Major: Lost Boy - The Art Room - Newly Lit Renders

Thanks to Alan for helping me out with learning about lighting the Art Room looks much more punchy now, I added area lights in and around the blobby paint like forms and bric a brac to make them pop out with a soft shadow underneath to ground them.

Render 1

Render 2

 Render 3

 Render 4

Major: Lost Boy - The Art Room

In between rigging and skinning my characters I have been working on the art room to try and get a more analogue feel that represents the vibe of Mr's Pratt's creative space. I used alpha maps to achieve the look as I thought it was a shame to disregard the previous alpha maps that made the art room look rather unfriendly so I softened their edges and bleached them out by saturating them with white.

I wanted to dial down the use of actual geometry in the art room as I want to be wary of render times because the previz version of the art room which has the camera movements locked and ready to use was very clunky to animate with, to compensate this I thought it would be interesting to take things further with alpha maps by making the random clutter look like backdrops from a soundstage by dialling up the fake-ness so that when the crane camera shot pans out to reveal the extent of the art room it would look like a miniature stopmotion soundstage, to achieve this look I used render layers to render out certain mounds of the art rooms bric a brac then saved those renders out and drew in extra scratchy texture, I then used this for the colour  accompanied with it a alpha maps.

I like the idea of these cardboard like elements as in a way it feels like it was created by present Graeme with the guidance of Mrs Pratt and would also crank down render times and make animating a lot smoother, I decided to throw in some of my concept art pieces as alpha's also. I didn't like how the the alpha maps looked with an overhead establishing shot as they looked like they were just floating in the ether so I added some simple wooden slats to make it look like they are boarded in place.

Art Room Full Render 1

Art Room Full Render 2

Render Layers window with Bric a Brac Mound 4 in view

Bric A Brac 1 Rendered Image Colour for Alpha

Bric A Brac 1 Rendered Image Alpha

Bric A Brac 2 Rendered Image Colour for Alpha

Bric A Brac 2 Rendered Alpha

Painted Image 1 with Colour for Alpha

Painted Image 1 Alpha

Painted Image 2 with Colour for Alpha

Painted Image 3 with Colour for Alpha

Painted Image 1 Alpha

The Art Room Render From Above

Lost Boy: Mrs Pratt's Art Room - Initial Tests in Maya

I have spent some time experimenting in Maya to try and translate the concept art from the art room into 3D. I started by getting random shapes in Maya and then laying out the UVs for all the objects and then unfolding them together, I then saved a UV snapshot and simply cropped out parts of the concept art and laid it over the top as a texture in photoshop. With some of the objects I messed around with the presets for the AIStandard in Arnold such as blood, gold and honey which gave some nice refractions to the objects.  I also wanted the sketchyness of the concept art to translate too so I made a simple alpha map in photoshop of a brush with lots of texture and attached that to a sphere, with the second image I was trying to make an alpha layer but it didn't go to plan however I actually like the way that it looks, it didn't show up in the render but does in the perspective view.

I am going to continue experiments with the art room to get the feel of the concept art by adding a depth of filed pass to show some atmospheric perspective, adding more textured brushes as alpha maps and give a whirl of using render layers.

Rendered Image 

Screenshot of failed alpha map

Texture in Photoshop

Brush Stroke Alpha Map in Photoshop