Fruit | Mysite

Fruit and murky water! I wanted to experiment more with Renderman for Maya, so I decided to make this little still life piece. The project was also made with Nomad, Substance Painter, and Photoshop.

Full Render:

Wireframe Render:

First, I decided I wanted to sculpt the fruit using Nomad. I wanted to practice more with retopology, so I decided to make high-res models to bake normal and height maps later. I had a lot of trouble with the strawberry seed pattern, so I totally remade the normal map in Substance Painter.

I then brought these sculpts into Maya and created retopology:

I brought my models into Substance Painter and started working on my textures. I ended up only using diffuse color maps and normal maps for my renders. All other parts of the material were edited or created in Maya's material editor.

I placed my fruit within my scene with the intent of creating interesting variation and a good sense of depth.

To add more detail, I created "hair" planes for my raspberries using xGen. To created small bubbles, I used a MASH distributor with size variation. To make the bubble cling to the fruit, I merged my fruit models and made this combined model the "input mesh" for my MASH distribution. This assures that the bubbles will always appear on the fruits' surfaces. This mesh appears green in the second photo below because it has no material, as I will not be rendering it.

I created my Renderman materials next. the only texture maps I used for this project were diffuse color and normal maps, as I wanted more control in the renderer to make edits. To add a bit more variation within my fruits' coloring, I added a blend color and a noise node to my strawberry and raspberry materials.

Lastly, I added my lights! This was quite simple, as all I used was a Pixar dome light with some exposure and a soft Pixar Rect light placed at an angle.