Still Life

This was a really fun and challenging project to work on. We were tasked with taking a photo of anything we'd love to turn into 3D and do a Still Life study of the photo. The end result should be that people won't be able to tell which was CG and which wasn't. It was challenging to get all the proportions right being asymmetrical and given the time frame we had where we had to take a photo, model, texture,light,render and composite.

I had to think how I was going to achieve a believable picture like result even if it meant having some proportions slightly off. I really had fun doing this and nitpicked a lot into the details to get things to feel right. The materials weren't that hard to set up but learning to composite render passes from scratch using Nuke was a huge challenge. It's the first time I've composited from scratch (since I usually just play around with the beauty pass) but I love that I've gained so much knowledge in terms of rendering and compositing.

Final Composition

Real Picture

Wireframe+Lighting

GIF breakdown

Lighting and shot composition study

Material and compositing study

Material Test

Early Sculpt test using Decimation

Brushes I used to achieve the look of the fur.

I used the rake brush at a really big size to do some really quick grooming. After that I used the clay build up brush to emphasize on detailing the fur along with the dam standard & inflat brush.

Early Sculpt WIP

Sculpt WIP. I only detailed the front since the back won't be seen anyway and the goal is to make a still life studying in one shot.

blocking out the shape/mesh after the 3D scan

This was the mood I was aiming for. It kinda had this god rays around (since I'm a sucker for that kind of lighting)

Some more mood references I found on the internet.

UV map for each of the assets. I specifically cut out the UV's based on which parts of the assets are gonna be seen the most and gave them more UV space as well.