Making of Lamp

Hello,

I've done another personal project inspired by Disney's Aladdin, Lamp

Final Image

1. Modeling & Layout

I wanted re-create the treasure cave in the animation. Just pile of shiny stuff and the lamp. and coins. lots of coins.

I kinda knew what types of models I needed for the project and started modeling them. As soon as I get to modeling phase, I found my self browsing free 3d model download websites.

Thanks to

https://archive3d.net

I downloaded some Idiany-treasure looking models.

Pretty much all models were not fine condition to use in Maya - Vray workflow. Some of them were just too heavy or had overlapping faces, screwed up normals and stuff. I had to do a lot of clean up work. It was tedious.

and no UVs. God

One tip for CG-Environment artist, lock down your camera and layout in the beginning of the project. In that way, you can avoid unnecessary work and focus on what only matter.

I've started layout and find good camera position. This determines major portion of quality. I'd say at least 50% of the final quality.

This is like a getting a good form first and then do the detail later in traditional drawing. You gotta find good composition and layout to produce a good image.

2. Coins

The biggest challenge I was facing was instancing coins. And I spent most of the time doing R&D for this.

Few problems to solve

1) I needed a lot. Enough coins to cover 60 - 70 percent of my image

2) With that, no overlapping each other. (no penetration)

3) With that, 'naturally stacked up' looking piles

So I created some dummy piles representing coin piles. I had few options to instance this 1 coin. (Yeh I literally modeled 1 coin geo which is just very short cylinder)

1) Using spPaint3D plug-in in Maya

2) Xgen

3) Maya's native instancing

4) Houdini's copy operation (I'm not an expert in Houdini)

I couldn't find a way to instance geometries without overlapping using those methods.

I'm pretty sure there's way in Houdini, but no energy to get into scripting.

So I ended up using 3Ds Max's pflow dynamic simulation. Never done that, but after watching few Youtube video, I could make a particle sim with collision. It's so easy. This helped big time to create that naturally stacked up looking piles of coin.

Basic workflow is this

- Run the sim

- Bake & export these particle instances as helper using alembic

- Bring the alembic file and you'll see just transform nodes

- Run the 'replace' operation in Maya and turn them into instance coins!

Make it rain baby

oh, one more thing I did prep work for the sim, I brought those treasure models to houdini, and converted them to volume, and then converted to lowres mesh for the sim because some of them were too heavy to be base geo. Why? maya's 'reduce' operation keeps crashing. :(

So looking at this image below, I was too ambitious.

It was too many of them. (It was around 410,000 coins)

My computer has only 16G ram and 2G for Vram. There's no way I can tumble or render these coins even though they're instances. And maya gets super slow in everything at this point and I decided to change my camera view to more close up

3. Lighting

To lit this kind of heavy scene, it's way easier to create 'lighter version of the shot'

You can delete most of the stuff in the scene and leave important geos

Like this

Deleted most of coins, no material, no displacement

You'll get your lighting setup very quick and you just export them and import to your main scene

4. LookDev

I used both Mari & Substance painter

Substance painter was awesome

Mari is still better doing UDIM texturing and fine detailing

Seriously, Mari need to implement this masking features

5. Comp

Raw Render

Disco

Final

For previous project I wanted do minimum comp work for some reason but I wanted to comp the sh** out of this lamp

Did some tests going little extreme in color but everyone hated it when I asked for feedback so here is final image.

Thank you again for reading my article.

The reason I post these is not to teach you how to texture or light like usual tutorials out there.

Instead of doing that, I wanted to show people what's my thought process and actual progress during the project which I think could be more useful for intermediate CG artists.

I'll come back with another project soon. See ya!