3D Kart

(by Spiderman e L'uomo dalle mani di pinza)

year: 2004
project type: personal project (rendering lighting compositing test)
software: Maya Mental Ray Photoshop HdrShop
my contribution: Lighting and compositing (I worked together with Stefano Tabacco on modelling, texturing, shading etc)




model: We modeled the kart entirely using 4-sided polygon ojects, that was necessary to render them as subdivision surface in Mental Ray. Modeling has been done in Maya.

script: Stefano a small script to create ropes starting from a nurbs curve.

Texture: Texturing was a big part of our work since we thought that they would have been the key for a realistic outlook for our image. We took many photographic references, woods metals and sand mostly. Textures have then been converted into Mental Ray .map format to achieve a better memory performance when rendering.


HDRimage: Also an important part of our work was to create an HDRI environment map of our location. So we shot a probe at many different exposures and got a very dynamic image.

Compositing: We rendered the image in Mental Ray 3.3: features like anti-alias per object, approximation editors and so on were necessary to help us render the image in a short amount of time.
We split the image in several rendering passes, so that we could use compositing to help us match the CG elements with the background picture.

Notes
We realized this project in India, where we were working.
The kart was found in Goa, next to a police station, close to a small village.
Textures were collected mostly near Bangalore, we also went to a timber depot to get most of the textures' references. We decided to place the kart under the big Banjan Tree, about 20 km from Bangalore.
Thanks:
To Kutty for his help for being with us all the time, to Sara for her help and patience, Mr.Mallick for his camera.

The image has benn posted in Cgtalk.com CgFocus.com DeathFall.com: