3d animation/renders

[Jre]

Pretty damn nice stuff you guys got here, respect. Really inspired me to post my own as well.



Something I've been working on, so if you wondered why I've been lost. I just need to move on and learn new things, still using blender though..
This is kind of a high poly modeling lesson for myself, need to improve that area a lot. It's also a huge challenge for me on the other artsy sections as well, since this is going to have a fictitious car brand with logos and stuff of course, and the design you see there is my own. Maybe got some influences from the other brands but I think it's still pretty unique looking thing, at least when I'll finish the headlight stuff. The current ones are just a "sketch" and something that would look nice. Actually it's pretty hard to invent a wheel again so..
Still a bit confused with cycles but I think I'm getting used to it. Don't mind the colors, just playing with lighting.

[attacker5]

Looks great! Really cool to see custom designs, even though replicas are stunning to, especially when so close you cant tell the difference.

[wheels1758]

SMR, this is awesome! However, with as nice as it looks, the mistakes can be glaring! The carpet looks like it would be tough, but that doesn't mean you can just have the wheels of the piano sunk in the ground! It looks like you modeled the piano to be on a flat surface, which is fine, but since the carpet has a bit of thickness to it, the piano doesn't quite work out. It kinda looks like you sunk them in a bit for effect, but maybe too far? Even if it was for effect, it seems like it is something that could make someone go "what the hell?". Looks pretty darn cool though!

[attacker5]

BTW smr, not sure if you are using vray, but if you are, if you use skylight portals on the windows, the shadows will come out a lot better which might help the floating look a little better. But other than that really cool!

[SMR 510RR]

Thanks Wheels. Yea maybe the effect is too much, the carpet has 1/2" pile height, that may have been too much. Still not sure what the white specs are in the carpet but I didn't have time to mess with it unfortunately. Working for people who have no clue how long it takes to put something like this together is a tough challenge. I had sent them some draft renders on Wednesday evening and then got an email the next day at 11am saying they wanted finished images by 2 or they would just send the drafts...I did not want the drafts going to their client because they were 1/2 resolution and looked like poo so I tried my hardest to get it done as quick as possible, basically doubled the resolution and hit render. That was not noticeable on the 1/2 sized render just because the resolution was much less and stuff like that was not as clear.

Overall I am happy with how it came out for the time I had to work on it (1 week nights and weekends minus most of Saturday because I had a wedding to go to). I made everything except for the Piano and the vase with flowers in it from scratch based on images they sent me. I didn't even get CAD for the room so I had to scan the plans to an image and basically trace it in max. I have learned that the small details are the killers...The eyeball pot lights, the door handles, that kind of stuff. I also learned that Interior Designers like to pick many many pieces of furniture. There are 3 different floor/table lamps, 3 different side tables, 3 different sofa/chairs and an ottoman, etc. Lots of modeling to do haha.

Attacker, yea I am using Vray. I have tried skylight portals in the past and they seemed to jack the render time up quite a bit but I will have to investigate them again. Would you just put it on those 3 main openings or the other "GI" openings also? Outdoor lighting is done with a HDRI in a dome light exclusively and I thought I read somewhere that there was no need to use skylight portals if you are using a Dome and they are only necessary if you are using a Vray sun. I do see what you are saying though, it doens't look like the dome is casting much shadow inside. Definitely noticeable on the coffee table, it has the floaty look to it. Maybe the interior lighting is too strong and is overpowering the exterior lighting. The couches and chairs have good shadows but only where the overhead lighting would cast them.

I just noticed the noise on the window frames, I think I put that in via PS in post...That was dumb. Ooops haha.

[attacker5]

Ye you see it really depends on the scene, but I have spent quite some time on interior lighting tutorials and such and what seems to always come up is that they say never use only an HDRi, because the control is somewhat limiting. If you can, use an HDRi with and use a vRay sun also, I also found that this usually works really well and gives great, super controllable results. Also, the HDRi is why the render times take so long, if you want, you can use the high res HDRi as the environment and then use a much much much lower res HDRi for the actual lighting, something like 256 or so, and you will be surprised how similar the lighting is, if not practically identical although the render time is literally a quarter of what it was.

One thing to know tho, is the hdri usually has the shadow samples set to 8, which is abysmal, but also, it renders faster at 16 in most cases, because of the "jump" method the engine uses. The Vray sky is also set to 3 subdivs for the shadow sampling by default for some reason, which makes them practically invisible.

