SAL
Shading and Lighting – Train
So in SAL, or better known as Shading and Lighting, I decided to choose one of the harder scenes to use for my final project. the SAL staff give the students a few scenes to choose from, ranging from a room with a Christmas tree to a Sci-fi hallway with a robot trotting around. The objective of this final project was to produce a realistic render of the scene as best as possible, using a ton of reference and achieving an overall good workflow in using shaders and lights.
So why’d I choose the train scene? Well, I wanted something of a challenge, and while there were other scenes that appeared complicated, I looked at other student’s work who’ve used the train and the shot ended up feeling empty and lifeless. I wanted to see what I could do to turn this scene around and give it a better feeling then previous work.
So, analyzing the scene, there’s a train with attached carts on tracks, telephone poles, a water tower and gravel. Nothing else. So it’s a little difficult to really expand off of this. What’s especially important for this project is to create a good looking texture to the model, even though the UV’s weren’t properly layed out.
I ended up laying out the UVs by hand, but I also experimented with this interesting script called Pelting Tools, which gave some amazing results, but nothing really useful for this assignment. I laid out the UV’s for the train, and did quick planar projections for the tracks and the rest of the scene. The ground plane and such had a background shader attached to it, to collect shadow information in the alpha channel, and that I could pull out the alpha in use for compositing in Photoshop.
Then, as soon as the scene was textured, lit, and rendered, I brought it into Photoshop for some image manipulation. Along with this, I compiled the train over top a background that I thought would make an interesting feel, as all other train scenes were outside, I wanted to bring my train inside. So, I went through and adjusted my colors and lights, I also extended the scene and painted some of it to keep from pixelating and keep the scene from looking too CG.
The ending result I was pretty satisfied with, but when I look at it now I see a ton of changes I wish I fixed. Some of these changes include the following:
Lay out the UV’s better, or even paint the train using a camera projection. (However, this class is about “Shading and Lighting,” which camera projections weren’t covered and thus shouldn’t be used in showing skill using textures and lights.
The assignment was completed 10/22/2009, and the render time was approximately 15 minutes.
-endy