Snowglobe
Posted: Thu Nov 23, 2006 11:01 pm
Just under ten million polygons, this work had to be rendered in two separate scenes and composited. Identical scenes were rendered with the same camera orientation and settings, with each scene focusing on different high poly models. For example, one scene included the snowglobe and a low poly base with no details, while the second scene included the high poly base with the contents of the snowglobe emptied out.
The work was put together for a contract manufacturing company as a holiday greeting card. The company manufactures monoclonal antibodies, so each snowflake is actually an antibody (model built from crystallography data), thus resulting in the high poly count. You can't really tell from far away. There is also floating glitter in the sene, but difficult to distinguish.
Maya's particle instancing and expressions were used for the snowflakes and glitter, along with their orientations and distribution in the globe. An unistancer was used and parts of the scene were exported as OBJ's into Maxwell Studio.
The hole in the "e" was due to a mistake in compositing, but was fixed in a later version. Multilight was used in the scene to adjust lighting. A large plain emitter directly above the globe worked best to light the contents of the globe with the least noise and rendertime.
Image specs:
1971 x 1275
Rendertime: two scenes, approx 48 hours for globe detail and 12 hours for base detail and environment.
Machine specs:
Dual core dual xeon 2.8gHz - 8 threads
nVidia Quadro FX 5500
8 GB RAM
Outcome based on expectations: satisfactory. I was unable to use HDR lighting due to the large data sets (Maxwell would keep crashing, looking forward to the 64-bit version). Small emitters yielded too much noise and rendertime, but would have made the inside of the globe more interesting.
Minor additional enhancements done in photoshop included adding a glow effect to the snow in the globe to match the surrounding vector ornamental decorations in the border.
The work was put together for a contract manufacturing company as a holiday greeting card. The company manufactures monoclonal antibodies, so each snowflake is actually an antibody (model built from crystallography data), thus resulting in the high poly count. You can't really tell from far away. There is also floating glitter in the sene, but difficult to distinguish.
Maya's particle instancing and expressions were used for the snowflakes and glitter, along with their orientations and distribution in the globe. An unistancer was used and parts of the scene were exported as OBJ's into Maxwell Studio.
The hole in the "e" was due to a mistake in compositing, but was fixed in a later version. Multilight was used in the scene to adjust lighting. A large plain emitter directly above the globe worked best to light the contents of the globe with the least noise and rendertime.
Image specs:
1971 x 1275
Rendertime: two scenes, approx 48 hours for globe detail and 12 hours for base detail and environment.
Machine specs:
Dual core dual xeon 2.8gHz - 8 threads
nVidia Quadro FX 5500
8 GB RAM
Outcome based on expectations: satisfactory. I was unable to use HDR lighting due to the large data sets (Maxwell would keep crashing, looking forward to the 64-bit version). Small emitters yielded too much noise and rendertime, but would have made the inside of the globe more interesting.
Minor additional enhancements done in photoshop included adding a glow effect to the snow in the globe to match the surrounding vector ornamental decorations in the border.
