Ideas and Modeling + Lighting works!

ok so after I got attached to the splash Idea I started to think abut various things like how would it look? what colors would I use for the splash? and things of that nature.


So first I did a little research on the color palette for splashes, my first idea was to use the secondary color's (CMYK) but I didn't like the idea of using black as it would stand out too much to in comparison to the other three colors. So my next idea was to look at the primary colors (RGB), It seemed like a great Idea when I visualized, however when I put it down on paper it didn't coincide with the color of the background of the scene which will be white, although after a lot of thinking I thought black would be a great addition to the primary colors but it still seems slightly out of place, as I am going for vibrant and appealing colors. I have had the Idea of creating a custom color palette but I don't think it would be as effective as using a set of colors already around, I was also of thinking of using complimentary colors for e.g Blue and Orange. I will put more thought over it in the coming weeks as I approach doing the splashes.

So after doing some research on color palettes, I decided to get some renders on what I wanted for the scene to look like however before that I needed a 3D model of the ARTS logo. My first idea was to use nurbs and create it from referencing the image (using image planes) but I couldn't find a suitable way to achieve this. I also tried to use the CV cure tool but it wasn't working either, the model would be to rounded and there would be no straight edges.

So I resorted to using Polygon modeling it still had easy aspects on the other hand it was a time consuming process. Although it was a long process I could see the improvement I have made in my accuracy and efficiency when  modeling, and even as modeling I was learning how to forward plan such as where certain vertices would go etc. I also gave the letters a more rounded edge (see image below) I think this worked well it gave the letters a lot more depth, I attempted to give it a more rounded edge but I couldn't make it work I will give it another go!

 Once I had finished modeling the logo I created a 3 walled room to test out different lighting and rendering attributes to see what kind of look I wanted. The image below is a render of default lighting and render settings, which looks very bland and boring. The texture I used in the image below was a standard lambert shader witch a color change as I wanted everything to be white so the splash colors could be a lot more vibrant and outstanding.  I played with various lights and settings to get the look I wanted  after a lot of trial and error of using spot lights, ambient lights, area lights and more I got the look I wanted. (second image)

This a mental ray render using a mental ray shader with a matte finish, I think this a perfect look I added an ambient occlusion with some passes, I understand this will increase render times but it isn't something that I am concerned about at this point in time. I also adjusted the indirect lighting settings in the render settings I activated the ambient occlusion and the physical sun node. I most definitely got the effect I wanted however after looking at the render, I noticed the quality wasn't as good as I wanted it to be and certain parts of the shadows weren't very detailed and were distorted. These are things I will be working on as I progress throughout the project!1