Kevin Crowe
After reading this book I knew from the start I wanted to try and work on a shot based off of the cover. I knew It could cover many aspects such as modeling, texturing, and my favorite aspect which is Compositing. Firstly I had to model the trailers and all of the steel grate floors and railings that encompass the shot. I did this using modo and of course I took some liberties with the design just because I had to think of how it would look on the backside.
After I finished modeling I moved onto texturing. For this project I did the texturing in Photoshop. A later look at the asset on the right shows the general look I had developed. Below are a few tests I used for the steel parts as well as the diffuse maps for two of the trailers and a diffuse for the rust and grunge on the steel (bottom right). Below those three images are two shader ball tests for the steel texturing. The lower right rust image is just one part of the layered shader that helped created a rusted steel look. Since the steel encompassed so much of the asset I wanted to try and do a seamless tiled texture so I tested the look out on some shader balls. They both came out how I wanted but I ended up adding some more roughness as well as some grunge as you can see by the image on the right. The grunge helped give an older more worn look. The asset was rendered using Mental Ray.
Above and to the left you can see my first, second, and third attempt at green screen. The ladder, no pun intended, worked the best. It had the most consistency with climbing and helped accomplish a more live look since the actor would be climbing and not be so stagnant in the shot bringing more life into it. I remembered thinking I could channel the first spiderman movie in the first green screen attempt (not shown) but it didn't work as well as we had hoped. We then decided to just do a more stagnant attempt where he was upright. That worked much better but was still tough because our prop usage left much to be desired, we used a miniature baseball bat to stand in for the ladder bars and a foot rest to stand in for where his feet would be resting on the bars.
There is two attempts with the ladder. We thought the step ladder would work fine but in the end the contrast between his clothes and the beige wall required more roto, which I don't mind at all but I wanted to get the best quality and in the quickest time frame so we went back and doctored the green screen on a different ladder to create better footage not only to work with but that would also look better in the final shot.
In the end the final attempt was of course the best. We cut up a few parts of the green screen to block out the front of the ladder and then used the rest behind him. The screen I own is a bit small so I had to use different keyers when building up the alpha for this footage where his head went against the wall and also some sort of spots on the back which sometimes went off of the green screen. I still would like to reshoot the green screen with a ladder much closer to that of the one in the picture but this works well for the short term.
Above is a breakdown of the final shot and how it all came together. Still a work in progress but it is my most up to date project so I wanted to get a decent version uploaded just to show the stuff I have been working on. This will show you the multipass rebuild and also the integration of the matte painting (WIP). In the breakdown you will notice I left two trailers from the model out. Did this strictly because I wanted to lighten the scene for shorter render times since they wouldn't be seen. I hope you enjoy.