Science Room

This is the final version of the Science Fiction room. I did not like the way the robots eyes looked, so I reshaped the eye and made him a cyclops. The two shaders that I wrote were for the glowing of the buttons and for LCD screens. I originally did the screen for mental ray, so that I could see what I wanted to try to achieve in Renderman. This is why I decided that I needed to figure out a way to make the buttons glow. Unlike clicking a button for a mental ray shader, the glow has to be a completely separate object, specifically a sphere. The LCD screens actually started as a shader for the robot. I was tweeking and tweeking when it started to look more like an LCD screen. The element that really made me think it looked like a LCD screen is the way the screen looks at different angles. I really wish that we would have had more time to work on this project or the Renderman would have been installed sooner, because at first it was hard to work with, but like anything the more I worked with it the easier and more interesting it became. The types of shaders that can be made or attempted render at very fast rates, especially when compared with mental ray. I did run into a problem with the quality tab under the Renderman render settings. I didn't want to reveal for me. I could access every other tab in the render settings except the quality. At first I was have smoothing issues with shadows and the only way to fix it was under the quality tab. I had to open the Maya scene file in a text editor and find the specific quality setting and adjust it that way. I then saved the file as a new iteration and opened it up to see if it worked and it did. I'm pretty happy with the results of the final image.

This is the AO pass. Images like this make me want to make a complete film with nothing but an AO pass. Stunning.

This is how the scene looks in Maya. The speres for the glow shader look weird and at times were hard to place properly, but the desired look made it worth the time and effort.