Photography Workshop- 18th March

This was our last photography workshop and today we were looking at printing. Beytan asked us to bring up two prints; one from the studio lighting task, and one from the five images task.

He explained to us the printing process, and how we were going to achieve the result we wanted. He also went through colour calibration manually and with a hardware calibrator in order to allow us to see our images as closely to what was going to be printed as possible.

In order to prepare our images for print, we firstly had to look at our proof setup to ensure it was simulating the right color space and set our rendering intent:

Once we had chosen this, we could then add a sharpening filter if we chose to do so.

With the sharpening filters, you can choose high pass, which will sharpen according to a set radius on a moveable bar. The result is a light sharpen if you choose a small radius such as 1.5 shown here. However I found that I would like it to be sharpened more, and so I chose to use mexican hat sharpening which involves physically putting the values in, however it is mathematically correct in the way it sharpens the image.

Without Mexican Hat

With Mexican Hat

This is an extreme view, and it is much more subtle when looking at the image as a whole, however for me it greatly improved the overall look of the image.

Now we could start to setup our print settings to match the paper, colour profile, printer, rendering intent, and 

The most important thing here was to make sure that photoshop was managing the colours so that the colours would be accurate to what I see on the screen, and to make sure that the rendering intent, and paper are the same as what I am using to get an accurate result.

Once I had made my first print, I placed it on the keyboard with the image on the screen so that I could compare them and determine whether my print was successful.

Maya 3D Workshop- 2/3/15

As this was our last session of our Maya workshops, we were tasked with creating a new model and trying to use all the skills we have learnt over the last few weeks. We were asked to make a UFO.

Firstly, I started out with a cylinder and then manipulated it to come up with my basic UFO shape:

I then started mapping out my UV's to enable me to take a UV snapshot and create my texture. After I had done this, I took it into photoshop and painted two different UV textures, a colour and a specular colour:

Colour texture

Specular Colour

The difference with the specular colour is that it determines how much light will bounce off your model. In short, how shiny or matte it will be. To make a surface really shiny you paint it white, and any areas you want completely matte are black. Other shades of grey with have more subtle differences, creating slight shines.

Basic colour texture on my model with no specular.

The final thing we had to do was use baking to creating more detail on our models. To do this, we created a duplicate of the mesh and then added more polygons, which allowed us to create a model with much higher detail. The idea of this was to add subtle details that we can then bake onto the lower poly model, which would be better for game engines to deal with (if you were to make a model for a game). We used the transfer maps option to create our UV normals, which will then tell our lower poly model what detail is going where:

After I had added this and my specular colour, you can really see a difference in the quality of the finished model.