Mic

For the second module of the masterclass, each of us student was assigned a concep and the goal was photorealism. I had to make a microphone. Luckily I found some orthogonal images, which I then inserted as image plane in Maya to copy the proportions.

When my bloking was approved I kept going with the modeling. I also set up the camera and roughly simulated the environment to see if it was correct. 

Time for texturing! I grouped the geometries under three materials: one for the metal parts, one for the plastics and one for the foam. I started with basic colors to identify the parts, then I added what I needed to create a clean material and finally I "ruined" the microphone so that it had a history (fingerprints, worn parts, scratches, etc). To create the logo and the writing on the switch plate I used Illustrator and imported in Substance Painter as decals.

When I tried to texturize the background I realized that in rendering it wouldn't have rendered well, so I decided to use the reference background directly by cutting off the real microphone in Photoshop.

The next steps were shading and lighting in Maya. It was quite difficult for me to set the lights because there are many colours of them and I had no idea of the direction from which they came in reality.

At the end I rendered in Maya with Vray, here are the results.