Digital Materials and Textures

File-Based Textures - Daylily v1

This project focused on using primarily file-based textures for the shaders while continuing to expand upon procedural techniques.

Digital Materials - Daylily v1 from Sean Dooley on Vimeo.

Overview

I created an organic model of a daylily for my subject matter and then created the appropriate shaders for the models from files (images) instead of using Maya's internal procedural shading nodes. Due to the complexity of the flower's petals, I ended up painting the textures myself and as a result, I made this more of a stylized project since my drawing/painting style isn't quite photoreal. If you look down further, you'll see examples of some of the color maps that I painted and why they are more stylized. From a distance, you don't notice it quite as much, but they are still my own style of painting and drawing.

I also continued my exploration of sub-surface scatter(SSS) shaders in the petal shaders while continuing to experiment with the more basic Blinns for the other parts of the flower. I simply ran out of time to create full SSS shaders for all of the parts of the flower past the petals. I also focused a lot more heavily on creating a realistic looking SSS shader and one that properly represented all that the real life flower actually does.

I also created my first texture maps based on the model's UVs. The anther's used color maps from UVs. So working with UVs was a new challenge for me and laying out the UVs properly.

Review

What I Learned/Challenges

- I learned a lot more about SSS shaders and how to properly build them and how to isolate the color information more accurately in the "depths" of the color maps.
- I painted my first color maps ever. And I got to use a Cintiq for the first time ever as well.
- I continued to learn more about the basic principles of light and color when it comes to creating a shader to resemble the real life counterpart.
- Since I carried this project forward and reused this model and scene into the third project, I learned quite a bit about the things I didn't do correctly with this project, such as having the petals be NURBS models instead of polys with a thickness (you need a thickness for poly models if the SSS shaders are to work properly). That was by far my biggest challenge with this project. I worked the entire time on this model trying to get the SSS shader to work on the NURBS model, but it didn't and I didn't realize that until the day before I turned it in so I took that day to rebuild the petals as polys. That also meant that I lost my displacement map that worked well on the NURBS models, but it broke the poly petals apart.

Future Improvements

- A lot of the things I wanted to change were done so in my Project 3 as I carried this project forward and I continued to work on it more and make the changes there, however, I'll list a few things briefly.
- Rework the SSS shaders, create more SSS shaders, smooth out the model, get the frilling of the edges of the petals to work based on a displacement map, clean up the models of the stamen.

Technical Breakdown/Extra Information

Concept for this Project



Distance Overview Shot



Medium Shot of the Flower



Detail Shot of the Flower and the Petals

Shading Network for the Petals

Petal Primary Color Map		Petal Primary Specular Color Map
Petal Secondary Color Map		Petal Secondary Specular Color Map
Petal Back Scatter Color Map		Petal Bump Map

Below are the textures for the anther models of the flower

Shading Network for the Anthers

Anther Diffuse Color Map		Anther Displacement Map
Anther Specular Color Map		Anther UV Map
Anther Bump Map