Making of Raspberry Madness by Tuna Unalan
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Inspiration
My main inspiration behind “Raspberry Madness” is food photography. I also ran into renders of other types of food on different CG forums. My inspiration comes from other artists as well.Reference
I gathered reference images and built a library by collecting images from the internet. That way I was able to roughly visualize the final look of the scene in my head and think of ways to improve my workflow. I looked at certain food in my hand to better understand what kind of shader I was going to recreate, like raspberries and chocolate bars.
Modeling
I started creating base geometry to figure out a good composition in Maya. Once the composition was roughly the way I imagined. I started importing my base geometry into ZBrush to sculpt and add details. I put a raspberry image as my background to help get the shape right. I was able to group each piece of the raspberry and make them as unique as possible. In order to create believable models, I tried to stay away from repetition as much as possible.
Texturing
- I used Mari to texture majority of the scene. CGTextures was my source to find good and high quality textures. For the wooden tray, I used 3 different wood textures to create the look of weathered wood. I exported the color map from Mari as a TIFF file at 4k resolution. For the blueberries I started with a procedural Cloud texture in Mari and picked my colors from a reference blueberry image. I picked different tones of blue to create a variety. When I was happy with the dark and bright spots, I started adding dirt, spots and other imperfections. At the end, I was able to color correct everything to match my reference. I exported the color map from Mari as a TIFF file at 1k resolution. Raspberries were mostly shader work but I still used a diffuse layer from a 2d hair texture that I found on the internet. Raspberries are mostly subsurface with a thin layer of diffuse.
Lighting
Lighting was crucial for the look of the entire scene. I ended up using 2 area lights; 1 as my Key and the other as my Rim Light. I also used an HDR as a Fill. Rim Light had a tint of blue to add a more natural feel. I set my key light first, and then adjusted my shadows to find a good balance between what is lit and what needs to be in the shade. The raspberries needed to have a nice SSS falloff from the key light. I also looked at how food photographers use their lighting and tried to use a similar idea as guidance.
Look Development
For the Look Development process, I created a neutral light rig, which means all my lights were white and there were no color bouncing to alter the look of my textures or shaders. For the subsurface shaders I started the look development with a single light to adjust the scattering. For the raspberries, I was trying to figure out how deep the light must travel and how to get that gummy look. I was mostly looking at the SSS channel and ignoring diffuse, reflection and specular.For the rest of the shaders I put a few more lights in and started testing other shaders. No post work done on these images.
Render Elements Compositing
It takes 2 hours for rendering a still frame at 2K resolution. Roughly 1 hour per frame at 1K resolution for a camera animation. For this project Nuke played a big role in the final look of the scene. I was able to save a lot of time down the road. V-ray offers a great amount of flexibility in creating your passes so I took a lot of advantage of it. I assembled back the render elements back in Nuke in order to have control over every aspect of the image. Passes sped up my workflow tremendously. I was able to save a lot of time down the road. I was able to adjust how much of what I wanted easily without having to re-render the whole image. I did quite a bit of color correction that helped the raspberries to become the focal point in the scene.I have also written a more in depth explanation of the process on CG Student Awards. Here is a link to the full tutorial here
About Tuna Unalan
Was born in Turkey and now living in NYC. Tuna Unalan is a CG Generalist with a concentration in lighting, rendering and look development. He recently graduated from Savannah College of Art and Design with a BFA degree in Visual Effects and a minor in Technical Direction. For more of his work please check his latest reel and don't miss his website: http://www.tunaunalan.com/
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