One more thing, reduce the inverse gamma on the HDRi in the material editor to boost the contrast and your shadows will be much stronger, just careful though, cause in turn this boosts the saturation, well not really in the image, but the render result becomes more saturated since the image is essentially splitting its colors into regions, so depending on the region that's lighting the area, it will saturate with only that color and not have the other colors to desaturate it.

Good luck, any more questions, il gladly help!

[SMR 510RR]

I boosted the contrast of the HDRI in PS (Basically just adjusted the exposure of the sun to be stupid high). I have balanced my scene per Grant Warwick's method of low AA sampling and taking care of the noise by upping subdivisions where it needs it. Dome light subdivisions for example are 350, other scene lights are 256, material reflection ranges from 64-256 depending on reflection glossiness with more diffused reflections getting more samples (this is done via a script by Joconnell on the chaosgroup forums). Then my AA is set to 1-16 and in 90% of the scene is only doing 1 "Pass" if you will with 16 only at edges of objects and such. For those 2k renders all 3 took 4 hours, I think that is quite manageable. Render time is such a hard thing to compare because everyone computers are different.

I may have to mess with it a bit tomorrow and see if I can't get it looking a little better. I have used the HDRI+ vray sun before and I agree it allows more control but it also takes much longer to render (maybe that is where downsizing the HDRI would help) because both lights would have 300+ subdivs. I think my big mistake was lighting the scene as an empty room so I think running back through and balancing it with objects to cast shadows would probably be a good idea. The overhead lighting is way too bright for a sunny day image, even where it washes the walls is far too much. I also duplicated the layer in PS and set it to screen and blurred it by 5px to try to get some bloom out of the lights and windows but I think there has to be a better way because it removes the contrast I tried to put in via curves adjustment. I like how the lens effects from vray look but I don't want to be stuck with whatever I select when I save it out so maybe I should look into a way to use the bloom mask later in PS to add the bloom effect in post so I have more control.

I will post up some render elements too so you can see how well that low AA method of balancing works. Grant's course is really good although since he isn't an Arch Viz guy and that is what I want to do sometimes it doesn't directly apply. He worked in print and they were rendering out at like 20k or something so while his uber realistic materials are cool they dont look good when a chair leg is only 10px wide and they take forever to render. There is a new GGX brdf in the Vray 3.0 nightlies that should hopefully do the same thing as his falloff curve for fresnel does without the horrid render times.

Anyways thanks for the tips, stay tuned for an update.

[Duckstream]

Pretty damn nice stuff you guys got here, respect. Really inspired me to post my own as well.


*Maybe got some influences from the other brands but I think it's still pretty unique looking thing*

Def. Unique, even tho i see some Toyota and other brands slightly in there (just somehow the front could fit into a Honda, back into an Toyota GT86 (or the subaru model) and the lover front looks all american muscle..ish.. )
but looks nice! Are you planing to make anything under the hood or just the outside (and inside?)

And @shadow, i swear i made similar wheels as my 3rd year of school project (did the design on solid, moved it to cam programs and into machines.. cool stuff back then )

ahh i wish i had solidworks to work on. only thing i do now days is work under an actual car/bike all oiled up and pissed at people who own fords, renaults or fiat's.... (no offence to anyone but those cars are what i see everyday there.)

[Jre]

Thank you! I think I'm not going to touch anything under the hood since it's hell of a project to model everything there. Interior will be the most interesting part for me personally, gives a lot of possibilities to play with. Well yeah the nose area definitely looks a bit honda accordish but it really depends on the angle and the way you see it. It's a shame I'm not the biggest car expert so I don't actually know how all the new cars looks like and I hope I didn't accidentally copy something already made.

[supercross711]

P2sta sent me this earlier, its to good not to post. adding birds was my idea so Its basically 75% mine.
https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5274/145 ... 0234_o.jpg

[SMR 510RR]

Yea that is awesome...

P2sta you add the glare in post? Trying to figure out a good workflow that makes sense. Freaking Barrington made me work on Redbud so I haven't had a chance to work on that rendering any more.

[dbaum25moto]

is it just me or is the wheel not round?

[tyskorn]

It's either from the camera or shrinking when resizing.

[supercross711]

is it just me or is the wheel not round?

fish eye

[p2sta]

Yea that is awesome...

P2sta you add the glare in post? Trying to figure out a good workflow that makes sense. Freaking Barrington made me work on Redbud so I haven't had a chance to work on that rendering any more.

yeah the glares are added in Photoshop

is it just me or is the wheel not round?

its the camera, the fov is pretty high and there is also camera distortion to make it look more they way i wanted