Been working on a little something today, I didn't do the modeling, I've just handled the materials, lighting and rendering.
And heres a close up:
Needs more saturation/color in it, the radiator looks kinda odd being too shiny and the Chrome metal is a bit grey in parts and has some not so great reflections.
This job highlighted Vray for C4D's current missing features though
No distributed bucket rendering
No support for material selection tags
No glow post effects, but.. they are naff anyway, that's what we have photoshop for
No support for exluding objects from shadows
No support for independent reflections per material, just needs a environment map projection type shader to put that effect in any channel you wish.
No blending of multiple materials
No support for proximal shader, so shader that based on distance from another object
No volumetric light support
Seemingly broken diffusion, that results in visible squares around buckets with high glossiness as seen below. I couldn't find a way to fix that.
... It's still better than Cinemas renderer though
:-D
And I know the next versions fixes a bunch of the above
I think I've found my answer at last, Houdini beta has arrived for Mac, and It's pretty cool. Perhaps finally I can render particles in the way I've been imagining for years now. Already I have enough particles in the Viewport to look like a solid surface, and it handles it very fast once the calculations are done. Finally the calculations on the particles take more time than the actual display of them, the way it should be.
This program sure could take a long time to learn though, it has such depth, could take years!
Thats 250,000 Particles, I seem to remember Cinema giving up at around 10,000
:-P
The above Movie (See Link) is something I've tried to do in various 3D programs and have never been able to do till today in Houdini!
Looks simple but, seemingly isn't for most programs... dynamic dynamics in effect.
Just paying in Photoshop again, I haven't really used for a year at least, not for anything creative anyway.
Not sure what it is yet, I do know It's not finished though.Though I suppose an artist never really finishes their work, they merely abandon it.
And yes It's extremely girly. Started out with the idea of just creating some ornate backdrop for something. This is one hour in:
It's born from these 3 stock images:
More Vray goodness:
Just found out about LWF (Linear Workflow) which is a method of setting things up for correct color/saturation. By default GI tends to bleed color all over the place and look over saturated.
For the first time I've been modeling things to scale, and setting up lights and the sun with real values. This should eliminate the guess work needed to render things properly.
Though ill admit I still have no skill at using the physical camera
:-)
The above looks pretty good till I tell you It's meant to be White paint on the walls.
Bit noisy.
Just working on a possible design for a paint company in europe.
Just a quick mockup in Photoshop
Playing in Vray:
Stanford Dragon Model. 10 Minutes to Render at not very high quality. Looks great
:-)
Rendertime: 15 Minutes on 5ghz G5 at 2x the above res.
The walls/window in background are a photograph/HDR which is lighting and reflecting in the 3D objects.
Make you don't overlook the importance of the DMC Sampler - Adaptive ammount. I've often had trouble making a render look smooth without noise, even when setting hemispheric sub divisions all the way to 1000 (its max value) if It's still noisy you need to change the DMC value here:
The DMC Sampler - Adaptive amount
It can be very sensitive to changes if you have high hemispheric sub-divisions so only change in small increments. It acts like a multiplier of all the other settings in a way, but It's a bit more complex than that it seems. I don't fully understand it, but It's significant.
Lowering that number increases the overall quality really. Very handy.
So when your increasing values all over the place but still can't seem to get smooth noise free renders, just lower that. Or alternatively if your render is smooth but takes forever, increase it
:-)
Small pieces taken from final render:
Also Vrays Fresnel effects seem broken to me, So I made my own using cinemas fresnel shader. Gives you more control over the gradient then simply entering in a IOR.
Just noticed a made a big mistake with the fresnel, win a gold star if you can spot what it is.
