#justynart

Progression of adding emissive materials and point lights:

Kim Possible 👀

The biggest struggle I faced after moving onto using path tracing was how the glass was rendering. As shown below, glass placed behind glass would render as black which isn’t realistic, especially when compared to the reference image to the side:

After adjusting shader nodes and settings didn’t help, and after I couldn’t find relevant solutions on UE forums, I thought the issue could be caused by the mesh so I revisited my model and deleted all interior faces. As shown below, this helped to minimise the problem but did not solve the root of it. Although the glass is clearer, you can still see the stems of the glass behind rendering as black:

I then revisited the UE documentation and found a very thorough explanatory video about path tracing by William Faucher. In this video he went over glass in detail and helped me realise that my issue stemmed from my post process volume settings. In order to get rid of the blackness, I simply needed to increase the max bounces under path tracer rendering. An increase in bounces allows for light rays to penetrate further before being eliminated.

Results after increased bounces:

Although our team continued to create stylised 3D tests for environments we were getting quite similar results overall and couldn't get close to what we had in mind. After receiving feedback from Wild Child about how animating in 2D over 3D backgrounds could pose technical issues we shifted our focus to wards an entirely 2D workflow.

I started off by looking into the UPA/00's Cartoon Network style we were using as reference and created a background test.

Reference:

Latest 3D tests:

Background style concepts:

Storytelling is just as important as lighting in my project. I wanted to create a simple prop that could be universally recognised as a symbol of childhood, such as colourful wooden blocks. I modelled the pieces to look as though a child had been playing with them and placed them on the carpet with the light spill acting as a sort of spotlight, highlighting its significance as the focal point.

Since I’d like to be able to showcase this area quite close up, I spent a bit more extra time on the texturing process, making sure the wood of the blocks was readable through the use of a wood grain height map and worn down paint around the edges. I also edited a quick product label for the bucket in photoshop using royalty free images.

After finishing the modelling of the armchairs and sofa I spent some time revisiting ways of simulating cloth in Blender. Having already made curtains, I was fairly confident in making a draped blanket for the sofa. With so slight sculpting adjustments I was happy with the result and moved onto creating pillows.

For the pillows I followed this quick tutorial:

As shown in the clip, I made the pillows by creating a subdivided plane and extruded it. After applying the cloth modifier to it I turned the pressure up to 5.0 and disabled gravity to prevent the pillow from falling through my scene.

Here are the blanket and pillow results:

After creating the pillows I also sculpted them a bit for added realism by squishing them into the seating to indicate that someone would have been leaning against them.

As my first hybrid test I wanted to start off with something simple. Inspired by Cody Ginty's brushstroke tree I wanted to create a simple grass card.

I started by using traditional ink on paper, creating various brushstroke clumps until I found one I liked.

Once I found the brushstrokes I liked I scanned them and prepared them in Photoshop. First I inverted the image, then adjusted the threshold until the black against white was sharper and cleaner, before finally adding a colour gradient as shown below:

Once my scan was prepared I created a simple plane in Blender onto which I applied the grass as a texture in the shading editor workspace. To make the grass appear as though it is 3D I simply duplicated the plane and rotated it 90 degrees.

The final render (top: cycles, bottom: eevee):

Reflection:

Initially I planned to use the black and white image as a starting point in Blender but I struggled with adding colour that way so instead I added the colour gradient in Photoshop. I'll have a more in depth look into Blender's geometry nodes and create a second test.

ONWARD! Can’t wait for this to come out C: