Mon, October 24, 2005
Reinventing the Wheel—3:00 PM
(Har!) As I previously mentioned, the assignment this week is to render a wheel (tire and rim) and light it using image-based lighting. I decided a night scene would be more interesting – and a street scene would be downright imperative.
I took some pictures outside my building last night, created a panorama for the image-based light, and then used another shot for a background. Then I dropped in the tire, which I created in class on Thursday and fine-tuned over the weekend. The match isn't perfect, and there's no shadow – but this assignment is more about lighting than compositing.
The fun part is that with a simpler basic assignment, I was able to devote more time to details. I found a tire tread image online and modified it so that it would wrap around the tire surface, then added a TireCo logo for the side, along with printed information like the size of the tire and the recommended inflation pressure, etc. The shiny rim was kind of a key point in the assignment – you want a reflective surface to show off the environmental details that come from the image-based light. I also was able to design a CarCo logo for the center of the wheel cover, and I built a bump map to give it dimension and reflectivity. (Hopefully this will come in handy for the future – my guess is that the next few weeks will be spent building a car around this tire, and I'll already have a logo for the hood!)
