Still Life Scene + Binocular Assets

Still Life scene

This scene was created for a CDW studios class in the second half of 2022. 

Programs used; Autodesk Maya, Arnold Renderer, Substance Painter, Zbrush, Marvelous designer, Photoshop and Nuke. 

The goal of this project was to display a variety of differing materials, organic and hardsurface shapes. 

I have included a detailed breakdown below.

- Planning & Reference 

- Asset Creation 

- Lighting & scene

- Composition 

Planning & Reference

Gathering reference and deciding on my assets early like any project, was crucial. Finding and photographing my own real life reference helped me a lot during this project. I knew I wanted to create a flintlock pistol, so honing in a specific one with lots of museum photo documentary was a must. Additionally, I wanted to make a variety of books that all were similar in shape, but yet stand out from one another. 

The blockout and draw overs below show my original intent with the project. 

Asset Creation

Skull

Zbrush - Maya - Substance Painter 

The skull was sculpted in Zbrush. I made sure to pay close attention to skull anatomy. Retopolgizing in maya was the most work with this asset as I had sculpted in the nasal holes and eye socket cavity. Which meant there were a lot of internal shapes to manage.

Books

Maya - Substance Painter

The most interesting part of the process was creating majority of the textures procedurally. I was happy with the smart masks I had created, using anchor points and levels to control the wear n tear for all 3 layers (Red arrows below). So all I had to do was paint on one layer, and it would naturally effect everything. This was most prominent on the heavily damaged leather book, but I used similar methods on the red book.  I created each book with their own story and age, meaning the wear would be different on each.  

Flintlock

Maya - Substance Painter 

The flintlock I modelled was a U.S Navy M1842.  Creating this model was the most time consuming out of all of the other assets in this project. It took me a while to understand the connection and interaction between each component. After that it was a matter of trying to use the topology as effectively as possible to create variety of interlocking unique shapes on a unsymmetrical object. I wanted to try and keep the poly count reasonable and evenly spread throughout the model.  Some screengrabs below show a few of the unique interlocking shapes.

Garlic

Maya - Substance Painter 

The garlic was interesting as I modelled 3 layers of garlic skin, making sure they were on their own UDIMS so that I could make custom alpha masks to show the layers peeling away (green arrows). I textured the garlic almost completely proceduraly like the books. Something that helped a lot was using cylindrical and spherical texture projection to create the the main lines (red arrows). Using a base of anchor points that I then could use over all skin layers making adjustments where I needed too. (blue box)

Bottle

Maya  -  Substance Painter 

The bottle was a simple object but it came to life with the shader. Using an AiStandardMaterial as a base, I used the transmission scatter for the glass colour, and the transmission colour for the colour value. The colour map was plugged into the transmission weight so the dust would not be transmissive. The specular roughness was set so that the glass was clear, but I used the Clearcoat roughness for my specular breakup map, so that the glass didn't look sanded in rougher areas. There was a good use of ramp sampling for a basic Fresnel effect, in both transmission and clearcoat breakup. 

Goblet

Maya - Substance Painter 

The Goblet was the first asset I created. I was aiming for a aged but polished silver look.

Candle

Zbrush - Maya

The candle was a reasonable sculpt, focusing heavily on getting the wax drips feeling correct. Then it was a matter of creating a waxy shader making heavy use of subsurface.  I used a image card for the flame, as I knew it was for a static shot from 1 angle. 

Lighting & Scene breakdown

The lighting and rendering was done in Arnold Renderer.

My lights consisted of; 

- Cool fill light

- Warm cloth soft light

- Warm white key light

- Background Fill

- Candle Light

The final Scene layout is below. I worked on making sure everything felt naturally placed, whilst trying to break any tangents I found. The drapery was created within Marvelous Designer, and the rest of the set was created in Maya and Substance Painter 

Composition 

The image was composed within Nuke. The breakdown below includes a lot of minor changes from the raw render to the final Image. The usual's like chromatic aberration, vignetting, lens distortion and film grain were used. But there was a lot of small colour and lighting tweaks done to various isolated objects using a crytomask. The final zoomed out Nuke network is below. 

|| Bonus Project ||

Binoculars & Case 

This project was created in Q2 of 2022 for a CDW studios class. 

Programs used : Autodesk Maya - Substance Painter - Arnold Renderer - Photoshop

I enjoyed creating different compositions to tell a variety of story's about a single asset.