Jade Dragon

This project uses the Arnold rendering system in Maya and a Stanford-model dragon. The objective was to create a complex shader and shadow by attempting to match the CG shader to a real-world object with a complex texture and composition—in this case, a jade stone.

Process Blog

Final Revision

May 23, 2019

I have been working on this project little by little since the last posting date and was finally able to get it finished! I was unable to finish originally due to the Renderfarm going down, but I finally got it done. The animation is rendered, I resolved the exposure and specularity issue, and I fixed the breakdown. There are still some things I could work on, but I’m happy with how it turned out.

Exposure Correction

May 19, 2019

After my critique I decided to revise my project because I knew I could do better. Below are the images with corrected exposures for my revision:

Critique

April 30, 2019

My critique went as well as it could go considering the issues of this past weekend. Of course, the Renderfarm and network went down the weekend before this project is due. The A/C went out in the school and the wires melted—I guess you could say it literally crashed and burned. Due to this, many students—including myself—did not have finished animations. Professor Gaynor was understanding regarding this issue and is allowing us to have the animation for the next class. I was able to submit a video and still image of my project to receive feedback. The main issues with my project was that the breakdown was not organized well and that my image was too over-exposed, which also cause the specularity to be blown-out. Professor Gaynor commented, however, that my CG object was integrated well into the plate despite the exposure issue. If I fix this problem and get the animation completed, I feel as though there will be a drastic improvement in my project.

Shaders

April 23, 2019

For this project we were supposed to choose a Stanford model to pay tribute to the contribution that Stanford had in developing shading technology. The primary lesson of this project is understanding and compositing complex shaders as well as learning how to troubleshoot the issues that come along with them. For this reason, we spent a couple class periods going over the different elements of the shaders, making AOVs, and making masks that will give us more control while compositing.

We covered a large some of information over the past week such as specularity and reflection layers, AOVs and creating our own masks, and transparency (transmission) and translucency (subsurface scattering (SSS)). For me, the most helpful skill I learned was how to create an aiMix shader to combine the transmission shader and the subsurface shader with a Fresnel mask that will keep the same facing-ratio no matter how the object moves in the scene. With the Fresnel mask, I was able to give a sense of depth to my object as it helped give a little more transparency towards the edges of the object where it would be not as dense and allow more light to shine through, while the center remained more opaque, alluding to a greater density in this region.

Below is an image that shows the object and various shaders in a look development form. The top sphere shows the transmission shader, the middle sphere shows the subsurface shader, and the bottom sphere and Stanford Dragon shows the aiMix shader that uses the Fresnel mask.

Project Introduction and Photography

April 19, 2019

In the second week of the quarter, Professor Gaynor brought in gemstones for all of us to choose from. I chose a green stone that, after some research, I believe to be either Jade or Aventurine. The time has come for Project 2 to begin and to finally use the gemstone. This project is mainly about creating and working with a shader that contains some level of translucency and transparency; and the troubleshooting that goes along with it. Like the previous project, the first step is photography.

I was out of town this past weekend and unable to take pictures, so I had to take photographs on Tuesday. It was a great day for taking photos as it was nice and sunny—without a cloud in the sky. Unfortunately, I forgot to take a video with camera movement, so I had to retake them on Thursday. It took longer the second time because it was a cloudy, windy day and I had to wait for the clouds to pass on several occasions. Below are the final sets of photographs I took on Thursday including the final HDRI.