It started here... at Birrificio Italiano, a craft beer place in Milan, Italy. A student at Full Sail University was trying to model this scene for one of his finals classes and was having trouble getting the light from his mesh cylinder to show through the clear covering of the cylindrical ceiling lights seen above.
So, I started looking into what was causing it. But, first, I had to get an accurate camera view for Maya in order to properly model the scene. So, I took this shot into Syntheyes to do a single frame camera solve that I could then import into Maya in order to begin modeling the scene.
Once I had the camera solve imported into Maya, I did a quick test... setting up a cylindrical mesh light (simulating the fluorescent tube of the ceiling light) and put a clear glass cylinder around that to simulate the cover. Lo and behold, the mesh light did not show through the glass cylinder. Why? Easy enough to solve. Under the Advanced tab of the mesh light, you have to check "Trace Light Paths" for the mesh light to show up in the Renderman render.
Problem solved. I sent a message to the student letting him know about the setting to address his problem.
Then I began to wonder just how difficult it would be to model this entire scene. So, I started laying out all the geometry I would need to define the scene (floor, walls, ceiling, etc.). But I started running into questions about just how deep the scene was (especially where the back dining area was located). So, I did some more research on exactly where this craft beer place was located. My solution?
After looking up the street address for the Milan version of Birrificio Italiano, I plugged it into Google Earth Pro, and, after slewing around a bit, I found this... a ground view of the front of the beer place. This view gave me the necessary clues to properly set the depth of the Maya scene. There are actually four big bay windows at the front of the store... and two doors (which explained the lighting I was seeing in the back dining room. The image seen at the top was actually shot from a much smaller dining area situated around the right most bay window under the rolled up Birrificio Italiano awning (blue, above the far right windows) looking, in this shot, from right to left.
Okay, so I'd solved the mesh light problem the student had encountered. I found a different solution to the problem, making use of the PXRCylinderLight instead of using a mesh first and making it emit light.
This entire scene had to be modeled by hand... every piece of furniture, every glass and bottle, every beer tap, every light... all of it. I even used nCloth to model the curtains and paint effects to create the vines in the scene.
And the tools I used for this project? Syntheyes for the camera solve. Maya to model the items in the scene. Substance Painter to texture the objects. I graduated from Full Sail University back in 2014... still hoping to get my foot in the door at Industrial Light and Magic. I just couldn't resist the challenge of replicating this scene in Maya. The end results aren't strictly an exact match of the original scene, but I'm happy with the results I was able to produce. I hope you like it, too!
