Hi everybody!
This is my recent work for a TV documentary. We need a tracking shot towards a 16th century book wich is located in a museum. Due to the damaging effect intense lighting has on that old print we did not get permission to make real shots of it. The museum gave us scanned pages of the book instead. So I used one of the scans as texture on a modelled book. Now I can dolly around it as often as I want …
(still I am not satisfied with the upper edge of the pages - too much alias)
Looks good! You could try increasing the OSA and using a different filter (Mitch or CatRom). That should smooth out the edges and also make the textures sharper. You’ll also get more definition with the page edges.
You may already know this but, you can use the J-key in the Render window to toggle two different render buffers and compare the results of different settings. Just be sure to pres the J-key (from within the Render window) to set the desired buffer to render to before rendering otherwise you will overwrite a render that you might have wanted to use for comparison.
I'm curious to know how you got the "pages stack" edges to look right. Is that a displacement map?
No, these are real pages - all the way down. It doesn’t matter if you have these bigger gaps as long as your cam shoots from an upper angle.
Nor-maps and replacement maps did not nail what I had in mind. I wanted a seamless transition from the real pages to the “stack” of pages. So I just doubled the top page and scaled it down a little (z-axis only), doubled it again and z-scaled it down a little - and so forth. This way the top page’s deformation decreases step by step but you can still see the “wavy” shape of the upper parts of the page stack. I positioned the pages a bit randomly approximately following a bezier curve that, in turn, was drawn after a close look at the shape of our old family bible when the cover and the first page is flipped open.
Finally I placed a little plane with a stain of dirt right in front of the side of the stack that points towards the camera. Only the dirt can be seen, the rest of the plane is unvisible (via alpha map)
As for the sawtooth edges I tried different filters (the current one was gauss) but the results are pretty much the same (except cat rom wich is worse). Putting osa at 16 looks the same as with 8. Maybe the effect is due to the highly subdivided planes. But there is no reason to worry. Think I am going to anti-alias the edges in the postproduction process, anyway.
