Spider

The spider model is the main character in the short, so a lot of attention to detail is to be done with this one.

The spider has already gone through some changes though the model is considered complete.

116914_1244815602_submedium.jpg

Model 100%

  • Spider_dynamic c

Rig 50%

  • Spider_rig_dynamic

Texture %99 c

  • Spider_dyn_diff c
  • Spider_dyn_nor c
  • Spider_dyn_spec c
  • Spider_dyn_SSS - faked using depth maps

Hair %50 c

  • Spider_dyn_hairmap

Model

The images below provided by Daniel Wray, the modeler and rigger of the spider character.

Spider_screen_1.jpg
Spider_screen_3.jpg
Spider_screen_4.jpg

Texturing

This was an early texture seen below, it has been abandoned.

spider_mapped_052109_02.jpg

Since 5/23/09 the below texture is being used instead.

normalmap_spec_color.jpg

Update (06/03/09)

The spider texture can be considered complete, with only the hair map to be completed once I figure out a way to do this. The previous method of using a map to control hair length is obsolete, the tutorial detailing how to accomplish this was written prior to Blender 2.48a (possibly 2.46) and since then the UI has been changed slightly. Once this is figured out the map will be applied, the hair will be groomed to it's proper direction and then the spider model is completely ready for production.


Shader

Since the spider will consist mainly of texture maps, custom shaders will not be used. The only shader associated with the model will be Mosaic's surface shader: MOSAICsurface.sl

With the recent addition of hair the spider model is nearing full completion.

Hair

Introduction

Rendering hair and fur is a challenging process. On the one hand, the number of individual hairs required for realistic-looking fur can be several million; this suggests that hairs should be generated procedurally at render-time.

On the other hand, the user often needs artistic control over the hair to achieve the effect they're after.

Blender solves these challenges using a system of parent (guide) hairs and child (interpolated) hairs. The parent hairs are under the control of the user, while the child hairs are generated procedurally, based on interpolation between parents and a small number of adjustable parameters.

Unfortunately, the interpolation machinery used by blender is closely integrated with the blender internals which means that it can't effectively be used by external renderers. The procedural code here is designed to solve this problem for RenderMan compatible renderers.

The procedural has been designed with generality in mind, so it should work with any program which can output hairs and meshes in RIB format.

Compiling

The procedural is compiled as part of the aqsis distribution and needs >= aqsis-1.5 to make use of the aqsis RIB parser. However, given that the aqsis RIB parser is installed, it should be possible to use hairgen with any other RenderMan-based renderer which has support for standard
RiProcDynamicLoad procedural geometry.

Usage

Here's an overview of the process:

  • Create a set of parent hairs in a modelling program
  • Export emitting mesh for child hairs, and the parent hairs themselves in RIB format
  • Create a RIB file calling the procedural, as shown below
  • Write shaders making use of interpolated primitive variables on the child curves.
  • Render!

Calling the procedural

The procedural may be called by putting the following in a RIB file:

Procedural "DynamicLoad" [ "hairgen" "<params>" ] [ <bounding_box_for_child_hairs> ]

The parameter string "<params>" is a list of (name,value) pairs the form "name1=value1; name2=value2; …"

Whitespace (including newlines) is not significant within the list and

semicolons are required to separate each (name,value) pair. Values are
specified as simply as possible:

  • integers and floats are just how you'd normally write them.
  • booleans are specified with the words "true" and "false"
  • strings cannot contain whitespace (though this could be relaxed with some effort)
  • values which may be written as an array of basic types are written as a whitespace separated list (eg, for a 4x4 matrix, we'd have have the value
string "1 0 0 0  0 1 0 0  0 0 1 0  0 0 0 1")

Here's the available parameters, first the general ones:

  • num_hairs - total number of child hairs to generate (1000)
  • emitter_file_name - path to RIB file containing emitting PointsPolygons mesh ("")
  • hair_file_name - path to RIB file containing parent Curves ("")
  • emitter_to_hair_matrix - transformation applied to the emitting mesh to take it into the space of the parent hairs (identity)
  • verbose - boolean specifying whether to print extra debug info (false)
  • root_index - index of the control point representing the root of the hair. For spline types which don't go exactly through their control points, this may not be the first control point (root_index=0).

Now some parameters which modify the child hairs individually:

  • end_rough - boolean specifying whether to attach extra randomness for use in simulating the blender "end rough" randomness in a shader.
  • clump - Clump specifies clumping behaviour in which child hairs clump toward the dominant parent. This parameter is modelled after blender, and should lie in the interval [-1,1]: For clump > 0: The tips of child hairs clump toward the parents. At the tip, the weight of the parent hair is clump, and the weight of the non-clumped child hair is (1-clump) clump < 0: The root of the child hairs clump toward the parents in an analogous way to the tip for clump > 0.
  • clump_shape - clump_shape is used in conjunction with clump, to control the blending between parent hairs and child hairs and should lie in the interval [-1,1]. For surface parameter v not at the tip of the curves, the clump parameter is modified to be clump*pow(v, clumpPow) where clumpPow = 1+clump_shape for -1 <= clump_shape < 0 and clumpPow = 1+9*clump_shape for 0= < clump_shape <= 1

Shaders

Shaders related to hairs can be found in the shaders directory.

  • hair_gritz.sl is an example from a siggraph course showing how to do strand lighting based on the curve tangent.
  • endrough.sl is a displacement shader simulating blender "end rough"

Interpolated primvars

One important thing about the procedural is that it interpolates all primitive variables ("primvars") attached to the parent hairs *and* the emitting mesh. These are attached to the child hairs and give us a lot of flexibility - for instance, hair shaders can use texture coordinates from the emitting mesh.

In order to avoid naming clashes, primvars from the emitting mesh are renamed with an "_emit" suffix. Consider the following:

PointsPolygons [..] [..]
    "P" [..]
    "Cs" [..]

    "st" [..]

Curves "cubic" "nonperiodic" [..]
    "P" [..] 
    "width" [..]

(Here primvar types and interpolation classes have been omitted for brevity.)

For this input data, the procedural generates a set of curves with the
following primvars attached:

Curves "cubic" "nonperiodic" [..]
    "P_emit" [..]    # <-- interpolated from emitting mesh

    "Cs_emit" [..]   # <-- interpolated from emitting mesh
    "st_emit" [..]   # <-- interpolated from emitting mesh
    "P" [..]         # <-- interpolated from parent curves

    "width" [..]     # <-- interpolated from parent curves

Spider R+D Videos

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CU2lBv5MHE&feature=related
http://video.yahoo.com/watch/16436/1169621
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ac0o8tfisRM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dE2QPYKju04
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hm9WutW8dng&feature=related

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