Week 9+10: Selecting A Scene for Still Life Project
From visiting the Metropolitan Museum last week and looking at the variety of still life paintings, I am interested in recreating a still life that consists of several random objects with dark and dramatic interior lighting. So I decided to go with Pieter Claesz’s Still Life with a Skull and a Writing Quill.
3D Models
This first week I started looking for 3D assets for my still life scene. I mostly found them on TurboSquid. These are the list of the objects to include: skull, glass, vintage telephone, two-tier plater, old folder with papers inside, book, and feather pen.
Process on Maya
Then I imported all the assets into Maya. First I created planes for the table and the wall, then I scaled all the assets accordingly and arranged them into the composition as shown on the painting.
Entering the second week of this project, I started creating Arnold materials and assigning them into each of the objects. Some of the materials that were downloaded together with the 3d assets needed some tweaking in terms of color in order to match the painting so I edited them in Photoshop.
Moving on to the most important step is setting up the lights. Here I am using five spot lights and one point light.
One thing missing is the reflection of a window on the glass. I honestly not sure how to reflect this on the rendering but I tried creating a plane with a window and set up an area light right outside and direct it towards the glass. The result is not as good as shown on the painting because there it is bigger and softer. I have tried moving it around but nothing changes much so this is the best I can do for now.
Final
The rendering I exported from Maya somehow always appear less saturated than preferred, so I enhanced it on Photoshop and increased the gamma correction.
