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Jellyfish Pictures: Human Body Reel

This. This a thousand times over. If I manage to get my work to look even one percent as glorious as this, I will be very happy.

On a slightly less effusive note… I am making notes on everything in this, particularly the use of random floating particles to create an underwater vibe.

In addition to this are other things I will endeavour to utilise:

– focus plane adjustments

– procedural textures (I think?)

– a slight vignette around the edges of the screen

– particle trails

– the fact that the shaft of yellow light bearing down on the egg looks awesome and I should use that same effect on my own DNA (in the project obviously, not my actual DNA)

– dynamic environments (the fallopian tube lining was made by “collapsing” some dynamic cloth to make those random-looking folds that give slightly under the weight of the egg. Maybe a bit ambitious for this project, but worth noting)

Lighting/Comp Test

OK, so… ignore the slapdash modelling, and the awful shader, and the missing DNA, and the chronic anti-aliasing (or lack thereof)… here is a rough test of the final look, lighting/comp wise. Still feels like it’s missing… something. A bit of atmosphere, for lack of a better word. And it feels a bit too spacious, but that’s more of a composition thing, just need to add more chromatin and move them around a bit.

Thumbnails

So having spent the last three weeks doing Going Live, I find out that we have to do a presentation on our personal project tomorrow.  Time to magic some work out of thin air…

As if they heard me, Digital Tutors has provided me with a way to do exactly that… well, almost.  Creative Environment Thumbnail Techniques in Photoshop with Nate Hallinan (check out his work, by the way: http://www.natehallinan.com/) explains a way to get the composition, colour and lighting of your piece locked down in precisely 45 minutes (or less, if you’re more experienced in Photoshop than I).

Following the tutorial, I started with a study.  The only problem is that there are no real-world photographs of the inside of a cell (unless you count murky black-and-white microscope slides), so I was going to have to make it up a bit.  I decided that considering how much stuff floats around in cells, an underwater scene would a be a good starting point.

I may have shot myself in the foot by picking something that was really rather difficult, and as you can see I ran out of patience toward the bottom of the image, which is not really what you want when you’re trying to keep things fresh. I didn’t time myself for this one or the inside-the-nucleus shot, as it had been so long since I’d touched Photoshop that I needed time to re-familiarise myself with the tools.  I limited myself to 45 minutes for the cytoplasm shot though, and I noticed a big difference in that I felt much more creative and less fed up with the painting.

I used what I had learned from making the study to paint the images on the left, then used Hue/Saturation to alter the colours and make a couple more tests.  I think my favourite one is Test_02, considering that the setting is the interior of a skin cell I think it makes sense to stick to warm colours.

Shrinkwrapping

Remember the problems I had with the automatically generated high-poly, triangular mMaya meshes? I thought I had perhaps found my answer in the new Maya 2014 modelling tools…

Sadly, Autodesk’s tardiness in making Maya 2014 available to the Education Community has meant that for now I must look elsewhere.

My good friend, the ever-resourceful Pat Imrie, pointed me to a free Maya plug-in called polyShrinkWrap, which I have been experimenting with tonight.  It’s simple to use – select the vertices of the mesh you wish to shrink, shift-select the target object, and type “polyShrinkWrap;” into the Script Editor.

There were a few initial issues, but I found out that it seems to work much better when both models are centred on the origin. After I figured that out it was very responsive.

The top image is my initial result (mMaya mesh on the left, shrinkwrapped PolyCube on the right); the bottom image is the same mesh after some minimal work with the Sculpt Geometry Tool.  It is high-poly still, but I find that the fidelity of the shrinkwrapped mesh is greater if I use a high-poly mesh, then Reduce it afterwards, rather than starting the process with a low-poly mesh.