The purpose of this assignment was to create a CG object in a real space. I went out and took photographs of several small objects in interesting enviroments. What I plan to do is create a CG version of my object then composite it into my scene. I choose to do a die. The object has some level of difficulties in the model and in the shaders. For the most part, these problems are not too difficult to overcome so I can focus on the lighting. This is the image I chose to work on. It's got some interesting shadows and lights on it with nice colors.

The fist step was to match the angle of my image to my photograph. I setup my Match to Live in Maya by loading the built-in plug-in. It's important to get the focal legnth right. I looked at the details of the photograph. It says that the Focal length is 56. There's a formula that I have found that gets you close. It suggests multiplying this number by 1.6. This would mean that our Maya camera's focal length should be 89.6. This usually gives you a good jumping off point. After tweaking I found out that 80.2 was a more approriate number. If you noticed when I took the reference photo I took a picture of the die in another position. This is where I will be placing the die in the final image. It will serve as reference

Now I have to model the die. Dice come in all different shapes and styles. but there is a certain standard die that comes in most games. I knew the biggest challenges would be getting the bevels correct and placing of the pips (or dots). I found some blueprints of dice online which I used as a guide. Now the die, eventhough it is factory made,when the factory stamps the die it leaves imperfections. I used the picture of the die to get this aspect correct. Believe it or not my die was very imperfect.

My first attempt didn't work out so good. The bevels were too round and the dot weren't the right size. I noticed if I used the inside of the black line this would fix the problem. To create the dots I used the boolean function. Now I know what you are thinking. Wait a second, Josh, don't Maya booleans really suck? Well yeah, they do. The displacement map I was using looked awful. In the end the booleans turned out, for once, to be an elegant solution.

Okay onto lighting. First thing is to get the keylight correct. I set up a spotlight. It has a light radius of one with a shadow ray set to 3. The intensity is set to 1.1. The light is a yellowish orange... so lets guess for now. I should explain at this point that I am rendering in layers. I set up six differerent layers: Diffuse, Specular, Shadow 1, Shadow 2, Object Occlusion, and Ground Occlusion.

Okay. Now I added two more lights. The one in back is set to .3 and acts as shadow 2. This light also has a little more red in it than the keylight. The closest light is a fill light set to .88. The placement of the third light was the hardest... I mostly went on the look of the specular highlights of the object. After this step was done it was time to Render out the layers and take it into Shake.

The Shake script is pretty self explanitory. The diffuse and specular layer get combined with the object occlussion and each of them have a color adjustment on them. The shadows and shadow occlussions are combined over the background plate. A fade node is also applied to the shadows and specular in case they are too much.

Shadow 1 is blueish whereas Shadow 2 is a yellowish-green. The object occlusion is set to be a little bluer to fake the bounce of the light. e book. On the left is the final complete with the full breakdown.