RenderMan:
Popup Book
This page displays the results of modeling and rendering a scene, consisting of the page of a popup book, using Maya and Pixar's RenderMan for Maya.
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I mainly did modeling (except for books in the background), lighting, and texturing in Maya for this project and rendered it in Pixar's RenderMan for Maya.
The primary goal is to explore Pixar's RenderMan by creating a popup book and rendering it in RenderMan, and I choose to make a popup book of the greenhouse. Based on this topic, I considered creating a warm and cozy mood. It is tough to fill the whole greenhouse using only flowers, but it will also look weird if I keep it empty. So I added a lamp and a paper-like cherry blossom tree near the greenhouse, making the scene more vivid and alive.
I also picked an article about Monet's flower garden for the book page's texture.
I am pretty happy to see how the final result comes. It does creates the warm and cozy feeling that I want for my scene.
Final Render
Warm Tone




Cool Tone




PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE PROTOTYPE PAPER POPUP PAGE



INSPIRATION AND REFERENCE IMAGES




MODELING AND LOOK-DEV



Lighting

Final Thought
This is the first time I tried to render a scene using Pixar's RenderMan for Maya. It is an entirely new experience for me. Though I would need more time to get used to it, I am also excited to see how easy it is for RenderMan to create a photorealistic result. It was a really fun experience for the first assignment. Though I still have many problems with denoise and some light-related issues, I'm still looking forward to diving deeper into more RenderMan features.
P.S. I also wish RenderMan could support GPU rendering in the future. It will save a lot of time on rendering and working process.
——Rui, 2020
