For this post, I thought I'd show you one of my first attempts at creating a photo-realistic scene.
It is, of course, a lightsaber from Star Wars! This project was particularly fun for me, partially because I love Star Wars, and partially because it tested my abilities in several different areas of 3D artwork. I modeled, textured, lit, and rendered the entire scene.
The most interesting part of this project was the lighting and rendering. For the lighting, I used an HDR probe which essentially wrapped the scene in a recreation of real-world lighting. The way it works is you take a series of photos that capture all the various light sources around you, and combine them all into one image. That image is then basically wrapped around your scene, and casts light towards the center of your scene. The light varies by color and intensity, depending on the objects that were captured in your photos.
Now, the rendering is where the magic really takes place here. I used a special renderer called Indigo that specializes in advanced light and rendering calculations. It has the ability to mimic real-world materials, such as metal, which I obviously used here. The renderer produces very nice results, but it can take a very long time! The image you see above took roughly 25 hours to render. 25 hours for a single picture!
I would link you to my online portfolio so you could see more of my work, but truth be told, I don't have one yet. This is something I aim to rectify soon. Doing a job hunt online isn't very effective if you don't have a portfolio readily available. Maybe I'll have it up for the next blog post!
