Shell Casing

I have also been working on my shell case animation, that I am going to composite over my footage to replicate ejecting shells from my actors weapons as they are discharged.

I began by Researching some 9mm shell images from the net. I then modelied my own case with a total amount of 1660 polygons.
To render my case I created a simple lambert shader and created my own HDRI reflection globe. Using images I collected on set I stitched together a 360 degree image in Photoshop. I then applied this image to a environment globe in Maya to provide accurate environment reflections on my shiny surface texture. I used a 100fram animation with my mesh rotating 360 degrees every 12 frames, to give the impression the shell is spinning through the air.

I used Maya Mental Ray plugin to render out my short animation. I then compiled my Targa images into After Effects and analyzed the result. I intend to composite this render over my footage of my actors firing their weapons at each to give the impression of ejecting shell casings.

Heres some Screenshots of my progress.