Monday, 11 February 2013

Fixing the Problems

The subsurface scattering material doesn't render with passes. To overcome the problem I had to separate it to five different sss materials: diffuse, front scattering, mid scattering, back scattering and specular. Then using colour buffers I was able to connect them to the custom render passes.

Here is a picture of the hypershade tree:


It worked very well. I was able to render out all of the pieces in one layer with all the passes I need.


To fix the wing specularity I simply had to add the wings to a different render layer.


Problems

While making the test composites, I found out couple of problems. The first and the biggest one is that the subsurface scattering is not rendering with render passes and it came out black.

The second problem is that the rainbow texture in the wing didn't render. So the next step is to fix those problems.

Environment test

Then I quickly created four new scenes using the HDRs I created before. I created all necessary render layers to make realistic composite and rendered it. In Nuke I put everything together to see which environment is the most suitable for the Fly. Also making those tests already gave me necessary Nuke tree to work for the final piece.

Here are four environment test:





Obviously those are just the tests and they not look as realistic as I would like the final piece to look like. They all need more tweaking to them but it gave me very strong visual idea how the Fly will look in different environments.

Texturing

I've chosen this design:

Having the UV layout allowed me to use exactly the same textures I used in the design. But it left seams in areas where I cut the mesh to lay the UVs. To get rid of the seams I used BodyPaint3d. It has a Clone tool which allowed me to quickly paint the seams out.

Here are few examples of the texture maps:








Above pieces are just for the shiny parts of the body. I used Blinns for them. For the fleshy bits, like the trumpet, I used subsurface scattering. I wanted them to look soft.

The wings are transparent Blinn with a rainbow texture applied to the specularity.

Here is a turntable of the complete textured Fly: