Week 7: Finalizing Exterior Rendering
This week is the last week to work on the rendering of the exterior project. First thing I did was fixing the UV for the terrain. Previously the material positioning on the right area was a little skewed and overall it was random as I was still trying to figure out how to apply it properly. This time I was able to adjust the scale and move it around so in the end the left hill looks like it is covered by more snow and the darker tone is on the right area of the terrain.
After that I started working on the bonfire flames by following this tutorial that Leah shared with me two weeks ago. The images of the flames were included with the 3D model that I downloaded few weeks ago, so I just needed to cut each of the flames and frame them separately on Photoshop. As suggested by Leah, I sculpted two surface panels and applied different image of flames on each to create an illusion of three-dimensional flame.
Then I tried fixing the lantern lights as well as updating the materials applied, relocating them in better positions and finally added another one to balance the overall composition. Here I am using the cylindrical Arnold area light as suggested however the light does not spread as much as the point light that I previously used. So I kept those area lights and moved them around, locating them at places that would highlight some of the flowers and parts of the tree trunks.
After playing around with the flowers for a while, I figured it is best to just remove them because I realized their existence don’t really make much sense for this composition. Then I thought I should probably add some animals to the scene, however I was not able to look for free downloadable 3D model of a well-built bunny or puppy that comes with the UV mapping as well. So in the end I decided to just leave the scene as what it is as I like it being quiet and serene.
Before attempted to render, I increased the sample to 3 just to check how the final rendering will look. After that, I transferred the tiff file into Photoshop and added some yellow glow around the lanterns and bonfire, as well as slight white glow around the moon. Somehow the color is a little desaturated so I increased the overall saturation level to make the scene more dramatic and vibrant. Then I went back to Maya, reduced the scale of the moon a tiny bit, and finally rendered with an increased sample of 5.
I am really happy with the final rendering of my first Maya rendering. The scene depicts the two combination of words of bucolic and organic, and I was able to reflect the complementary color scheme between blue and orange into the elements. There are two things that I would figure out how to fix if I have more time. First, I will try to find a way to scale down the background HDR image a little bit. Second, I will have to figure out how to make the moon even brighter because I have increase the brightness on Photoshop a few times but the changes are not apparent much.
