Maxwell Render | Official public forum

This was a fun project, if all goes well it could be one of three. The spaghetti was shot as you can see in the breakdown video here:

http://vimeo.com/128236518







Another mix of Maxwell and photography, the breakdown of which is here:

http://www.loopcorp.com/#Star_Alliance_T2

You may ask why not do the watch in CG too and I'd probably agree with you in this case, it was certainly the easier part of this job! But the client was happier having something real in there and I had plenty on my plate already. Johanna Parkin is a great photographer and it does help to work with strong base imagery.





This was interesting to me because of a test I did with Photoscan. I think the cake was probably the perfect shape for it, something with lots of recessed areas would probably push it. But I highly recommend it if you ever need stand in geometry or something to model accurately on top of.

http://www.loopcorp.com/#Billingtons_Xmas

Most excellent...the texturing detail is absurd (thumb prints!)

We are slowly integrating photogrammetry into our workflow as well, trying to figure out a low-end 3D capture method that's portable and non-crusty (sorry Kinect).

hey this is awesome..

Awesome result!
I wonder though if this took less time than hand-modelling everything...

This is great!! The idea is really funny and well executed.

thumb prints?

Thanks everyone. As for the fingerprints, not sure if it's coming across but these are meant to be cake decorations made from some sort of sugary marzipan. In fact the sleigh is - it was made by the food stylist. So the logic of the thumbprints is that the arms and legs are all pressed on.

"I wonder though if this took less time than hand-modelling everything... "
I know what you mean but I'm sure that had I tried to sculpt that surface from scratch I wouldn't have caught that nice hand spatulaed (is that a word?!) quality. Probably any one of a thousand users at ZBrush Central could have, but not me!

Yeah sorry I meant the thumbprint comment as a compliment. Absurd as in, absurdly good.

Superb render!

Just wanted to add, after reading your text on Vimeo that they preferred a smoother version of the cake. I agree that's too bad, and also I wonder that nobody said the filling looks not too appetizing for a cake. Or is that some traditional thing that everyone in England would know about? To me it looks like minced meat mixed up with some other stuff...

We'll add your video to our Vimeo album

From the video i see that all the cake photos of different angles were masked out (alpha), how were they done?
Manually keying? Is a lot of maskings to do...


Great job RichG! : )

Tan I was wondering about that as well !

Amazing job by you RichG, on so many levels.How long did the whole job take you to do?

Yes the masking is a pain but I use a great plug-in for that so each one only took a minute or so.

http://www.topazlabs.com/remask/

Some interesting 3d scanners on Kickstarter so I'm sure it won't be long before this looks way too much work.

I can tell you that the whole job took around 3 weeks but that's not just sitting down to the 3d and retouching, there's a lot of meetings, time on the shoot and then all the inevitable changes from the agency first and then the client.

"To me it looks like minced meat mixed up with some other stuff"

, all I can say is that we spent a lot of time on that, as that is the end product, so it ended up looking the way they wanted it to! To be fair to them, this is not the finished image here. As so often happens, the early comments are good and improve the image, then it gets to a point where you feel they're not improving so I've ditched the final image. That one may well have looked better internally but I liked the choppy surface too much to lose it.

Excellent!

Great! I guess the table cloth is not CG, right?