If it smells like fish..

Back in college, my computer animation professor told our class one day that if it looks like CG, it's bad CG. I'm almost positive it was on a day we were discussing lighting. She then told us about how a CG ball that had been comped into a shot in the movie "Toys" was blurred and covered in noise, among other things, to merge it into the scene.

Last semester, my professor Eric Hanson taught our class about creating organically lit and shaded renders. He showed us photographs and CG renders that all involved light that had been broken up and was unevenly cast across the objects in view. In my last post I noted that among the quick approaches he gave us in order to achieve this was to map fractals to our lights, as well as map fractals to the specularity of our shaders. I have since relied on these methods and have been very satisfied with the quickly calculated and more organic renders.

As much as these strategies helped to create the sense of realism with lighting and rendering, I noticed that when I could employ them on geometry that was not beveled or smoothed correctly, or perfectly symmetrically angled geometry, there was no way of hiding these obviously CG characteristics.

Here is a scene I shaded, lit and comped (but did not model) last semester:












Notice the very sharp edges along the base, as well as where the side meets the front of the cab:



















I tried to hide the sharp edges with the shaders, lighting and comping, but it's something that still bothers me to look at. Maybe it's just my personal preference, but I do think that smoother edges help to sell the image so much better, especially when it comes to the way light hits them.

When it came to modeling the bathroom scene, I decided early on that I would avoid creating sharp edges so that I would not have to spend extra time hiding them with the lights, shaders and 2D compositing. Additionally, I knew that I did not want geometry that looked too "perfect."

My solution was to use another one of Eric’s methods that he had taught us: pushing vertices around so that edges were not so straight and angles did not line up so well at 90 degrees. Using the poly-to-subD strategy, I would create the basic geometry with quads, and then make crooked angles, asymmetrical shapes and slightly offset faces before performing Edge Ring cuts and subdividing.

Here's a closeup from the night shot:













I offset the individual uprights of the radiator so that they were at slightly varying heights and distances from one another, and also rotated them at different angles. The window sill was also modeled to be bowed downwards and towards us in the middle. I was able to light all of these objects with just a single spotlight. By randomizing the scene in the modeling stage, I was able to avoid doing any extra lighting, shading or comping to hide the seams.