apartment update

Just a quick printscreen dump to show off where my loft apartment is at. Most recently, Ive been playing with transparencies; trying to balance beautiful refraction with..not looking through 4 transparent materials in one object. I was also playing with post processing effects. I'd LOVE to do a huge polish pass, and maybe make this place more lived in, but who knows if/when that'll happen.

UE4 Kitchen

I've been trying to familiarize myself with Unreal Engine 4. eventually, this will be a beautiful polished kitchen with tones of pretty assets and lighting...

Spherically-projected perspective in photoshop

who's ready for some ultra-boring perspective stuff? I am!

I wasn't satisfied with pinched coordinates at the poles of spheres- that and the incredibly warped perspective led me to come up with other solutions, like adding a cap for overhead clouds, or just leaving the top of the sphere a generic wash of colour.

The other day, i figured out how to paint to your hearts content, with way less perspective distortion.

Let's use the polar coordinates filter in photoshop!

An example of the kind of perspective we'll be making. notice the huge warping going on at the top and bottom.

We’ll skip ahead and assume you've already got a 4 point perspective drawing. This would wrap onto a sphere well, but there would be gross pinching at the top. What if you wanted to continue your drawing all the way to the top of the sphere this was getting mapped onto?

I'll be using a square canvas for this demo. The grid measures out every 45 degrees

For the tops, I've found its easier, and more sane to make another painting for the top (and bottom if need be). I started here with a 5 point perspective drawing of my top pole ( imagine fluffy clouds and happy trees and stuff)

the grey border will match up with the 45 degree longitude line in the other drawing

You can mark out a smaller circle (like I've done in grey) that cuts into the radius by half. this is the 45 degree mark, where you’ll be cropping later. Making sure your perspective drawing is perfectly centered, you can run it through a filter called ‘polar coordinates. use the ‘polar to rectangular’ option;

I’m still getting used to polar coordinates myself. Basically, it cuts your drawing halfway through and stretches it around a virtual sphere. It will get un-stretched when we map it onto real geo in maya. All you have to do then is shrink it vertically and sew it up with your other drawing:

See the nasty stretching happening at the top? that means its working!

To test our results, here it is mapped onto a sphere. Ive also included a generic looking texture to show something other than a grid;

Glorious.

This was just a photo I used the same technique on .

Magnifique! I hope this comes in useful to anyone doing skyboxes/ matte paintings and such.

Hand-painted HDR skies

I was looking around on the net for resources on painted HDR probes- ones that didnt involve photography, or photomerging or what have you.
After some experimentation, I found it was pretty simple to just switch to 32 bit more in photoshop and paint values manually, using the 4-point perspective trick I mentioned in an ealier blog post.

So heres the map I made;

and heres a simplistic test render;

Aside from adding a shadow caster ( which you can see in that chrome balls reflection) This test worked as I had hoped, and opens up new possibilities for lighting in the future.

I'll be doing some tweaks if I carry this through to any real renders-
>seperating out the sun for better control over the directional light
>adding way more detail, in perspective, for pretty specular stuff
>maybe rendering out maya scenes as HDRs as a base for paintovers in Photoshop

In conclusion, I hope I get a chance to do a big n' beautiful picture using this technique in the future.

lighting updates

Just some messing around I did this weekend. I updated alot of assets in preperation for making an actual final piece.

still life practice

There are a million things I could have done better on this, but Im pretty happy with the hydrangea and the ( beginnings of a) samovar. I need to stop focusing on modeling stuff if I'm supposed to be practicing lighting techniques

midnight snack

This isnt a legit artistic thing- just the end result of me playing around with vray. I modeled the kitchen base on the one in my apartment. My next goal is getting control of 32 bit images- rendering them out, and bringing them into comp.