Amber Evans
​​​~ Effects Artist ~
This website is old, please visit amberevansvsfx.com for my new site.
Jack-in-the-Box
This web page displays the results of modelling and rendering using Pixar's RenderMan Studio.
For this project, we were given the assignment of creating a Jack-in-the-Box with the theme of
"Fools and their money are soon parted."
The interpretation is left up to me and the jack itself could be any shape or form. I chose to do the medival tale of Man versus Dragon.
Dragons are mythical creatures known for collecting gold and jewels. Many men have been known to want to kill the dragon and take his spoils, even though it is a dangerous task. My story is that the man was eaten by the dragon and his money taken from him, thus the man becomes the fool.
Final Renders
Occulusion Renders
Process
I began with box modeling the dragon. I have never been very good with modeling, so I started two weeks in advance before the first day of class.
Once the dragon was semi-done, I began adding other elements. The cave came first, followed by the grass, crystals, bags, and the coins.
The Dragon
The dragon proved to be more difficult than I thought. Like I said before, I am not fond of modeling, so creating the dragon was a lot of extrusions and "in the moment" decisions. I wanted to create my own dragon, and I felt like I accomplished that goal.
Problems
The very first problem that I encountered was with the grass. I have never used Maya fur before, so I did some research to figure out how to apply fur to an object. I started with the ground plane, and applying the grass was easy, but figuring out the settings was a little confusing. I changed the color, the length, and played with the baldness, scraggle, and thickness. At first, I barely had any grass and when I rendered the image, I had trouble with the viewport showing more grass than the rendered image. I finally figured out that to have more grass in the viewport, I had to up the Density in the Grass FurDescription and to have more grass in the render view, I had to up the UV samples in the FurFeedback Shape.
I ended up having more Density for the cave grass because there were more UV's.
The other problem that I had with Maya fur was that the grass was interpenatrating other objects. If you go to the slideshow below to the "Problems with Coins and Grass" image, you can see that the grass in going through the coins. When I looked this up, I found that you cannot get Maya fur to interact with other objects, only Hairsystems. I did not understand how to fix this, so I made the decision of moving the coins from the ground to on top of the bag. This way the interpenatration was less emphasized.
Another problem I seem to have is floating grass on the cave. For some reason, in a couple of spots there is grass that is disconnected from the cave, even though I have not set the parameters to make them "float". The length of the grass is very small and with little noise.
I still have these problems and will eventually fix them.
Depth of Field
I had a lot of problems with Depth of Field. At first, it was figuring it was just figuring out what to set the F-stop, F Distance, and Focus Scale at. Once I had the right amound of "blur", I had to deal with the small black squares on the cave. No matter what I did, they kept coming up. I set the pixel samples higher and higher, but I could not get rid of these black squares, so I scrapped the idea of Depth of Field. I do not think that it affects my final Jack-in-the-Box at all.
*Note: The image is smaller due to the fact that it takes longer to render images with Depth of Field, so I made the image size smaller to cut back on render time.
Conclusion
In the end, I feel that I succesfully accomplished the goal of creating a Jack-in-the-Box with the theme of "Fools and their money are soon parted." This project pushed through my limits of using Maya and figuring out how to correctly obtain the right look for the textures and lights using RenderMan Studio. I have definitely attained more knowledge about Maya and RenderMan throughout this whole process.