Joe Rule

Wow, it has been a crazy few weeks. As the title indicates, this assignment was to create a still life scene. Professor Larson allowed us to make multiple revisions on the project before handing in a final. The initial work was critiqued in a one-on-one session with him. We were then expected to make appropriate revisions to the project before being critiqued by the class. The format on the class critique was different than the usual open discussion. An internet forum was set up and each person sat at their station and wrote thoughts and comments about other students work. It was helpful in that everyone got to say something and could anonymously speak their mind if they were usually too timid to speak up in class. I got a lot of good critique on my project; mostly saying how yummy the pies looked and how fake the blood looked. After the class critique we could make a final revision before being graded on the project. I chose not to do the final revision because it was due right after I got home from my class trip to Chicago and we had already started on the next project (coming soon to a blog post near you).

In case you're not familiar with the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, read here. I've been on a bit of a Sweeney Todd kick lately because we were studying the history of the musical theater in my theater class. It also seemed appropriate to do something a little dark with Halloween coming up. Anyway, on to the technical side of things.

This project was fairly challenging because the textures had to be created from scratch along with all the modeling, lighting and rendering. We had an entire project earlier in the semester on just texturing. The pie crust texture was obtained from a wonderful Jean Kays pastie and the wood texture is a photo of a bridge near Marquette. I got the fingerprints by coloring my hand with a blue highlighter and pressing it on a piece of paper. The photo was then imported to Photoshop for coloration and a contrast boost. All the rest of the textures were created with color and noise in Cinema 4D. The most frustrating part of this project was trying to get the texture to map properly on the pie with a bite out of it. Because it was modeled in Sculptris, the UV mapping didn't play nice with Cinema 4D. Whenever I tried to paint the bite mark, red would spread out over the entire pie instead of where I wanted it. What I ended up doing was exporting the model from Sculptris, reimporting it and reexporting it. (or something like that) As you can see, I didn't include the bite mark in the first “draft” of the project because I was having so many issues

The other tough part of the project was the blood texture. I tried setting up a displacement map on the blood so it would appear to seep into the wood, but I couldn't get it to line up correctly and it always looked too jagged or too soft or the deep places looked too dark...and on and on. My guess is that there is a better way to construct the blood puddle, such as a fluid sim, but that is beyond my skill and I didn't have time to learn. Larson told me it looked too reflective in my first draft, but I over-corrected in the second one and it turned out looking more like cloth than liquid. As always, there are higher resolution versions available. Just email me (joe at joerule.com).