Project 2 : Shading

Date Assigned: Monday, April 7
Date Due: Monday, April 14

Reading: Chapters 5 and 8 (Kerlow)

In this assignment you will assign surface shading properties to your models. The assignment is designed to be done in Power Animator, but if you understand the basic principles of shading, the basic practices of texture-mapping, are comfortable programming, and want to use this as an opportunity to learn how to write RenderMan shaders, talk to Cassidy. (Here's some more information about RenderMan, which we will be using for the final project.)

New project groups have been created. Each person in a group will bring along all models from their group from the modeling assignment. With your new group, choose three models from this pool that somehow go together or that tell a story. Place the models in a scene and shade them in each of the ways described below.

Getting started

To get started with shading in Power Animator, here are some tips.

To get started using RenderMan, look here.

What to do
1. polka dots
Shade each model with polka dots. The polka dots may be any size, but should be uniform in size and distribution on each model. They should also still look like polka dots. There is a template polka dot pattern available: /home/cse458/data/polka.rgb. This texture tiles fairly well, but feel free to make your own. Alias provides several texture mapping options. Also feel free to paint a polka dot texture that is warped so that it looks correct on your model. You can paint textures using whatever paint program you like. StudioPaint is available on the lab machines. To start it up: studiopaint.
2. photorealism
Shade the scene so that it looks as photoreal as possible. Find and have in front of you a reference material for each model: an actual object, a photograph, a piece of fabric, etc. This reference material will be shown during the critique.
3. effect
Choose a special effect for each object; make it look like it is made out of some specific material (papier maché, mosaic tile, leather, felt, fur, skin, etc.), or that it is in some specific state (dusty, frozen, rusted, etc.). Again, have a reference material or photograph close at hand. Achieving an effect like those mentioned is hard, and the canned effects provided will try to whisper in your ear. Bring your ideas and reference materials for this part to class on Friday.

What we're looking for

We have different expectations for the results of each part of the assignment. The goal for the first part is perfect polka dots, by whatever means necessary. In the second part, you should emulate reality with all of its imperfections. In the third part, you should aim to convey the desired effect as well as possible. No cheating. ("Here you see my pepper grinder made out of... well... what does it look like to you? ... Mashed potatoes? Yeah, that's what I was going for.")

Since we will only see one view of the scene for each part (or all parts, if you like) of the assignment, take some time to find an effective camera angle and lighting intensity. The final scenes should be rendered using the real render (as opposed to quick-render) option.

Turn in

Before the critique on Monday, hand in your project as follows:

  1. Make a directory in /home/cse458/critique/shading with name that says something about the general scene (i.e. antique_shop).

  2. In the new directory, put the following:
    1. A README file containing group member names and a short explanation of who did what.
    2. Three high-quality rendered images (at a resolution of about 720x480), one for each part of the assignment, named polkadot.rgb, photoreal.rgb, and effect.rgb. When you render a scene in Alias, the image is saved as a pix file (the Alias image format) in the pix subdirectory of your project. To convert this image to an rgb file:
      % fromalias myscene.pix myscene.rgb.

  3. Make sure that the directory and files are world readable.