I worked closely with Fellow Tom Perkins, Gavin King, and Allison Churnside. I was initially rendering an image for the JILA Light & Matter Spring 2009 issue and then after I was done, talk of using the image for everything popped up. I was excited about the possibility of getting the cover of Nano Letters, but the publishers at Nano Letters said they already have all their cover images for the whole year or something along those lines. I found this to be kinda weird and was wondering how they actually run their publication. Do they know exactly what research to publish almost a full year in advance? Regardless Science picked up the image for their Editor's choice which was also pretty neat.I have worked on Tom Perkin's stuff on past projects, so I was familiar with some of the visual and potential animation objectives. The intial meeting with Gavin and Tom was pretty quick. I decided I wanted to use Maya for this project because I knew I could make a pretty beautiful rendering pretty quickly AND I could make an animation from 3D file when I had the extra time. The shapes were pretty easy to model (and I already had some 2D illustrator line work that I did previously to use for the "revolve" procedure in Maya). I spent most of my time working on textures, lighting, and colors. I was pretty happy with my lighting. I hate texturing in Maya, but I was able to get the results I wanted pretty efficiently. Of course I am running Maya 8.5 which is two versions old now and no longer supported by Autodesk. So Maya crashed a multiple times during this project which caused me an extra 2 days worth of Maya time. I think I am going finally break down get Maya 2009 Unlimited because the problems I am experienceing will never get fixed unless I upgrade (UPGRAYED!). I didn't use Mental Ray render because it was artifacting some weird stuff in there and I didn't have time to debugg that (and I would have to redo all my textures also). Hopefully the newer verion of Maya will support my current hardware configuration and work well with the latest OS that I am running on both the Mac and PC systems. All n All the final results were pretty good and I was happy with it. I am glad Perkins Group liked results as well and that NIST picked up the image for their press release thing. Hopefully I will get around to the animation part of the project after I get back from my trip this April.
No comments:
Post a Comment