bluphoenix - third dimension

Fruit Still Life

The Fruit Still Life is a project in which I combined many new concepts into a final composite render. Most notably, I have begun to use mental ray in lieu of 3ds Max's built-in renderer. Global illumination, ray traced shadows, deformation maps, reflection maps, pelt UVW mapping, lense blur, and photometric lighting have all been introduced into my work here as well - not to mention a bit of Photoshop to composite the render over another background.

This project took about 30 hours to complete, most of which was spent on learning how to use the above concepts (especially fiddling with mental ray!) It was created with 3ds Max 8, Photoshop CS2, zBrush 2, and a Canon Rebel XT dSLR camera (for texturing.) The entire scene is about 26,000 faces, though less than half are visible in the final render.

Development

Original sketch to determine placement and lighting. Banana in background was later rotated away from camera.	Two experiments with geospheres and texturing. The green star in the middle was also created to be the nub that can be found on the top of oranges.	The final texture and form the the orange took. The texture was created by hand in photoshop, with most of the work invested in the displacement and bump maps.


The apple was created mostly in zBrush through the adding of volume in key places to a standard sphere. The texture is a tileable texture created from a picture taken with a Canon Rebel XT.	The banana also gets a head start in zBrush using zSpheres, with the lowest level of detail model getting exported right into...	...3ds max 8, where its hard lengthwise edges are chamfered twice. The faces are all subdivided to allow for a smoother curve, in addition to some general touching up of its overall form.


Here we have samples of all of the textures. Clockwise from top-left: the banana pelt (used for bump map too), cutting board (used for bump map too), banana sticker, orange diffuse skin tile , orange bump map, and apple tile.	Here is the preliminary 3ds max scanline render, as the texturing, lighting, and placement is still being tweeked a bit.	The objects are now in their final positions. The banana sticker and cutting board have both been added to the scene. This too is the scanline render.


Here is the final render as seen via wireframe.


The final render through mental ray. All global illumination, lense blur at f-stop 11.2 and ray traced shadows are visible now. Note too that both the aluminum brushed handle and blade have different degrees of reflection. The background was composited with Photoshop CS2. Click for a larger version!

bluphoenix