Texturing / Lighting / Look Dev

I am happy to be able to participate in The Rookies one more time. This time I'm participating with four projects. Three of them I created during my time at Pixl Visn Media Arts Academy, the other two in my spare time.

I hope you like them!

Sunbathing

During my youth, I lived in Costa Rica. There I saw for the first time this tiny frog, the blue jeans dart frog. I was amazed, how can a creature be so small but at the same time so deadly. I just had to make it as a 3D project! This made me choose this frog as my 3rd Demo reel project!

For a in depth breakdown feel free to chek out my last entry!

Below you can see some 4K frames, you will see some more details!

Be the Meister

I have a big interrest in advertisment, which made me go for a bottle, at the start I didnt knew which to make, when I saw my Jägermeister shot glass on my table, I decided to make the shot glas and the Bottle, but I wanted it frosted, to give it more texture and make it more interesting!

For a detailed breakdown check my last entry!

And again I have two 4K frames for you!

Portrait Lighting

For this project my complete focus was on lighting and look dev. Therefore I downloaded the models and textures. Especially because I have done relatively little lighting and lookdev on human heads I wanted to practice a little more. I am quite happy with the results. 

Development process:

To get started with this project, I first needed a reference. I searched the internet for a reference. When I found one, I started to rebuild the scene.

I have downloaded the model from the site Eisko (Animatable Digital Double of Louise by Eisko© ( www.eisko.com ))

 First I started with the alignment of the head, this was relatively easy because the head was very well rigged. Then I started with look dev and finished with lighting. During the lighting I made two adjustments to the skin shading. The last adjustments I made in Affinty.

Below you can find the second portrait. For this I did not look for a reference and wanted to build my own light scene and live out creatively.

Conclusion:

As already mentioned, I downloaded the model and the textures. For Look Dev and lighting I used Maya and rendered the frames with Arnold. The post I made in Nuke and Affinty.

I had a lot of fun with these projects. Because of the model and the finished textures I had the possibility to invest a lot of time in look dev and lighting. Especially experimenting with different lights makes me happy every time, because through light so many different moods and stories can be told.

Lost statue

For this project, my focus was again on lighitng and look dev. I have all assets and plants from Quixel Megascans. I am responsible for scene layout, lighitng, look dev and comp! In the beginning I had no real plan I just wanted to combine different assets to create a small forest scene. Only later came the idea to add a statue or other hardsurface asset to the scene to tell a little story!

This project was created during my free time at the weekend.

Development process: 

As mentioned before, I didn't have an exact plan, I just wanted to play around with different assets and create a small scene. I wanted to live freely and try to create an interesting look!

For this I have searched the Quixel Megascans library and collected various assets where I thought they harmonize well!

I started to drag the assets into the scene and edit them. First I started with the large trunk in the MG, initially this should be the main focus for the scene. Then I imported the different plants and stones and arranged them (1). However, I was not completely satisfied and wanted to have more storytelling, so I scoured Quixel again and found these wonderful statues. Both are two separate assets that I initially wanted to keep separate (2), however I quickly realized that I thought it was cooler when the head was on the lap (3). Still, I was missing some more depth, so I decided to add a small swamp to the FG (4). 

Here are images (1), (2), (3) and (4)

I was quite happy with the final look. So I got to work on the lighting and started trying out different things. The first version you can see further up was lit exclusively with arnolds Physical Sky.

For the second version I used physical sky, area lights and spot light with gobos.

For the postprocessing I used Nuke. I only added some CC, Dof and particles. Since I didn't have much time to render a whole sequence, I created a small sequence in Nuke by generating particles and keying Dof.

Conclusion:

For this project I used Maya and Arnold for rendering, and Nuke for post-processing.

I had a lot of fun just playing around and seeing what my own creativity is capable of. The most challenging part was the lighting, because I wasn't sure which setup I liked best. I also wanted to keep the focus on the statue and had to use different things like the gobo or the more powerful sunshine on the statue. In the end I am very satisfied with this project, because it was also a very spontaneous and unplanned idea. I will probably take a little more time and polish this scene and add more detail.

I hope you liked my projects, I would be very happy about feedback!