April 15, 2025 (Week 4)
After some good critique, I had changed some aspects of my final video. This included making sections longer , adding the textures I used, and reformating the material section to more better read what I have done.
Fully updated video with all the changes.
April 14, 2025 (Week 4)
I fully finished editing my project 2 yesterday but today was class so I submitted it. A key issue I noticed was the readibility of the materials in the video since its 1080p my text breaks, I plan on fixing that asap.
Honestly a bigger challenge then actually making the materials is rendering them all out. I managed to use all my credits very quickly and had to purchase some more. Rip $33. And even with that I feel as if the cloud rendering isnt increadibly fast, also the Denoiser wasnt working.
I sorted everything into each respective material folder, that had two renders one with textures one without and all the screenshots of the material
Another thing compared to Maya I noticed is that the material parameters aren't in a list, so I had to tab into each section and take a screenshot, which meant I had like 6 screenshots per material.
Also, my After Effects project file got massive. In the end, I had, I think, 27 materials. Almost all had two renders, and all of them had material screenshots. Honestly, in total, this After Effects comp took longer than making the actual materials.
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Right now im trying to figure out what I want to do for project 3. Still not sure, something with lava maybe. I will probably stay in V-Ray.
April 13, 2025 (Week 3)
Noisy versions
This week, I finished up Project 2. I created 27 materials for the project. We were required to create 21, but I took a lot of material reference pictures, and I wanted to see if I could make them. For my reference photos, I used a Canon 70D and my iPhone 14 back camera if I was out.
Reference Images
I made sure that the materials I used with textures were tileable. After delighting (to the best of my ability) the photos and removing the camera warp, I fixed all the seams in Photoshop, and for some, I created a displacement map there too. For most of the materials, I tried to keep an accurate Index of Refraction.
Example Diffuse Pine Needles
Example DIsplacement Pine Needles
I used the generic V-Ray Material most of the time, but for some of the Subsurface materials, I used the AlMaterial to get the layers more like we did in class.
One caveat I noticed while doing this in a desaturated environment is that making water is difficult. For something that almost solely relies on reflected atmosphere light, having none makes me cheat around it. Also, at least the way I was doing it, I didnt find any way to make the caustics more realistic with the bending of the normals they're nice but could be better.
I really enjoyed the challenge of finding items to remake, if not in person, online, and the challenge of switching up renderers from my usual Karma to V-Ray.
Materials
Light Rig
My favorites are probably Scratched Aluminum, Gold, Water, Salami, Soil, and the Monty Carpet.
I found that V-Ray has a really cool dispersion feature for translucency. It makes stuff like glass look so much nicer, and the same goes for water, which helped me emulate some of the features I saw. My biggest issue is rendering my final video, the cloud points getting eaten away and im getting noise no matter what.
April 4, 2025 (Week 2)
This week we're working in V-Ray. I've decided to do my Project 2 in Houdini's V-Ray instead of Maya as more of a challenge to myself. Every aspect of the actual V-Ray in each program is identical.
All the V-Ray settings are the same, just some of the ways to edit them are different. Obviously, Houdini has a different viewport rendering setup and camera things, but other than that, it's very similar.
Transferring my Maya scene (the default project) is really easy with V-Ray. They actually have a .vrscene file you can export out of Maya, and it acts like a better USD. It also imports all V-Ray materials to Houdini, which is sick! Im still screwing around with it but it seems to be chill.