Rock- Textured and Lighted

Apologies to viewers of this blog for the severe lack of updates. This is as I have been focusing on completion of the final production video and the breakdown and has neglected this site. I will update the information from where I left off.

Let me describe the process of getting the ideal rock(meteor) first. The original rock model from Turbosquid looks like the below as I have shown in my previous post.

However its size, shape does not fit the scene which I have. I did some changes to the modelling by resizing and extruding some parts of the default model.

Once it is ok, I added in the texture with a higher repeat UV value such that it looks like a larger rock with the finer details. Then after, I added in a different bump map that looks like a noise map, adjusted the bump value to reach the ideal texture. The image below is before rendering and does not look that good. But it gives a pretty good idea of how the rock turned out from the default one.

Finally I put in the lighting to add realism to the rock. As you can see below, the background plate has a scene under a bright sun. Thus, the top directional light added has strong intensity. For all the lights, I turned on Raytraced shadows. Due to the irregular shape of the rock, this gives a result of irregular shadow patterns at the bottom half of the rock. The bottom cannot be too dark also due to indirect lighting from the light bounce from the ground and the ambient lighting from the surrounding. Therefore, more lights with required intensity are added to the side and bottom of the rock which are visible to the viewer. This gives the rock a better feel of depth.

The position of some of the directional lightings shown below.

The final result is as below. It looks like a really big rock which is 'correct looking' to me when composed with the backplate. The shadow was rendered separately to be composed in later.

Once the rock was textured, a tedious process of animating the rock sequence commenced. I have to time the appropriate motion of the rock whenever the actor in the scene moves. The rock has to follow the actor movement of his hands in either a translation or/and rotation of the invisible rock. If the actor moves and the rock does not, the CG rock will not look in place. Thus, I dedicated quite a fair bit of time to ensure that everything was correct. With 479 frames to look at, it took quite some time and effort to accomplished this result. You can see this in the final production video.