gorillamilk
06-19-2009, 11:27 AM
Well, as you can tell, it's not the first thing one might use mental ray for, but when my wife asked for wallpaper for a 24" monitor, I couldn't refuse. I've never had an opportunity to wrap my head around rendering a realistic piece of paper, nor a polaroid photograph... until now, and my head still hurts. I will say this render is more complex than it looks. Maybe the paper could have more fibers sticking of the edges but she didn't want it to look furry. As usual everything in the scene is scale right down to the handwriting on 300 DPI rendered paper and additionally the torn edges. Does anyone know how I did the edges and does anyone really care. Well, in case you'd like to know, here you go:
Found an image online with a pretty high res image of torn paper. In photoshop took a lot of the edges and made a 30 inch wide and half inch tall strip to use as the opacity along with a few other added details like the thinning of the paper in some areas. Took that 30 inch wide image and applied it to a plane and did a path follow around a spline to make the papers any shape I wanted. The reason I made it 30 inches (even though I wasn't as random as I needed to be) was to keep the edges random. Once the UVW map was applied, I slid the gizmo around to different parts of the map to help randomize the edges of the individual pieces. WAY faster than using photoshop at this point: paint brushes = fake; pasting = layers; layers = confusion. And the alpha map renders took 3 or 4 seconds each. Then took the images into photoshop, wrote the quotes, and made the masks for each one. Again, scale was important and so was keeping the font size the same for all the quotes.
Ok. So, a lot of work went into this. Not to mention the polaroids, but that was a breeze compared to the paper. Lighting the scene was easy because I used my breakfast area scene - http://www.mymentalray.com/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=807&d=1227646135
And of course there's bump maps for the paper and polaroids. Almost forgot. I used reactor to drop these on top of each other. Some are still “floating” due to tolerance, but hey, I’m done with this. Enjoy.
Big version - 1920x1200
http://www.3dcreativesolutions.com/images/quotes.jpg
Found an image online with a pretty high res image of torn paper. In photoshop took a lot of the edges and made a 30 inch wide and half inch tall strip to use as the opacity along with a few other added details like the thinning of the paper in some areas. Took that 30 inch wide image and applied it to a plane and did a path follow around a spline to make the papers any shape I wanted. The reason I made it 30 inches (even though I wasn't as random as I needed to be) was to keep the edges random. Once the UVW map was applied, I slid the gizmo around to different parts of the map to help randomize the edges of the individual pieces. WAY faster than using photoshop at this point: paint brushes = fake; pasting = layers; layers = confusion. And the alpha map renders took 3 or 4 seconds each. Then took the images into photoshop, wrote the quotes, and made the masks for each one. Again, scale was important and so was keeping the font size the same for all the quotes.
Ok. So, a lot of work went into this. Not to mention the polaroids, but that was a breeze compared to the paper. Lighting the scene was easy because I used my breakfast area scene - http://www.mymentalray.com/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=807&d=1227646135
And of course there's bump maps for the paper and polaroids. Almost forgot. I used reactor to drop these on top of each other. Some are still “floating” due to tolerance, but hey, I’m done with this. Enjoy.
Big version - 1920x1200
http://www.3dcreativesolutions.com/images/quotes.jpg