Home > shaders


The Crow Spirit
Well the crow spirit fur and shaders are as done as they're going to be for now. I'm not totally happy with how its rendering from all angles, but I think that has more to do with the lighting in the test scene rather than the shaders themselves. So I'm just gonna go with it, and tweak it as is necessary once it gets into a real scene.

And that does it for all the characters: models, rigs, and shaders are all done! Now it's time to actually make this film. The outline and storyboards have been done for quite some time, but I haven't tackled writing the dialog yet. So this week I'm taking a little break from Maya to get a draft of the script written.
Topic(s): maya shaders fur
By fruehdom on February 10, 2008 at 9:10pm EST Add/View Comments (1)


The Mall Security Team
With the trailer behind me, its now back to completing final shaders on all the characters. The three to get cleaned up this past week were the department store security guards. Their clothes didn't need much tweaking, and their skin is largely based on the SSS shaders used for Peter and Kiana. As with those two, the fur is on a separate pass, as is the Ambient Occulsion.

Also, in case you've missed it, we're up to our third strip over in the webcomic section. Its starting to get interesting over there so check it out.
Topic(s): maya shaders
By fruehdom on January 14, 2008 at 5:54pm EST Add Comment


Panel One and Crow Shaders
The first webcomic almost wrapped up, although I'll probably be tweaking it the rest of the week. Its a one panel establishing shot. Drawing it was a bit harder than I expected. Anyway, look for it in the comic section of the site on the 1st of the year. In between drawing, I also tweaked the shaders on the crow so they matched the body feathers better. Mostly just involved work on the feet. Here's a render with the cleaned up shaders.
Topic(s): webcomic shaders
By fruehdom on December 2, 2007 at 5:00pm EST Add Comment


Site Launch
The website for the series is up and running! Special thanks to Mike Gamin for this amazing blog engine, and to Janis Acampora for all her drawing advice. As may be more or less evident on the site, my expertise is in 3D graphics, not so much with traditional drawing. But I'm ever so slowly improving, and I do have fun with it. Like it or hate it, you'll have a chance to see plenty more of my drawing once the webcomic gets underway at the beginning of the new year. And now I've given myself a deadline for the trailer too, so keep an eye out for that.

And also since I didn't get to post it last week, here's an image of Peter with his new sss shaders.
Topic(s): website sss shaders
By fruehdom on November 18, 2007 at 5:00pm EST Add Comment


Fast Skin Subsurface Scattering
Getting some final shaders rolled out now. Both Peter and Kiana have mental ray fast_skin_sss shaders on them now. The shader does have a slight learning curve, but the results are a million times better just using a blinn. In the course of getting things ready for mental ray, I realized that it will be a heck of a lot easier to render the fur in software and composite it. And much to my surprise, that is going to be a totally painless process. You can just tell the fur renderer to keep the fur image separate, and it saves with a flawless alpha channel. The paintFX on the hair are a little trickier to composite, but not too bad, and obviously they have to be rendered in software because mental ray doesn't support them.

So here's an image of Kiana with her lovely new skin.
Topic(s): mentalray sss shaders maya
By fruehdom on November 11, 2007 at 5:00pm EST Add Comment
Please Log In
Username:
Password:
register

Popular Topics
maya (8)
shaders (5)
trailer (3)
webcomic (3)
hair (2)
fur (2)
sss (2)
script (2)
particles (1)
animation (1)

Recent Comments
The Crow Spirit
Very nice...the crow looks awesome!
New Year, New Additions
Thanks! It's actually hand drawn, and t...
New Year, New Additions
I like the web comic a lot. Is that han...
The Teaser Trailer Concludes
I am eagerly anticipating it. :)
The Teaser Trailer Begins
Well that's pretty freaking cool looking...

Archive