Saturday, February 4, 2017

Tutorial: Displacement for Renderman 21

So I've been working on a project in my freetime using the latest Renderman 21 with Maya 2016. Really loving it so far, but there is limited documentation out there right now for the new shaders and work flow that has changed since Renderman 20. This proved to be especially difficult when I was trying to set up displacement maps that I had generated through Mari.

There IS documentation if you made your maps in Mudbox or Zbrush, so if that's your situation then stop reading and check out these links!
https://rmanwiki.pixar.com/display/REN/Using+Displacement
and this video is pretty good too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjI0gMhVa60

BUT if you are using maps you created in Photoshop or Mari, I couldn't find anything explaining how to set this up. I tried following the tutorials shown above, and just plugging in my maps from Mari instead, but it caused my model to shift to the right for some reason.

Anyway after much trial and error, I DID figure out what to do! I honestly have no idea if this is the proper way to do it lol, but it worked for me and so I thought I'd pass it along for anyone else struggling as I did.



Without further ado.....


How To Setup Displacement for Renderman 21 Using Maps From Mari


Step 1: Create File Node

- Displacement maps should be 16 bit or 32 bit, so make sure your Mari channel or Photoshop file has been set up for this.
- Set your Color Space to "Raw" so it knows to read the map as linear.
- If you have your map painted so that 50% gray should not displace, then set your Alpha Gain to "2" and your Alpha Offset to "-1".



Step 2: Create PxrDispTransform Node

- Make sure your Displacement Type is set to "Scalar"
- Plug in your file node into the "Scalar Displacement"
- Leave everything else as is



Step 3: Create PxrDisplace Node

- Plug in the "PxrDispTransform" Node into the Scalar Displacment. The Connection Editor will pop up. Select "resultF" on the PxrDispTransform side and then "dispScalar" on the PxrDisplace side.



- The Gain is where you adjust how strong you want the map to displace. 



Step 4: Plug PxrDisplace node into the SG node

- Profit!




In the end your network should look like this:




Thanks for reading! And I hope this helps keep you from banging your head against the wall like I did ;P

Sunday, January 29, 2017

Zbrush Tiling Texture

Playing around with creating tiling textures in Zbrush.






Old but fun!

Sad story that lead to finding some old fun art! I let some people borrow a hard drive of mine and I'm sure it wasn't done on purpose, but some how anything in a subfolder was wiped =(  A ton of old artwork was on there and probably lost forever now. So I started scavenging through all my computer folders to see if I had backed any of it up. Anyway long story short, I found some old artwork I had done for a music game a few years ago and decided to post! Gives me a little piece of mind that at least some old artwork will be preserved by the internet lol

TL;DR: Found some old artwork I did for a music game and decided to share ;P



         

**UPDATE** More old art of mine that I found after digging lol. Uncharted was a big reference point for this one








Wednesday, January 18, 2017

Overwatch Fan Art

Totally forgot to post this over the holiday break, but I painted this Overwatch piece for my boyfriend. It's been our latest obsession!! He usually plays Reinhardt and I usually play D.Va :)


Monday, September 5, 2016

Style Studies











Style studies. Exploring the style of EliOli, love their work! Used artrage