Project Description
For the third project in this class, we had to create a scene that included grass, concrete, and marbles. The caveat was that we had to use OSL scripts we found online to achieve the shaders for these objects. These OSL could include scratches, dots, swirls, or anything we needed to achieve the photorealism we sought after.
My Process
To get started this scene, I gathered reference online. Pictures of marbles and pictures of people throwing marbles. A requirement of this project is that we had to have grass, and we had to have concrete. So, I hopped to Maya and began.
I continued with the placement of the marbles, generating my final idea in real time. I added lights and increased the complexity of my scene very gradually, in various ways.
I liked the idea of an elevated curb with some grass underneath. I like the idea so much, actually, that I wanted a whole bunch of elevated curbs that formed concrete stairs for the marbles to bounce down! I modeled the stairs, modeled a wall, and placed some regular spheres where I envisioned the marbles would go. My first idea of this scene involved a cup spilling marbles down these stairs.
Class critique made me aware that I should really be focusing on my marbles, instead of a cup and some stairs with the marbles as a consequence/side character. It was a shaders class, after all, not a "funnest concept" class (a lesson which I will learn a few more times during my studies at SCAD). My favorite part of this project is the XGEN grass I created in Maya. The grass underneath the stairs is a green-to-white ramp on a single plane modeled to look like a single blade of grass. Using XGEN in Maya, I instanced this grass enough times to a get to a point where it looked realistic to me.
The Shaders
The shaders of a scene are the most carefully examined portion of CG created in VSFX 319- Procedural Models and Shaders. The magic behind adding the concrete look of the stairs, the tiles of the wall, and ripples of the marbles lies in OSL shaders. OSL stands for "open shading language," an open source format for procedural shaders created with code. We were tasked with finding these blocks of code online, and importing them into Maya as text documents in the correct maya directory.
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