9/11/11

Advanced Texturing & Lighting: Chimi Base Materials

One of the classes I am taking this semester as directed study credit is an advanced lighting and texturing class.  I'm hoping to pick up a few techniques to help out in the texturing of my thesis project. This class will feature a lot of texturing work, but hopefully will teach me a few new things about lighting and rendering that I don't know about yet.  One thing about that area of the industry is that it is always changing.  Programmers are always looking at quicker ways to do rendering and advanced lighting techniques, so that's one thing to stay abreast of.

In this class I was given the model of a character, Chimi, and this week we were to create and assign all of the base shaders with no texture on them.  I mainly used a combination of different shaders from the simple Phong (the name of a particular type of shading algorithm), to anisotropic (which renders out very elongated highlights, like what you would see on brushed metal), and a subsurface scattering skin shader for the face.



I also made a quick 3-point lighting setup and did a turntable rendering to see how the light moved across the surface of each shader.


Unfortunately, most of Chimi is comprised of NURBS surfaces, which are a pain to texture.  So this week my task involves converting the surfaces into polygons and UV mapping them.  Typically, that is the job of a modeler, not a texture artist, but this class is unfortunately out of date.  Oh well, it's just more experience, right?

No comments: