Category: Personal

The rendering of the personal project is finally completed. In this project, I figured out non-realistic rendering and plant growth animation in order to prepare for my final major project. For the current visual effect, although I am quite satisfied with the part of texture, there are still many problems. First, I needed to figure out how to make a hand-painted background based on the lens, light and shadow. Then, the current rendering effect is fine, but I still feel that some elements are missing, especially light and shadow. Therefore, I need to improve the light and shadow in the rendering setting. At the same time, I need to find more reference of rattan to redesign the plants that grow on the bell tower.

For the texture of the plant, I used the same method for making the texture of the bell tower. In order to let the branches and leaves have texture and brushstrokes, I added two sharpen filters. In this way, the plants can have hand-painted with textures.

Although I got the hand-painted style in substance painter, I still had to deal with how to render non-realistic visuals in maya. So I used aitoon for non-photorealistic rendering. I connected the basecolor map to aitoon’s basecolor, and then connected the base tonemap and specular tonemap to ramp to make light and shade for the model. Since non-photorealistic rendering does not allow for significant 3D vision, I reduced the contrast of light and shade in the model. But the renderings aren’t quite as stunning as I’d hoped, so I’m still exploring how to draw the style in maya.

This week I tried to make plant growth on the bell tower. First, I used curves to make the growth path of the branches on the bell tower. Then, copy the model of the branches and use mash to make leaves on these branches. At the same time, I will also put flowers on the branch, and then let the flowers grow with the growth of the branch.

In Substance Painter, I made the non-realistic material of the clock tower. Because I wanted to make hand-drawn style materials, I found some hand-drawn drawings of scene design on the Internet as a reference.

In order to make hand-painted style materials, I only made basecolor and normal map of the clock tower. On basecolor, I used noise in the black mask of the color layer and added blur slope, blue directional and Sharpen. This method can produce hand-painted brush strokes to achieve hand-painted visual effects. Luckily, I managed to get the hand-drawn effect I wanted.

When I was doing plant growth, I was always thinking about how I could control the bloom of flowers. In the end, I decided to make a controller for the flowers so that I could control the animation of the flowers‘ bloom .

First, I added blend on each lace x and y axis to make the petals curl naturally. Then I added attributes to the controller of the whole flower to control the curling of the petals. In this way, I can make the flowers bloom in order according to the growth rate of the branches.

Because it was difficult to make plant growth using blender’s geometric nodes, I found a way to make plant growth using curve and curve extrude in maya. We can control the size of the subcurve to control the growth of the branches. To be honest, this method is much more convenient because I can also control the points on the curve to move the growth direction and size of the branch.

I can use bend’s function to control the bloom of flowers.

I used mash to copy multiple flowers onto the branches and then animate the initial flower’s size and bloom.

The plan for making plant growth is to use blender’s geometric nodes. I found a tutorial online and followed along. Although I made it, I found a lot of problems, especially too many nodes are too complicated, and the effect of plant growth is relatively stiff. So I gave up this method and decided to find another way to make it.

Making a model UV is a simple but tedious job. Based on the color and material classification of the model, I use multiple quadrants to combine the UVs of models of the same color and material. This method is convenient for me to make materials in substance painter.

In order to create a bell tower, I did much research and looked for many reference online. I prefer to build a European-style clock tower. It doesn’t need to be serious like big ben. It’s just a cute and simple bell tower in a small town, so I design it to have three parts. The first part is the main building with windows and door, the second floor has four large clocks on four walls, and the third floor is a arched pavilion with a large bell inside. Meanwhile, I add some simple European pattern on the walls, pillars and clocks.

London has a lot of historical European architecture, which gave me a lot of inspiration, especially when I designed the door. Around the door, I designed a frame that connects the pillars, so that the door can be integrated into the whole building.