The goal of this project was to gain a basic understanding of using Renderman in Maya by creating a simple pop-up book. I chose to create a castle resembling the one found at Disney's Magic Kingdom, and focused on emulating the lighting found at night during their fireworks shows. This was done for a class project, and I do not claim to own the rights to the music, or the Magic Kingdom Castle.
I started this process by first creating reference geometry using simple boxes so that I would know the relative scale of the obejcts before I began modeling. I then simply modeled from the bottom up, using both box modeling as well as modeling specific pieces (such as the towers) to be simply added to the scene. As I progressed with modeling I began to play with Renderman's shaders, going for a more flat and pappery appearance. For lighting, I used many Renderman area lights, and for the fireworks I found using a mesh light created the best effect. To continue to have control over the color of the center of the fireworks, I had to create a custom shader and add the emission from the mesh light to the middle sphere of the firework. My early renders were very noisy due to the darkness of my scene and the high number of lights being rendered. I tweaked the render settings, especially the pixel variance and using Renderman's denoise option, until I had renders I was please with.
Wireframe and original render (without music or fireworks effects):
Process images (modeling and lighting):
