j_forrester

Hi John, Thank you for the link but unfortunately it is not in the right area. Shame you cannot export Google earth models any more. The models required are more for reflection than anything else so don't need to be super accurate in terms of height/massing, just there or there about's.

Hi guy's, We have started working on a project based in Miami recently and we are struggling to find 3D context models of the north of Miami. Generally in London we use a company called zmapping, but cant seem to find an equivalent for the Miami area. Just wondered if anyone had any ideas where we maybe able to purchase model information? We did look at 3DCadBrowser.com but they do not go as far north as we require. Many thanks, Jaimie

Nodar, Try this. Model one object you know the exact size first and then tweak it from there. Takes a bit of time to get it very close, but does get you most of the way there. Max 2014+ needed.

Go into the slate editor. In the main tabs select the "Material" tab and then click "Get all scene materials".In the main panel bottom left corner you should see a pair of binoculars, click this. Now type in your map name word exactly as is is written including spaces. Now click the green box next to the where you have typed in your map name. This should now locate the map.

Correct me if i'm wrong, but "Beauty Pass" is simply a term of the final rendered out image that you see in the rendered frame. This is the render you get "out the box" with no post-production carried out. What Chris is basically saying is render out your image with the lighting, textures etc as you want i.e your "beauty pass" and then do a seperate render for the fog pass using an override material and comp this together in Photoshop setting the fog pass to a screen blending mode (with this blending mode anything black will be hidden and anything white will stay visible).

Do as Chris said above. The main reason for keeping effects like this seperate in Photoshop is if the client says can we knock back the "fog effect" you can simply dial down the opacity or get rid of it completely. If it is "rendered in" as a flatten layer you would have to re-render the whole scene again each time. This is also the principle for all render elements, allowing you to tweak them as and when desired.

If I were you I would do pretty much as Peter has described. The black is too black and would be great as he said to add a bit of a reflective quality. The wood also looks quite orange, maybe a bit less saturation? The glass could probably do with being a bit more solid and reflective too. Search the net for a nice glass material should you need. Also the general contrast of the image, the back of the building which is in shadow seems to be the same lightness as the side elevation which is in the sun, try to differenciate the two faces. Saying all this I would probably start by removing all 2D entourage (people, trees) and concentrate on the building itself and then introduce these only twhen you are happy with the building. Whilst on the trees it is always good to try and match the same lighting conditions as close as possible, in your case being lit from the left handside to help them fit in (obviously you can always flip them). You can tweak the hue and contrast + lightness/darkness too to fit. A bit more internal activity would also be good. Maybe some wall pictures, TV, free standing lamps, curtains/blinds as a few ideas (a bit more lived in). Also just check the contrast of your people inside as these would not be as contrasty as people outside in the full sun, normally desaturate and slight tweak to lightness/darkness depending on your glass.

In your Vray "Global switches" try setting your Secondary rays bias to 0.001 Also try turning off "recieve shadows" in the trees object properties.

Will Vray Multimatte elements ever be able to output clean antialised RGB mattes? It is such a great tool and saves having to create mutliple model files with self illuminated RGB colours. What is a bit more hard to understand, is that there is a 'enable filtering' check box avaliable? The only way we have managed to get the mattes a bit cleaner is to put the image sampler to 'Fixed' with 5 sub divisions, but this is harder a great option and means having to use two different image sampler types (one for the 'the beauty pass' and one for masks). Because of this you are always going to get slight fringing. Again I could render these double the size and then scale them down in photoshop giving a cleaner edge but this is not an option as most render are between 5-8k wide. Is there any future thoughts with this issue? I know having speaking to many other 3d artists that hey feel exactly the same. Having clean mattes is a must in what we do and being able to speed up this part of our work flow is just as important. Would love to know if this could be adapted to render antialised mattes. Even a black and white clean matte would be useful.

Someone show me a while back this technique, but my self and the other person cant remeber how they did it?! The way it roughly work was you selected a material. This material would say have a diffuse, spec, bump (basically a worked up material), they then somehow clicked a function and then slected another material which copied that materials attributes to the first one selected. This function kept the name of the first first material but somehow copied all the attributes in one function. i.e the diffuse, spec, bump etc Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks for the comments guys, I'm now finding manipulating a tree a bit easier after your help. Many thanks

Hi guys, Does anyone know of any good Square 3D tree models (big box trees). We have tried to manipluate 3d box hedges etc, but never seem to look that good. Any help would be much appreciated.

I would really like to and push for a Sketchup importer for C4D. It seems 3D Max has an integrated .skp importer as well as modo. Maxon needs to take note and follow suit. I have personally e-mail them myself in there suggestions section and see the only it's going to happen is if people also fill out the suggestion form (takes less than 2 mins if that) and let them know that there consumers want this Sketchup Importer for C4D. Cant upload link due to needing to have posted 10+ posts but go to maxon.net/support/suggestions. Tried Collada which half works but you lose all the dynamic material names in translation to C4D which is extremely annoying having to go through and rename 30+ textures everytime.

Does anyone know of any good 2d Arab people collections? Many thanks in advance.

Hi Guys, At work we have been trying to get the most control out of our rendered images by rendering out at 32bit using the Vray multipass option. We have had some quite good results but are still struggling to find a good photoshop stacking order, taking into account different blending modes, layer order etc. There may not be an exact order, but any good starting points would be of great help. Also when you render out multipasses from Vray for C4d 2 of the channels get named correctly and the rest are named post_01,02 etc. Is there a way rendering out the correct channel names. Many thanks in advance.