JuhaValimaki.com

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Sometimes ideas just pop into my head… this image was definitely one of those. Once I had the idea, I really felt I needed to create the image. This is a short “making of” for the image.

The concept

Here the idea is to drop a globe into aquarium to symbolize the final and ultimate end to global warming. I also considered sinking the actual planet in the image, but that wouldn’t have been realistic… The borders on the map also have a meaning: some world leaders still seem to think that “we” don’t have to do anything because “you” don’t do anything, so borders are part of the problem.

The Image

I use Maya and mental ray for my 3D images. This scene was very simply to model: a sphere, background plates (flat planes), couple of reflection cards (flat planes), water and bubbles.

(click the image to get a larger view)

Water

Water was originally a nurbs surface that I sculpted to look like the globe had just been dropped. I then converted the surface to polygons and added some detail in the depressed area. Finally I added front and back planes, so I could have the camera outside the “aquarium”. Having camera outside the water was important for getting the materials working correctly (see below).

Bubbles

Bubbles were a little tricky to get the way I wanted. I first tried particles and particle replacement (with random scaling and rotation for each bubble), but I didn’t like the results. I then started adding the bubbles manually. I first distorted a subdiv sphere, then placed it where I wanted. Next I duplicated, moved, rotated and scaled the bubble to get the next one. This was repeated couple of times. Then I grouped all the bubbles and duplicated the group. Now I could transform the whole group, which sped up the process. I again repeated the duplication couple of times. I could also select all the bubbles inside a group and rotate all of them. This changed the look of the group quickly (because bubbles were not symmetrical).

The globe

Well, what can I say.. it’s a nurbs sphere. There is even a button to make one in Maya :-p . Textures are from the CIA. (Yes, seriously, CIA has published and placed in public domain some great looking maps. These were downloaded from http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/world.html. I combined a geographical and political map to get the final map. The projection isn’t perfect cylindrical mapping, but I simply chose a view that didn’t show anything odd (like a huge white spot the size of Europe).

Lighting the scene

Materials for water and bubbles are almost identical: mental ray dielectric with all colors set to pure white. The only difference is in ior. In mr rays know in which material they are currently traveling. The ray ior is set initially to 1.0. When a ray from camera enters water it has ior of 1.0, so the material has to have ior set to 1.33 (or something like that). Likewise, when the ray enters a bubble it has the ior of water (1.33), so the bubble material has to have ior of 1.0 (ior of air). When a ray exits a material mr uses out_ior to set the current ior.

I use quite a lot reflection cards with highly reflective and refractive objects. The idea is to replace lights with self illuminating objects. Reflection cards work with standard ray tracing and final gathering, but to get direct or indirect illumination you would need real lights. I also use many ref card materials all having different incandescence. This makes it easy to tweak brightness of each reflection. In this scene the background has colored blend, but otherwise it’s just a standard ref card.

The globe is lit by three directional lights, two super whites (brightness about 1.2 -1.6) from top & behind and one dark blue from below (no shadows for any lights).

The first step in lighting the scene was naturally deciding what kind of look I wanted. I experimented with various looks before finding the “right” one. Finally I chose a bright studio look with perfectly white highlights and high saturation. I used relatively low resolution (something like 500 x 750), mr Min Sample Level set to -2 and Max Sample Level set to -1 or 0 to get pretty fast full scene preview renders. Reflection and refraction limits were set to 8, as was Max Trace Depth.

The bubbles needed a lot of white to look good, so I placed large ref cards behind the blended background and on both sides.

BTW: if you want to learn how to light photographic studio scenes like this, there is a wonderful book called “Light: Science and Magic” (link to amazon below). The book is about real world photography, but it’s very useful for 3D stuff also.

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