Lollipop: Subtle Realism

This week, after unwrapping for several days straight (it's a lot of UDIMs so far, here hopes Arnold can handle the final textures) I wanted to make a little two day project to break up the monotony and also add to my portfolio. I've seen a few projects around showing people putting small items in a scene filled with the same object so I thought I'd give that sort of idea a go - with Lollipops!

So, on Wednesday, I went out and bought 2 massive family packs of sweets (much to the delight of my friends) and filmed them on a white(ish) table.

Here is a frame from the source footage after lens corrections in NukeX.

I decided to model the lollipop you can see at the very bottom of the frame above. I used a Maya to model the Lollipop stick and head before moving onto Marvelous designer to create the wrapper. Getting the wrapper to be tight was quite tricky and to be honest, I'm still not sure it's right but I'm thinking I may be able to fake it with some normal mapping and textures. I then brought both of them into ZBrush for some extra details. Once this was done I unwrapped it using UV Master and began texturing in Mari.

Here is the lollipop with basic textures on the Lollipop body made in Mari.

As I wanted the plastic to have some 'dirt' and wearing I thought it would be easier to texture the wrapper in Quixel. This proved to be the right decision as I could use Photoshop to place the textures and text easily.

Here is the wrapper after Quixel.

The next task was tracking. I used 3D Equalizer to do this. The tracks were initially having trouble recognising points to cling onto but, after my lecturer Steve introduced me to the colour management options within 3DE, it became a lot easier.

Desperate measures can get a bit trippy!

From there it was onto rendering and compositing!

Here is a test composite I made in Nuke!

This is how far I am so far. A bit more work to go but I'm happy so far!