PUP Cabin Challenge: Red Riding’s Home

PUP Cabin: Red Riding's Home is my take on the PUP Cabin challenge. I shaded and lit this set throughout the month of June 2019, practicing using Substance Painter for textures and developing a better understanding of RenderMan shaders. In this project, I also took the opportunity to learn more about lighting in Renderman, using PxrVolume to add dust to the room. I decided the theme of this piece based on my love for fairytales and the color red. I wanted to create a setting that feels warm and cozy - the kind of cabin that one would raise their fairytale children in.

Programs used: Maya (2018), Substance Painter, Photoshop, Renderman 22, Nuke.

Shading Grandma’s Armchair

The armchair was my favorite prop to shade in the scene, as I had decided early on I wanted to try attaining a velvet cloth look. Using Photoshop, I created my own geometric, tiling pattern for the fabric, using wolf and foliage geometric images I had already constructed to texture other props. In Substance Painter, I further adjusted the look of the fabric’s roughness and metallic properties. In Renderman, I connected my textures from SP and used the fuzz parameter with 0.7 gain and 12.5 cone angle to get a fuzzy, velvety sheen on the edges of the chair.

For the props on the armchair, I created more custom textures to add the Red Riding Hood story characters into the scene. For example, I created the following wolf decorations used on the stickers on certain spools. Since this is Papa Wolf, I used a grey, desaturated palette to evoke a more masculine feel, as well as contrast with Red Riding’s incredibly iconic red color.

My approach to designing the quilt draped over the armchair was to ask myself: how did this quilt come to be in a cabin in the woods? Since I wanted to make a domestic setting, I decided Red Riding would have made this quilt for her cub, using a variety of re-purposed cloths. This was another place to practice shading fabrics, so I tried out making silks (making my own, simple anisotropy shading tangent maps) and using displacement maps for bumpy/knitted yarn textures. For the quilt squares with Cub’s face, I used brighter, more saturated colors to for a younger, more innocent feeling. Fun fact: the flowers in Cub’s quilt squares are called Red Riding Hood Beardtongue!

Shading the Hearth Props

To give the scene some more personality, I custom-designed some logos and patterns for the props on the hearth. To create the Three Little Porks’ branded pork fat and Mother’s Goose Stew, I referred to actual canned-good logo designs to inspire the shapes I used. The “Many Happy Blessings” design is a custom engraving on one of the two pans I shaded - a housewarming gift from a family friend. The two pans are shaded at different levels of use; after all, a nicely engraved gift is too precious to regularly use.

Finally, I doodled some images for the picture frame and papers on the wall next to the hearth.

Lighting Progression