Project Description
The purpose of this project was to shade and texture a provided 3D model of a cactus, to match it with a reference image of a real cactus.
Reference Images
When searching for reference, I found a cool, blue, ribbed vase that I wanted to recreate in Maya. I also found a succulent with red tips which I thought would add a pleasant flair of color in my scene.
Early Stages & Scene Development
During the first stages of the developmental process, I focused on the scene and general composition. I wanted to set myself up to where I had the most amount of time to work on the shaders for the vase and plant. I set up the background tarp, spotlight, and added a HDRI skydome as a fill light.
Developing the Shader Network
The first parts of the cactus model I created a shader for were the clay pot and the rocks. I used AiStandardSurface and matched the IOR and roughness to where I wanted them to be, optically. For my rocks, I used a noisy ramp with 5 different rock colors I referenced from an online image. This included a blend of charcoal, sand color, and adobe, among others.
Creating the Vase and Plant
I would say that creating the vase and cactus were the most difficult parts of this assignment. My vase was created with a series of ramps and noise nodes. At first, every time I tried to create even horizontal grooves on the vase, they would appear slanted. This required me to edit the UVs of the vase model to be straight rectangles instead of curved.
The plant itself was a bit more complicated. To achieve a look similar to that of the reference image, I needed to account for subsurface scattering and sheen. In the real world, succulents like the one in the reference image are coated in very fine hairs which scatter light. Additionally, each color in the ramp had to be carefully accounted for, with multiple different patterns occurring across the same surface.
Final Product and Challenges
Overall, I'm happy with how this plant turned out! There was a huge hurdle I had to overcome during the last few days of this assignment. Prior to the final weekend, I had unwittingly left my hard drive in a school building overnight. That meant that all my files, including the crucial project files I had been working on, were locked up over the entire weekend. So this final product has many key differences to the previous iteration I had shown to the class. Instead of fine tuning the details, I was pushed to recreate the whole project from scratch. Ultimately, this was a beneficial learning experience! It was both a lesson in managing assets, as well as how to create a shader node network at a faster pace!
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