WIP No 1
No I'm not whipping people. It's a WIP, Work In Progress. I thought I'd share some of the progress I've made in CGI.
Now a CGI scene can look very much like a photograph, but that's as far as the similarity goes. When I take a photograph I get to select location, lighting, model, focal length, composition and then I take the picture. You can simplify this to simply picking up a camera and taking a shot. The photographic equivalent of CGI would be building the house, decorating the rooms, building the furniture, installing the lighting, obtaining or making a model (or growing your own), painting the models skin, arranging the furniture.... and so on.
It's a big job and there is a ton of stuff to learn but I'm making steady progress and I thought I'd share with you the progress I've made since November when I first decided to do this.
Two heads:
Another View:
Getting the skin to render correctly is very hard indeed. The algorithm that generates the way something looks is called a shader, and the skin shader that is used to generate realistic skin has multiple inputs. Each input is a texture map that contains the data for that layer. We have a bump map that describes surface texture, an overall colour, epidermis, dermis, subsurface scattering, specular reflection levels and a whole bunch more. They also have relative weights and adjustments that make for a tricky balancing act even when the texture you have is correct, and it not easy to make the textures either.
Full Body:
This one is shot in a virtual studio with a grey backdrop. The head is not textured in this shot.
Portrait:
This is another virtual studio. The head is now textured and I converted it to black and white as a reference against the other BW shots in my portfolio. The interesting thing is that I'm adding moles and spots to the CGI models body. Its kind of ironic that as a photographer I spend time in photoshop removing spots from models to make them look more perfect and spend time in CGI adding them in to make them look more real.
When I'm happy with the skin I'll move on to creating eyes, hair and then finally animating the whole thing. Then it will be time to pose and shoot.
Now a CGI scene can look very much like a photograph, but that's as far as the similarity goes. When I take a photograph I get to select location, lighting, model, focal length, composition and then I take the picture. You can simplify this to simply picking up a camera and taking a shot. The photographic equivalent of CGI would be building the house, decorating the rooms, building the furniture, installing the lighting, obtaining or making a model (or growing your own), painting the models skin, arranging the furniture.... and so on.
It's a big job and there is a ton of stuff to learn but I'm making steady progress and I thought I'd share with you the progress I've made since November when I first decided to do this.
Two heads:
Another View:
Getting the skin to render correctly is very hard indeed. The algorithm that generates the way something looks is called a shader, and the skin shader that is used to generate realistic skin has multiple inputs. Each input is a texture map that contains the data for that layer. We have a bump map that describes surface texture, an overall colour, epidermis, dermis, subsurface scattering, specular reflection levels and a whole bunch more. They also have relative weights and adjustments that make for a tricky balancing act even when the texture you have is correct, and it not easy to make the textures either.
Full Body:
This one is shot in a virtual studio with a grey backdrop. The head is not textured in this shot.
Portrait:
This is another virtual studio. The head is now textured and I converted it to black and white as a reference against the other BW shots in my portfolio. The interesting thing is that I'm adding moles and spots to the CGI models body. Its kind of ironic that as a photographer I spend time in photoshop removing spots from models to make them look more perfect and spend time in CGI adding them in to make them look more real.
When I'm happy with the skin I'll move on to creating eyes, hair and then finally animating the whole thing. Then it will be time to pose and shoot.
posted by Richard at 10:48 AM
1 Comments:
Good as your CGI work is -- and you are making great strides in this regard -- it only goes to point up why photographing the "real thing" remains such a great pleasure.
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