Displacement Mapping

For my next personal tutorial, I decided that I wanted to learn more about displacement mapping and how it differs from bump mapping. I read about displacement mapping here (pg. 235 in the Google book if the link doesn't take you directly there). The pages in this book taught be about bump mapping and how it differs from displacement mapping. Displacement mapping is more realistic, however it is more processor intensive (as is the case with everything in Maya). Thus, displacement mapping is something I would use sparingly. I used this tutorial to learn about how to create a displacement map.

The above image is of a bump map with a noise texture. As you can see, it creates a pretty good effect, but the edges of the polygon mesh are still completely smooth, which is not totally realistic.

In the picture above, the sphere on the left still has the bump map. The sphere on the right as a displacement map with a noise texture. You can see that the edges here are actually rough, like they should be. However, it is pretty obvious that the displacement is way too strong.

So, all I did was lower the alpha gain value for the noise texture file to reduce the intensity of the displacement. However, the displacement still looks a little bit blocky and low resolution.

To fix this problem, I just increased the number of subdivisions on the sphere. However, by increasing the number of faces it makes this displacement method even more resource intensive.

Another cool thing that I learned is that you can go to Modify>Convert>Displacement to Polygons to make the displacement into an actual polygon mesh. Below is a picture of the wireframe of this new mesh; it is obvious that this method can create a very high poly mesh and will slow down Maya.

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All in all, this tutorial taught me a new way to make objects look bumpy in a way that is a bit more realistic than bump mapping. I would definitely like to practice more with this technique and use it more if my computer will be able to handle it.

UV Mapping/Texturing

For my second group tutorial, I watched some videos about UV mapping. I've done some basic stuff with UV mapping, but I would like to learn some more advanced techniques. I will probably continue watching the rest of the videos to learn any new information they have to offer. I practiced by creating a UV map for the hallway for our game by creating an automatic mapping and then cutting certain edges and arranging them. Below is an image of the UV map, but it is not done being textured.

I also worked with texturing the house model by using the UV map. Below is an image of the UV map for the house and some images of the house.

Klein's Choice Tutorial

Here is my Klein's choice tutorial. Not much to explain, just a bunch of extruding and tweaking vertices. I didn't have too many problems other than some weird stuff with the normals and just trying to make it look good. Also, the guy on the video goes really fast.

Images:

Wireframes:

Mental Ray Light Fog Tutorial

Here is a tutorial I did on making light fog in mental ray. This is something I've wanted to do for a while, since light fog seemed to always be one of the few things mental ray couldn't do. However, I found out that mental ray can do light fog... it's just a little bit complicated. Overall, I didn't have too much trouble with the tutorial, I just had to tweak settings like the extinction, nonuniformness, and min and max step. It's not quite as simple as the maya software option of just clicking the create light fog button, but it does work and can be customized more than maya software light fog.