My visualisation project is about still life. My theme for this project is menswear but I added a narrative to this to ensure that my theme was understood. The narrative is a business man coming home from work where he places his items after removing them and is enjoying a glass of wine. I have selected 6 objects to model which are: cufflinks, a tie, a watch, a pair of glasses and a glass of wine and a pen. With this, I have chosen four sceneries where this narrative could work with an extension in some cases. The first scenery I have chosen is the table in the living room where the man would place his things. The next is the bathroom where he could be getting getting ready to relax after a hard day of work and the next is on the sofa being careless and homely where the glass of wine could fall. The last I have chosen is the bedroom side table where he places his objects just before heading to sleep.
Next I thought about the composition of these items. I chose to use the composition of Gerrit Willemsz Heda from his painting of Still Life with a Nautilus Cup from [1645]. This was ideal because of the wine glass that I had chosen to model. I kept the same sort of positioning of items and the angles which means that it corresponds with the style of Heda. The tie I draped over like the cloth, the angles of the rest of the objects, the positioning of the wine glass and the glasses and watch being slightly off the table.
I found modelling the objects easy as I could measure them and look at them physically. The texturing to some aspect was easy if the materials didn't need to hold reflections of the environment. With these I could use my own textures that I had taken instead of the pre-made default ones. For the cufflinks and tie, I had used the same texture for the material but I photographed them from the box that they came in as the cufflinks were too small. The watch had taken the longest to model and texture as this has more intricate detail and I had used the UVW Unwrap tool to create the leather straps to make them look right.
I found the sofa hard to model and texture for one of the environments as I had to use the UVW Unwrap tool again to texture it. This object has more shapes to it which and when I tried to apply any of the smoothing filters on this, the texturing would shift and not look correct therefore I applied a black background instead of a white one so that it blended in more.
I found lighting the scenery simple to do by changing the colours to the mood and colours that would be there such as a slight blue-ish colour for the bathroom scenery. I had these environments infront of me to look at which helped a great deal. The living room table had a window, sunshine lighting feel to it becoming evening whereas the sofa living room environment had an evening spotlight feel. The bathroom had a blue-ish top spotlight feel and the bedroom had a three directional bulb lighting.
I would improve the modelling of a few of the objects as well as in the environment and use my own metal textures if I did the project again. I would perhaps work more on some of the shadows from the lighting too as some of them showed to have some jagged edges. I feel that this project has helped me immensly as I can now model and texture quite accurately which is used as a basis for nearly all virtual environment careers whether it is realistic or unrealistic.
Here is my flikr account with some textures as well as some of the ones I have used. I couldn't load them all as I used my monthly allowance. I have organised my photographs into sets.
