Author: Cameron

Posted on

The Layered Model

For my uber-shader, I have gone with a ‘layered’ style model so that I may represent many different types of common materials easily. I’ve structured it so that some familiar, but old, concepts are represented, yet in a way that is physically plausible.

Computer-generated graphics, like most things, can be burdoned by their history. The common shading models have existed since the beginning of computer graphics, and they are usually chosen for their speed or ease of implementation. Either reason … Read the rest

Posted on

Minecraft Cabin Render

After wrapping up a large portion of the code of my ubershader, I wanted to try it out in a production-friendlier environment to look for possible improvements. I did find a few bugs and quirks, but all is better now! I think you’ll be able to see that the quality of this image is quite better than my previous renders of Minecraft scenery.

3D Minecraft Render Cabin

A few features of the shader that I’ll be going over soon are in that image:

  • The
… Read the rest
Posted on

Image-Based Lighting

What is it?

What you see above is The Shaderball lit by an image, not by standard 3D light sources. I’m going to talk about the idea (and implementation) of using images of environments to light 3D scenes. Two other common types of lights that I’ll eventually go over are punctual lights and area lights. Image-based lights use a 360° image of an environment to cast light onto 3D objects. The image should have a high dynamic range (an … Read the rest

Posted on

First Glimpse

I’ve been writing this shader for a few weeks now, but I hadn’t thought to blog about it (or anything, for that matter) until now. That’s probably a good thing; I’m learning a lot as I go along, so there’s a good chance I would’ve explained something incorrectly. I’ve decided to post updates on this more often, so you can expect much more info later. There’s a lot that I’ve already accomplished, so there’s a backlog of things to write … Read the rest

Posted on

3D Christmas Lights & Garland

3D Christmas Garland Close Up

Inspired by the Christmas decorations I’ve recently put up, I’ve created a few in Maya. Admittedly, this would have been much easier in Houdini, but I plan on creating an interior in Maya and didn’t want to be switching programs to decorate it.

First, I created a CV curve for the garland. I built the entire process around curves so I could write a script to generate all of this when given a curve, making decorating in the future extremely … Read the rest

Posted on

3D Snowy Woodlands Cabin

3D Snowy Woodlands Cabin

It’s been a little while, but over this past weekend I had a vision and I set out to do it with my free-time. My goal is to try out a few new 3D styles, some photo-real and some not. Here is my first attempt:

3D Snowy Woodlands Cabin

Some refer to this as “low-poly,” but I don’t think it fits into that realm. I take “low-poly” as an art form to be more about achieving as much as possible with as little as … Read the rest

Posted on

Houdini Waterfall

Here’s something I’ve done completely in Houdini. Render quality isn’t great, but I just wanted it to render quick so I can start working on it again.

http://youtu.be/LBXw1INxrHo

Right now, I’ve created a procedural mountain and scattered rocks across the mesh by randomly deforming the copied rocks. I’m plugging that into a simulation network where I first simulate the water, and then simulate the spray. I plan on turning the simulation network into a digital asset to use anytime, by … Read the rest