Ever love someone so much you just want to vomit hearts all over them?


So here it is, the image fate didn't want me to finish. As you may know, this is based off of `delya's "I LOVE YOU" (with her permission of course). As you may also know, when I first tried to render this image earlier this month, after 8 days of waiting and about 3/4 way done, someone flipped the fuse to my room, making all that waiting pointless. I got so angry that I made "First Impression". After that, I optimized it a bit, reused the lighting map, used some really insanely simple yet genius tricks, and cut that down to 4 days instead of what I estimate would have been around 12 days render time otherwise.

I have to admit this is one of my favorite works I've ever done. The colors just seem to work together really well, and it's goofy and has a good happy style to it. To me, this image is the perfect mix of technical achievement, art, and humor. Not only that, it was fun to make! This is what I was born to do.


Technical Details

Made in Maya 6.5, rendered in Mental Ray 3.4 standalone. The puke mesh was done in RealFlow 3. The shaders on the characters are custom shaders designed to blur reflection more towards the angle facing you (so that there is less blurring towards the edges). They also reflect less on the angle facing you, like a Fresnel effect. It may not be very obvious, but an incredible amount of effort went into getting the characters' shaders to look the way I wanted. The L_Glass shader was used on the puke, and Maya Ramp shaders on the hearts. I reused the hearts from Almost Perfected and slightly edited them. There were no lights, only bright cubes illuminating the scene with Final Gathering. This is the first image I've ever used RealFlow, and I'm glad I learned how to use it! Until this image I had no use for it, but now I'll be able to create liquidy shapes in any render in the future.

The puke itself is the most incredible part of this image. The puke totalled out at over 1.8 million polygons!. Yeah, I'm a little bit of a detail nut . The puke calculation in RealFlow took something like 8 hours to compute on my dual Opteron machine, and I accidentally filled like 100 gigs worth of meshes and particle files doing that! Oops. Anyways, on to the pictures!

Here is a bunch of screenshots from inside Maya: Backside, closeup, icky!, sideside

Here's the lighting setup (the black cubes are actually white): Light Setup

And check out these wireframe shots to see the pukes detail!: wireframe1, wireframe2, wireframe3, wireframe4

And here's a shot from within RealFlow: RealFlow Shot

Here's some BSP diagnostic renders: Early Diagnostic, Final Diagnostic

Here's a hilariously crappy, but funny extremely early test render: Funny crap

And finally, here's a lossless PNG version of the image, if you don't want any JPG compression and want to enjoy the full quality of the image: Puke Wallpaper