The Great Cheese Squeeze (Big DL)

[theukulele]

Hey all, I’m new to this site, cool stuff all over! Thought I’d post some work I did with a buddy of mine from a children’s book we wrote and illustrated called The Great Cheese Squeeze.

http://www.aliaswavefront.com/en/products/maya/customerwork/stories/cheesesqueeze/img/large_cheesesqueeze04.jpg

http://www.aliaswavefront.com/en/products/maya/customerwork/stories/cheesesqueeze/img/large_cheesesqueeze05.jpg

http://www.bryanballinger.com/images/gruntlyiggy/images/page05.jpg

http://www.bryanballinger.com/images/gruntlyiggy/images/Gruntlytinker.jpg

http://www.aliaswavefront.com/en/products/maya/customerwork/stories/cheesesqueeze/img/large_cheesesqueeze09.jpg


You can see more about the book at http://www.cheesesqueeze.com.

Thanks.

Bb

[Landmate]

Cool, I've been a big fan of Mr. Lango for many years.

if your looking for crits, which i doubt hehe, but I will give anyway, I think you are over using depth of field, or gaussian blur, im not sure which, because it doesnt look accurate. also one thing occured to me if this is for a publications how come the geometry and texture details are so low, I would think when working with still images you would be able to push the render quality. granted, no kid would really notice or care ;)

just my thoughts,

-Ben

[theukulele]

Hi, thanks for the feedback. Point taken on the depth of field, it's a little strong in spots. We were actually going for giving it a little bit of the feel of old photographs which can have a very strong out of focus, but they're also illustrations so we weren't necessarily going for photo realistic accuracy. By the geometry and texture details, do you mean you are seeing lowres textures and low tesselation in the images? We used high res painted textures and I don't think there's visible tesselation in the images. Or are you speaking more towards a style preference?

[Landmate]

the style is great, it fits wonderfuly, what follows are purely techical/visual observations.

ok dont hate me, i know this crit wasnt asked for, but these are just some of my thoughts:

to be horribly frank, the lighting is poor, I think you may have 1 or 2 lights in your scenes that arent casting shadows, which makes things float.

in the first render your obvious light source, the candle, isnt even the primary light source, in fact, what i find odd, is that the area under the mouses chin is actually brighter in value then the very origin of the candle itself. I dont know where this spot light is coming from, but it overrides your chance of a nice warm "cheese studio" nook you might have been shooting for.

The texures, while you say painted, look like a large percentage are procedural and not painted specifically for the objects. For example, the contraption rack has crude tiling texture that is pretty obvious, you can see mirroring and stretching of texures on things like the window hinge and alot of wood elements. Using your standard maya fractal on the staff on the last render is just to blatant, take 10 minutes and paint a map for it man!

IMO

-Ben

[ChaosEidolon]

These are fantastic...
I love the style you achieved for the work.
...specially the cheese contraption

[theukulele]

Hmm, well Keith did the last illustration, so you can take the staff texture up with him. :D

As for the other illustrations, I really did paint all the textures, ah well.. I won't argue lighting with you either, although we did do more that slap two lights into the scenes.

[egerie]

I think someone posted about The Big Cheese a few months back.. Or was it on Sijun ? Nevertheless it's always nice to see all this work again :) :)
Those stink fumes are not too convincing tho.

[theognis]

wow thats great.

[theognis]

children's books are becomnig cooler now :-D :D