Category: Art

Whittles & Sticks

[singlepic id=37 w=660]
Sporkii and I have been playing Super Mario Galaxy 2 and really liked these little characters we found in a couple of galaxies. Apparently they’re called Whittles! They looked really simple so I whipped up some quick models and slapped on some procedural wood textures. Also using Multiscatter for the grass, but had to go a funky route to get color variation in mental ray using the submap material and creating multiple copies of the same proxy in order to have it randomly distributed.

[singlepic id=35 w=660]
More playing around with Multiscatter, using noise to modulate rotation on a bunch of boxes. Unfortunately I forgot to save out z-depth AND the max file (was just a temp thing to play around with) so no fancy DOF on this one. The close one is curved from lens distortion.

Pushing Boundaries

Testing out some new stuff:

* aa_stonePlacementTools, which creates some nice, procedural quad stone patterns I quite like.
* 3ds max’s native object paint to scatter leaves, grass, rocks and stuff. Had mixed luck with it actually placing objects on to the scene where I’d like them, but otherwise seemed responsive and flexible.
* mental ray displacement down to 1px, seeing how far it can be pushed without crashing. The patterned texture was an accident, but I continued with it because I liked the look. Reminds me of some tedious exacto-cut paper craft.
* Using Multiscattertexture to vary color of scattered leaves. Works wonders~

I ran them all through Photoshop Camera Raw for some extra color lovin’, though the tree test environment has too many ugly tiling/UV problems to deserve it.