So far for the monthly thing...

Seeing as my last post is from the 28th of January I think it's fair to say my interning role at Grid-VFX is asking for an increasing amount of time spent there rather than working on personal projects. I also haven't found the motivation for making another blog post for this period of time as work at Grid-VFX has been both interesting and challenging.

However, after meeting the mastermind behind the Arnold render engine himself -Marcos Fajardo- last week, I felt the urge to pick up on where I left off; namely rendering, lighting and compositing small scenes and tests. On a larger scale I have started thinking about what I am planning on doing for my specialisation stage for my education. This is a preparatory course where I formulate a plan, conduct all my research and provide a proof of concept for the graduation stage; where I will be executing the specified plan.

I haven't decided on the scale of my graduation yet, but I'm planning on creating a small pipeline where I mimic the leaps a large production would make in its pipeline. Namely the large categories Pre-Production, Production and Post-Production which I would split up in tasks like script, storyboard, visual development, r&d and afterwards deeper into folder structures and dependencies. I wouldn't want to go too far into this as I still do want to deliver something that isn't insanely big. I want to finish my education first and foremost.

I decided to start off with a character to get a little feel for the project. So far I've only defined certain words and an image I want it to relate to.

Cute - Tiny - Comical

This ended up in me modeling the little bugger and trying the properly render it. I have never found any help file more helpful than Arnold's help file. Serious life saver.

Front - Side - Top - Persp

Quick and dirty Arnold render with little to no render passes.
Friends helped me understand this character needed a light environment. With fun/sweet/cute in mind.

Final render. I'm not at all happy with the grass nor am I happy with the contrast posed by the eyes and mouth.
The colors are not saturated enough and I am still considering adding fur to this little guy. A displacement and bump don't seem enough to make him jump alive.

After this, I followed some Arnold tutorials posed in the help file itself (amazing!) and below is the result of that. Quite happy with it. It could have used some more dramatic lighting but a friend mentioned it was quite alright. I still don't know if I agree.

That was it for now. Possibly more to follow. Maybe some animations using paint-effects?

Kind regards,
Pim