Art Studio

Tonight I started working in earnest on the second lighting challenge from CGSociety - the Art Studio. Here's my starting and end point for the evening :

I'm trying to figure out exactly how I want the light to fall. This is a pretty good approximation but I want to bring more of the details out of the foreground elements without losing the silhouettes they provide. I think I'll try to focus more on rim lighting tomorrow. There are some compositional problems such as the easel in the left rear and perhaps even the hanging lights.

With all that in mind I am enjoying a number of different aspects of this setup. The lighting is beginning to feel like a warm pool in an otherwise dim room.

I have been learning to use Photoshop to texture directly on my 3D objects. There are a number of benefits to this approach, the best of which is real time visualization of how my textures look on the 3D model. I was a bit clunky with it at first but I think it's paying off. The stool seat in the foreground was painted in photoshop using a number of different images as samples - there are bump, reflection, diffuse and specular maps present.

At this point we're 15% complete.