3D Metropolis

Corruption.avi (320×240, 1.1MB, MPEG4 video)

Now:

Corruption was essentially my effort at something like a fine art sculpture, but with 3DS Max instead of ceramics. Saved file versions and test renders from along the way make up this visual roadmap to how I achieved the final sculpture and image effects.

One thing to note in the later stage of this project is my somewhat flawed approach to lighting. I’ve heard artists say that the lighting should start with the least significant light and move to the most significant light. That way the contribution of each light can be more clearly seen as the scene’s lighting is being built up. However in this project I went about lighting in a more prosaic fashion, with the biggest and brightest light first. Something I’ll be sure to think about next time.

Another minor point, about the chamferbox/rounded edges on the cube: they’re there to catch the light. A perfect sharp edge from a normal 3d box doesn’t provide any faces on the edge and thus catches light rather poorly. In real life nearly all objects have some rounding to their edges which enables highlights to bounce back toward your eye, and the slightly rounded edges here look more natural.

Then:

The video is an animatic I compiled of a complete set of project test renders, showing the project’s progress from beginning to end.

Corruption is a sculpting project based on some ideas I had while sitting in on a few college-level art courses. My goals were to combine two different forms and used them as a means of artistic expression. After sketching out some ideas, I decided on the image of a worm insinuating itself in and out of a cube to represent the concept of corruption I was envisioning.

The sculpture started out as a cube with ever so slightly rounded edges. Then the basic path of the worm was created and lofted, producing a very crude looking form.

The worm’s path was refined and the scale deform used to narrow the tail end and widen other parts, to give it the bulging midsection and overall structure of a snake.

Wherever the worm passed into or out of the cube, the cube’s surface was deformed to provide visual clues that the worm is having an effect on the cube’s form.

The worm was then given a mouth, and the material for the cube was assigned; here a rough version is shown but the final material is more smooth and understated.

The worm’s material was created to contrast with the cube, to be light, bumpy, and dull instead of dark, smooth, and reflective. To make full use of the cube’s reflective material, a simple environment was introduced. Aside from being useful for reflections, the set can show shadows and enhance the overall realism of the piece.

Next a material was created for the set, and lights were placed. Here is the scene with only the first light, showing the resulting highlights and shadows.

I wanted to use a depth of field effect in the final image, blurring the set the further away it got from the camera while keeping the sculpture in focus. To accomplish this, several passes of the image were rendered and composited. The first step was to render just the background, without depth of field blur.

Step two was to render only the sculpture without any background to create an alpha image of the sculpture that can be used as a mask.

Step three was to assign matte materials to the sculpture, effectively making it invisible but still able to cast shadows on the background. Here the depth of field effect is applied, though it may be less obvious at this small image size; areas of the background that are not normally covered up by the sculpture get blurred based on their distance from the camera.

Finally, the image of the sculpture in focus is composited over the background with shadows and depth of field applied. The alpha image serves as a mask for a sharp, unblurred render to select only the sculpture, and the sculpture is pasted into place over the blurred background. The result is an image where the background is blurred slightly as it recedes from the focal point of the image, the sculpture, which is in sharp focus.

To finish the image off, I decided to use various weathering effects including some Gaussian noise to simulate film grain. Check out the final image version of Corruption.