PUSH POP BUDDHA
CG Integration + Creating Shaders
The goal of this CG integration project was to create a shader resembling a Push Pop and applying it to a Stanford 3D model, the happy buddha. To begin, I went to Daffin Park in Savannah, GA and filmed a backplate. I also gathered images to create a photoset consisting of a clean plate, grey ball, chrome ball, and a cube photo. These will be helpful in Maya to accurately light the scene, obtain real world reflections, and line up the perspective/angle of the camera used.
As I first began experimenting in Maya to create the Push Pop Shader, I started by creating a glass shader, adjusting the color and roughness and continuing the process from there. I tested out placing geometry like spheres and rectangular prisms inside the object to create bubbles and striations. However, I ran into a problem where Cast Shadows had to be unchecked so the 3D shapes would not create strange shadows around the base of the model.
I continued to experiment with the shader's specularity/roughness, subsurface, and transparency. I tried a few different saturated colors, and settled on green to unify the model with the grass in the background. I also needed a green caustic shadow on top of the model's real shadow to resemble the light shining through the object. This caustic shadow was one of the most challenging parts of this project, and it was created by drastically increasing the Arnold Spotlight intensity, rendering out the sequence, and making color adjustments in Nuke.
Bubble Map
Cylindrical UV Unwrap
Bump Map
UVs with Bump Map
Because I added bubbles within the shader, I needed their shadows to appear within the caustic shadow. I used Photoshop to create a Bubble Map, and then used Nuke and a Corner Pin node to place the image accurately and animated their positions as the model spins around. The Push Pop reference I had showed horizontal lines wrapping around the candy, so I cylindrically unwrapped the Happy Buddha's UVs so a Bump map could be applied. Render layers were used for passes of the model, fresnel, shadow, caustic shadow, and occlusion. They were composited together in Nuke and color corrected to achieve the final render!
Nuke Node Graph
PREVIOUS
Final Comp
NEXT
