Procedural Texturing in Maya and V-Ray

In this lesson, we will do some post work on the single cell organism and create our final image. I went ahead and open all the rendered elements into Photoshop and added them into one file, and also renamed each layer according to the render element. So now, before we start doing some post work to these, just go ahead and create a new layer and drag this to the bottom. Name this bg for background, and I'm going to fill this with black. I'll go ahead and put a lock on it, just so we don't move it by mistake. Now, I'm going to go ahead and make the self illumination layer visible. So this is the self illumination that we rendered. And now, under the blending options where it says Normal, just go ahead and select Linear Dodge. This is also called Add to in After Effects on other composition software. So this will add the self illumination effect on top of the beauty one and will make everything that has self illumination stronger. What I want to do with this is I want to add a small glow around the vines and those small dots that are on the nucleus. To do that, I'm going to go to Filter, Blur, Gaussian Blur, and just add something around 3.3, 3.5. If you check the preview, you can see with, without, and with. So this is the look that I'm going for. I'm going for this blurry glow around each dot and around the vines. If you think that the effect is too strong, you can go ahead and tone down the opacity to get the look that you're going for. All right. Now let's go ahead and make the reflect visible. Before I change the blending options for the reflect as well, I'm going to go into Filter, Blur, and add a Gaussian blur on this one. I'm going to add a blur to this one because I want the glossiness reflection to have a nice bloom around it. So I think something around four or five would be good. Again, I'll go into the blending option and change linear dodge. This will make a nice bloom, and also will make the glossiness far more stronger. So, to tweak that down, just go into opacity and just ton that down to the look that you're going for. Now, again, we'll do exactly the same thing for the specular. Go under Filter, Blur, Gaussian Blur, and I'm going to go ahead and maybe tweak this down a bit. Maybe something around three or two point. Maybe three is good. Again, change the blending to Linear Dodge and tweak this to the look that you're going for. What do you think looks good? Now here's what we had before, and here's with the few tweaks that we did. One thing I want to do before we start the new image is, I'm going to do some tweaks to the self illumination by adding an adjustment layer just to tweak the color of it, just to show you that you can do this do any of the layers that we added, any of the passes with the other elements. So select the self illumination. Under Adjustments, add the Hue and Saturation adjustment. If we go ahead and do the tweaks now, you're going to see this will affect the entire scene and the beauty, and I'm not looking for that. I just want the color effect to affect only the self illumination rendered element. So to do that, hold Alt, and this will change the mouse pointer. And just click on it. And you'll see this will clip the Hue and Saturation adjustment to only the self illumination. So now-- I'm just going to move this a bit so you can see-- if we go ahead and tweak this, to move it you'll see that it will change the color, but it will change the color only for the self illumination. So now if you'll hide this, you see this won't effect the other layers. So it's only affecting the self illumination. So, I think something around this makes it look more bloody, more organic. You can tweak down the saturation if you think it's too strong. I think something around this is good. All right, so now let's go ahead and create the new image that we will build the final image on. So go ahead and create a new file by File, New. For this, I'm going for full HD. So 1920 x 1080. And I'm going to go ahead and open the image that's called MilkyWay_bg. And you'll find this in the same HDRLabs zip that we download from HDRLabs.com, and we used the HDR one for the dome light HDR image. All right. Command+A or Control+A to select it all, Command+C or Control+C to copy, and in the new layer, just Command+V or Control+V to paste. Now let's go ahead and just move this just to get the look and the part that we think looks interesting. Just move it up a bit. And I think this looks good. It has a nice effect and a nice glow to the edge. I think I'll add this one here. All right, I'll go ahead and just close this one, because we won't need it. And I'm going to go ahead and save this as the cell final. All right. OK. Now, let's go back to the rendered elements. And before I drag this and drop it into the new file, what I want to do is, I want to select all the layers and right click and select Convert to Smart Objects. You might see it clipped on your side, but it says Convert to Smart Object. This will add everything in one smart object, and you'll see why we're going to use that in the next lesson. So now, let's name this the cell. And under Window, Arrange, have 2-up Vertical. And now just drag this into the new image. All right. Now go ahead and save this. And I'm going to go ahead and close it. We don't need it anymore. So now I'm going to go ahead and just duplicate this and arrange it across the scene, just to get the composite that we're looking, just to make the scene look more interesting. So, what I'm going to do is, I'm going to rescale this a bit. I'll have this like our centerpiece. And now I'm going to go ahead and duplicate this. I'm going to go and Command or Control+J to duplicate it. Now again, hold this, transform it, make it smaller by hitting Command+T or Control+T, and scale this over to this side. Again, select this one, Control+G or Command+J to duplicate it. I'm going to make this a lot more bigger, and make it as a foreground cell just to add some depth to the scene. And again, this is what I'm going to do. I'm just going to go ahead and duplicate the layer, and move them around the screen just to make them fit, to get the look that I'm going for. All right. Now in the next lesson, we will add some depth to the cell and cell image and add some final touches to the final shot.