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VSFX 319 - Project 2 - Marbles
October 2021

Research/Inspiration Images:

The main references I used for my marbles are the first 3, but altered the colors of the second 2. The green blended in too much to the grass, so I made it pink/orange with an OSL gradient. Then on the striped one, I also changed the colors and left out the piece on the inside.

closeup-shot-green-marble-top-wooden-table_181624-14182.jpg

sea-grass-clipart-blades-grass-green-grass-png-157425-free-blades-of-grass-png-920_947.png

WIP Renders:

Model:

For the grass model, I used xgen and exported it as geometry that I could then manipulate in Maya. The front grass pieces I subdivided more and extruded to add more details to the shader such as slight subsurface.

Material/Hypershade Breakdown:

In the hypershade, I worked on creating masks from OSL shaders for different shader properties as well as mixing and blending them with existing noise and texture nodes in Maya. I was able to preview what each node did by using base color on an AiFlat Test material.

More descriptions on each image below!

Overall Troubleshooting:

While working near the end of my project on adding scratches to my front marble, my maya project crashed and corrupted , causing me to lose a few hours of work since I hadn't saved a new version. You can see in the screenshot below how everything turned green (all shaders deleted) and the concrete geometry disappeared as well.

With the project as a whole, I struggled with visualizing and understanding what each OSL shader was supposed to do. In project 1, I started to rely on seeing the textures mixed together in the hypershade preview the way I would in Nuke. Because of this, it made it hard for me to work without being able to see the texture previews with OSL. To get around this, I previewed the OSL shaders with an aiFlat by plugging them into base color. Even with this, though, I sometimes struggled to understand what the parameters in the OSL shaders meant or they seemed to behave randomly.

Comp:

For this project, I kept the compositing pretty simple because I was happy with how most of the render turned out. Therefore, I just added some depth of field, subtle color grading, vignette, chromatic aberration, and comped the sky into the background so it wasn't warped like the HDRI sky was.

Here's a before and after for comp!

Final Beauty Render: (1920x1080)

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