So here I go

Hello,
So I decided to use this blog as an art journal and a way to keep myself motivated to post new stuff.
So to start off, here are some renders from my Advanced Material and Lighting class that I took last quarter.
I am going to render the full animation which is a camera pan from one scene to the other later on but for now these are the singe frame renders.

I had a lot of technical issues with the forest scene. Especially when it came to lighting with all those raytrace shadows I started running into memory issues where I had to opt for a GOBO where I used the opacity maps of the foliage I had as goboss for my key light and disable "cast shadows" for all the leaves except for that of the main sugar maple tree. Even though it was problematic I really enjoyed working on these scenes.
And I wanted to render a different zdepth pass especially for the forest scene however Z-depth doesn't respect the opacity maps so in the render I could see all the plane of the various leaves and plants. But it was easy to fix in photoshop when I had a single shot. I should research into how to get that right for the entire animation. Perhaps the through the camera options withing 3ds max.


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