Purple Subsurface

Purple Transmission

White Subsurface

Gloss

Mask

This shader got out of hand quickly. There are so many little details in my stone, but I decided one only focusing on 4 aspects. I created a purple, white, and grey shader, and separated  the glossy coat in a separate aiStandardSurface. I used AiMixShaders with a ramp or noise in the mix settings. After putting all of these together, I have created what you see below.

A number of things happened in this render. The main one being that I rendered the reflection of the instant film in with the main shader. I did this to save on render time and adding another layer. I have figured out how to mask just the reflection, but this  mask also takes away the geometry. Guess I will be seperating that into a new layer.
Another issue is that when rendering several Mix Shaders put together while as trying to use those with AOV's, Arnold has a hard recognizing the differences between transmission, and subsurface scattering. The way around this is by separating each of those shaders into their own layer and composite them back in nuke. To get the masks to work, I'll have to create another layer and use a surface shader.

to I went out to take photo for the next project. During setup, the sun was out and  giving me amazing lighting. It took me about 5 mins to find a composition that I liked and to adjust my camera settings. But by the time I was ready to take my plates, a large cloud had pasted over.

In the meantime, I took my instant film camera around the nearby area and took some pretty cool photos.

I came running back when the sun started to peak out again. The light had shifted greatly and I had to quickly shift the scene down. Since it was a rush job, my focus and composition became slightly off. ​The sun did not last long. I was able to take a clean plate, and HDR before it was gone again.

Maybe if I had grabbed the grey sphere, these photos could have been usable. But the second setup isn't as strong as the first. I like the closeness of the first composition where it's like I'm about to draw a doodle of my CG object.

I did wait around for a couple more minutes. Maybe, just maybe, there would be one more chance to see the sun again. But, alas, the clouds became a dark shades of grey and thunder was booming from a distance. I quickly packed up. I do plan on having a reshoot in a few day to try to recreate the first scene.

Project 2 is all about matching a texture from a stone to a complex CG model and compositing it into a scene. Many of the examples use the Stanford Dragon. Fortunately,  I know of a similar website that have several amazing scans of statues.

Deux Chiens de Meute à L’attache is a model found on Three D Scans that I believe features a lot of interesting complexity. (Click here for more information). The scan is comes from the artist Georges Lucien Vacossin crafted in 1911 .

The download is a OBJ file of a 2,499,989 tris of great detail and no UVs. The next step is to export the model to zBrush to convert the mesh to polys and reduce the face count. One idea to help bring the details but keep the face count low would also be to use zBrush to make bump and displacement maps.

I'm excited to start this project.