Test renders of the day 005

This one scene has been giving me a lot of grief. It's a complex scene and Maya isn't playing nice with all the SSS, nParticles, etc. I had to sacrifice SSS-ing the whole scene because render times jumped up to 3++ minutes per frame. For now I am using a Blinn with scatter radius tweaked (a la Marc), but I used SSS on the ones closest to camera.

Marc mentioned the scene looked pretty flat from my earlier test renders, so I completely reworked the lighting set up to better bring out the forms. I think it's better?! I have to give credit to Jeremy Birn's excellent book Digital Lighting & Rendering  (who wants to buy it with me off Amazon.com and share shipping? lol). It's a must-read, really!

In an attempt to save more render time, I added sprites to the background, but the transition looks pretty obvious to me. I changed my lighting set up since I rendered out the sprites though, so fixing that might help. I think I will have to add more real objects to make the transition better.

After immense amounts of AE compositing and tweaking, this is the best look I can get so far! I haven't implemented colour-coding for the different types of cells yet. And no hair yet.

Also! I haven't figured out how to composite the cell nuclei in, since the cells are all overlapping... Will have to think about it some more.


I tend to lean towards a low-contrast look for my illustrations and it seems to have spilled over into my 3D work... but I know it can make details difficult to discern, so I'll have to balance that.

 

Need to turn down light on vessel, it's bleaching it out a bit and losing its form.

Lesson learned: Changing accuracy of Final Gathering can significantly reduce render times, but also produces gross, blotchy colours. (Current setting is at 80, seems ok for now)