Week 3

Here is my current progress on the Bothriolepis model.



Here is test video of a particle effect I would like to incorporate into the animation. Getting Maya to render transparent sprites is proving to be a challenge.

This is a chart describing the sort of shader I will be setting up for my ontogenic character. Vray has a blend material that accepts several separate materials and overlaps them. I'll have two separate textures for the adult and juvenile form, which will fade into one another under the control of the growth slider.

I figured out the positional specular highlight shader. I placed a conditional node between the samplerInfo node and the Vray material. The samplerInfo node sends the Y position of each rendered pixel to the conditional node. If the Y position is greater than 0: the specular amount of the Vray material is set to 5. If the Y position is 0 or below: the specular amount is set to 0.

Here is render test. Notice the faked Caustic lighting on the sand. Also notice the environmental fog that causes objects in the distance to assume the color of the water.