Nicol Lee Jones | Glass on the Water

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Nicole Lee Jones

Texture & Digital Artist

Glass on the Water

For my pop up book project I decided to draw inspiration from American glass sculptor Dale Chihuly. After constructing a physical 3D model of the pop book, I completed the rest of the project in Maya 2018 using Pixar Renderman for both texturing and lighting.

Beauty Renders

Evening Light

Glass at Night

Daytime Light

Glass with Light

Glass with Light 2

Glass in the Sun

Three Point Light Source Setup

Pxr Sphere Light One

Pxr Sphere Light Two

Pxr Sphere Light Three

Occlusion Render Passes

Below are the occlusion passes I made in Maya using the Renderman Settings, as well as a show case of the modeling I did for the project. For the most part I did the modeling in Maya using the deformer brushes to shape some of the models. However, for the cluster of flowers that are by the boat I went into zbrush after my first attempts of modeling in Maya didn't work out. For the water aspect of the modeling I used the Renderman aaoceanshader. I first took a simple polygon and then plugged the shader into the displacement channel of a PxrSurface and the rendered. I played around with the settings until I got the desired look that I wanted for my scene. In addition, I also used the TexturePickerCycle Node to apply multiple textures to the glass spheres sitting in the boat using only one shader.

Occlusion Render Pass

Occlusion Render Pass

Occlusion Render Pass

Occlusion Render Pass

Wire Frame Render Pass

Inspiration

I was inspired by the work of glass sculptor Dale Chihuly. I choose Chihuly as my inspiration because I wanted to create a pop up book where i could have fun experimenting with colors and Chihuly was the first person to pop into my head. I have always admired the way he transforms glass into stunning organic sculptures that mimic the the organic world of nature. More importantly his use color on the sculptures is what drew me in intially and my hope was to great something similar.