render the whole thing, and because it was only a side kick I didn't stress about it being as high of resoultion as my hero render. 

Hero Render:

Sunset Sidekick Render:

Neon Sidekick Render:

- Plastic Disposable Cup:

- Wooden Table with Drawer

https://quixel.com/assets/vfvndhsga