MEREDITH O'MALLEY

RENDERMAN POP-UP BOOK

This was my first pass at using Pixar’s RenderMan and I’m in love with the product. We were challenged to construct a popup book and this was my interpretation. Lets just say I had a ton of fun playing with the “presence” node.

FINAL RENDERS

PRESENCE | TIDAL WAVES





When it came down to the waves I wanted to be sure they still maintained the consistency of paper but while maintaining depth and interest. So I pulled inspiration from my Father’s geography materials. More specifically, his topography books, which give the illusion of depth on a flat piece of paper so why not play with it in CG?

This pop up book was designed in a way that heavily relied on RenderMan’s Presence attribute. This attribute allows the user to input a basic black and white image and RenderMan will output that image with white as the positive space and black as the negative space(like a cookie cutter). Although this may be mistaken as a very flat, 2D effect for a 3D program it allowed me to create shapes three dimensionally that would have been much more difficult without the use of the presence especially with highly organic forms.

PRESENCE | BASE WAVES


There was a dilemma with the dimensionality of the composition of my pop up book. It appeared to be flat and didn’t seem “3D” enough. Thus, I made the creative decision to incorporate layers of polygonal planes and using the presence node to add more depth, dimension, and some whimsicality

METALLICS + REPETITION



For this project while making the preliminary pop up book I came across a very unique, interesting but oh so complex texture. The texture was not easily photographed and reflections made it unusable for CG use. Thus, I resulted to experimenting with RenderMan’s metallic materials. Although this texture is still far from perfect it does spark and interest in making complex 2D patterns elaborate, user-friendly, and customizable CG texturing tools for complex materials in the future.

REFERNCE IMAGES

The following images are my primary sources of inspiration for this project. Topography and Japanese water art were key factors for look development and stylized approach for this project.