2012 Lighting and Comp Demo Reel

Here's the link to my official 2012 Lighting and Comp demo reel:

2012 Demo Reel

There's still more work to be done and more work to add to this, but this is the best work I have so far. Special thanks to Liz and CJ.

Cabin Fever is finished!!!

This post is a little late and I need to do a better job of keeping up with this blog. Cabin Fever was finished around May 20th. Here is the link to it on Vimeo:

Cabin Fever

It was an awesome ride, but it's not over yet. We finished within the window for Siggraph 2013, so we will be submitting it to Siggraph next year. I will also be posting more screen shots of rough light shots and everything else I did on this project. Liz and CJ, I could not have done this without you two.

Point Clouds Point Clouds and more Point Clouds

It's been a while since I last posted. All I've been doing for basically 3 months is rendering for Cabin Fever. I finally figured out the correct point cloud workflow to render my scenes super fast and the point cloud will approximate the raytrace info. Here's an example point cloud:

What I do is bake out the entire scene based on the camera view. Then Renderman calculates points and stores global illumination, colorbleeding, and occlusion information in the points. This cuts my render times dramatically once I render the final passes.

Here's some test lighting for shot 11:

 

I have to test the lighting before I do my final renders because the final render could take 3-4 hours. These take about 2-4 minutes. As you can see the samples are really low and shading rate is at 20. This is what causes the textures to blur out. 

Here's a high quality lighting render of shot 11:

This render took around 3 hours to complete.

Playroom final lighting with feather boa added

So the last image I posted it took 11 hours to render. This was a combination of me being dumb and also my computer settings not being optimal. All that has been fixed (including me being dumb) and now here's the final lighting for shot 3. The feather boa has to be composited in due to it being fur. I'm using raytrace shadows and fur does not work well with ray tracing, it works but takes a while. So I'm rendering the boa with Renderman Deep Shadows, a process that was developed for Monsters Inc.

Finally an update, lol

Well my last post was Aug 21st and my daughter Lily Ava McCord was born on Aug 24th. This was the main reason of no updates, a good reason. I'm back now and I just finished the first full quality render of an animated short me and some friends are working on. More to come so stay tuned!!

Hornet Scene Update

Here's what I've setup for the scene so far:

The barn is not done yet. I need to add a broken door, deform so of the wood slats, and add the inside skeleton of the barn. I'm also going to add some objects in the background to fill up the scene. Here is a reference I'm using for the barn:

And here's some references of how I want the car to be textured and the lighting I want to accomplish in the scene:

Lighting and Texturing project I'm working on

This is a project I've been wanting to do for a while. I modeled a 1952 Hudson Hornet as a modeling project while I was an undergrad at UTD. I've had it for a while and I've been wanting to do something with it. Above is the concept that I have for it. It's basically old and worn down stored in a barn. I'm currently building the scene in Maya 2011 and I think I will start creating the light setup in the next few weeks.

Here are some renders of the Hornet