This image was originally a sketch by the one and only `delya which you can see HERE

I have to say, this is my favorite render as of this date. There's a lot I like about this image, particularly the liquid and the cloud. I created about 40-50 different color variations and effects for the background before coming to this particular one (examples below). And just overall I think it came out fantastic. I used to think that it was going to be impossible to make a render that I liked more than Love Juice, but this one took the cake

Credits to NASA for the awesome high resolution star map. Yes, it's a real star layout!


Technial Details

Made in Maya 2009, rendered with mental ray. Liquid over the umbrella was created with Real Flow (see screenshots below), while the actual stream was created with Maya's new nParticle system. Lighting was accomplished with three directional lights, one which creates the shadowing, one which only effects the highlights of the characters, and another which... I apparently just forgot to delete from the scene and does nothing. There were also several small lights that were made to create the bright highlights in the two Zurds' eyes. Maya FluidFX was used to create the cloud. Render times were extremely good! The reason I was able to get so many color tests is because I could do a near full quality look of the entire scene in just 45 seconds! I'm watching the final one render as I type this and it should finish in approximately 2 hours total.

Ambient occlusion was used in this image in very specific spots. The main place it was used was on the lower Zurds face, to help bring out his eyes. But... it created an undesirable shadowing effect on his feet, as was expected. But I wouldn't remove it because it created that useful shadow underneath his head onto his body. I had to use a custom attribute called miLabel, which is basically just a way to tell mental ray what number to label an object. I could then tell the ambient occlusion shader what objects to include or exclude in its calculation. Read about that HERE if you are maya/mental ray inclined.

Indirect lighting was accomplished with two 'bounce cards', which just means I have two flat planes with a bright material on them to emit some light. There is an orange one on the right that creates the hue you can see on the top Zurd, and a white one on the upper left. See screenshots below to see their positions. The bounce card on the top left was inverted so that it actually blocked light instead of created it, which helped get a better shadowing effect on the top Zurds face... which in turn helped bring out it's reflection.

The image was rendered in two passes. One was a 'beauty' pass with color and light, and the other was no lighting at all, just reflections/refractions. It was done this way because I like to have control over the intensity of reflections in photoshop, but also because it gets complicated to set up the scene otherwise. I mean, I had to make it so that something can block indirect light while simultaneously being very bright in the reflections (like on the top left bounce card), and that jsut opens up a whole can of worms.

About the liquid: Originally I tried to create the entire liquid as a single stream in Real Flow. It ate up hundreds of gigs of hard drive space and was slow. Then I tried in Maya's nParticle system. I got some good results but it was still seriously slow. The problem was I needed a huuuge amount of particles because I needed a thin stream to split into 10 smaller streams of equal size. To do that I needed ten times the average resolution on the particles and it just ended up not being practical. So later the idea came that I should create a big fat cylinder filled with particles hovering above the umbrella and just let them go. It worked, but it had dynamic problems... for example, the particles at the top of the cylinder, being acted upon by gravity, would hit the umbrella faster than the first particles did. That created an unwanted splash effect. Then the idea hit me... why not just create a circular shaped emitter pointing down right above the umbrella? GENIUS! Problem solved. Then All I had to do was create the stream separately and I would be done!


Picture Time:

Here is several of the other color tests I did before arriving at this one: Way, too, many, of, these, freakin, color, tests, Oh, My, God, WTF!

Here are a few shots from the Maya viewport: shower, faucet, lighting setup, lo-res, from above

Here is some views of the Real Flow simulation: Full thing, Details, in-progress




I hope you enjoy this image as much as I do!!