Making of the Fruit Tartsby Hau Ming (Jamie) Li, USA
For the tray, I revolved a NURBS CV curve, converted it into polygons, reversed normals, smoothed it, and then deleted every other edge inside the tray to keep the polygons low but still maintain the roundness of a tray. I could have left it as NURBS geometry, but the UVs were noticeably distorted so that’s why I converted it into a polygon.
Tray and UV |
For the doily, I used a NURBS plane.
Doily and UV |
For the raspberries, I used a NURBS sphere, checked the normals, duplicated it many times, positioned them and shape them like a raspberry using a lattice. I left it as a NURBS geometry, because I needed that roundish organic look without having Maya calculate the densities of all the smoothed polygons. In addition, NURBS has its own UVs, although slightly distorted, it works out fine for the fruits. I also made sure all the texture seams are facing inside the raspberries instead of outside.
Raspberry and UV |
For all the grapes, I used NURBS spheres and shaped them with a lattice. Red grapes are bigger and rounder at the bottom. Green grapes are elongated and thinner than red grapes.
Grapes and UV |
For the blackberries, I used NURBS spheres just like how I modeled the raspberries, except I converted them to polygons, reversed normals, deleted the inside of the spheres and combined them, shaped them with a lattice to cover all the gaps and make them shaped like a blackberry. The bulbs of the blackberries are rounder and the bulbs of the raspberries are slightly flatter on top. I didn’t UV map the blackberries, because blackberries are mostly blackish in color with a shiny specular skin and they are not translucent like raspberries so there is really no need.
Blackberry and UV |
For the blueberries, I used a NURBS sphere, converted it to a polygon so I could texture it better, extruded the edges to make the leaves and of course reversed normals. Then when I positioned them, I duplicated the original, rotated them, flipped some of them upside down, and scaled the size smaller or bigger to make the blueberries look random.
Blueberry and UV |
For the pomegranate seeds, I duplicated the polygon seed and scaled it out to create the meat part. I actually didn’t know they were pomegranate seeds in the photo concept. For over a week, I seriously thought they were cranberries even though I couldn’t find the actual fresh fruit in the supermarket, (at least that was what my American instructor told me,) till my Brazilian instructor walked by one day and pointed out what they really were because his country sells them. So knowing exactly what you are modeling and texturing is a very good thing.
Pomegranates and UV |
Texturing
Before I explain about texturing my project, let me show you the old version of the fruit tarts, my first draft which I posted up on cgchannel. At the time, I wanted to create another food scene that is fast to render with very minimal skin shaders. As you can see it is not photorealistic. In that scene, I used a phong and fractal for the gel custard, a fractal and phong for the blueberries, and a fractal and a misss_fast_simple for the raspberries. Then there are the pomegranate seeds, melons and pineapples that no one can tell apart. It rendered 7 minutes a frame using very little final gather instead of an hour a frame like the Cheese Platter. Although, it rendered really fast, the quality of both the models and textures were not there, didn’t even come close to Ratatouille quality. So I went back and remodeled all the fruits, replaced the melons and pineapples with red and green grapes. I used file textures for everything instead of procedural shaders except the blackberries to have more control in making it photorealistic looking. I also used a misss_fast_skin shader for the custard instead of a subsurface phong, as well as a misss_fast_skin shader for the raspberries and grapes instead of using the misss_fast_simple shader. The misss_fast_simple shader is very basic, renders faster than the skin shader, but doesn’t offer much specularity control to make the fruits wet looking without the use of little transparent spheres.
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