Water Lily
For this project, I wanted to do a render that will look realistic. I also wanted to mix organic material with non-organic material.
Reference Photo
To start I wanted to get many reference photos and get an idea of the type of render I want to do. I took this reference image of a Water lily and decided to build my project from this
Creating the scene
Then after looking after the reference images I started to look for models of Waterlilies that I could use luckily I found one and started to build my scene
Light Rig
The light rig
For getting textures that look realistic I created a light rig using Dreamworks standard for materials. This is so that I have a reference of what a material should look like using the standards of the balls on the right
Saturated Version
I also created a saturated version of the light rig so that after I create the materials I can see how it interacts with color.
Making textures
For this project, because I wanted to learn about the Arnold renderer on Maya more I made sure that my textures instead of using Substance painter I wanted to use Photoshop and creating the textures in a way that would let me explore and learn the Arnold renderer.
Problems I encountered with creating the textures
Using photoshop
For when creating textures on Photoshop, unlike substance where you can see the change in real-time in Photoshop once I made a change, I would have to go into Maya and re-apply the new texture map over the old one.
Many iterations
For my Petal color and streaks, I had to make sure that the streaks and the color came out just the right way, or at least the way I wanted them to so it took me a long time using my reference to the image to get it in the UV map and editing the color on Photoshop. Because of how the render would look different from the texture map I would go back and make small adjustments in photoshop and in the Maya shader network to get the texture on the petal to look right
Test Render
Then once the scene is set up I did test renders to see the overall lighting and the movement of the water lily
Nuke
Then after rendering each render layer out I used Nuke to composite the renders together and did some color correction to make everything feel and fit together.
Final Render
Then Once everything is Finished I export it out of nuke and create a final render