ruskie77

as a quick fix, you could untick the "exposure" box in the vray camera settings... this should resort to a "standard" exposure without taking into account aperture iso and shutter speed... let me know how you get on

spend a few quid and invest in Vray RT.... worth it's weight in gold!

when your sun is quite low in the sky it will always gice you a very "warm" light. you could try and adjust your white balance in the physical camera to compensate (but it's very hit and miss unless you've got Vray RT) The way I do it is to render out all of my images and then batch process them in lightroom or adobe camera raw to correct the white balance and exposure to whatever I need. also render out 16bit images so you can rescue burned highlights/shadows. This is a quick and dirty workaround, but it does save a lot of tinkering with you camera. incidently, my usual settings when using vray sun/phys cam are; vray sun intesity: 0.01-0.015 Cam: F-Number 5.6 vignette: off (add later in post) shutter 1/20 ISO: 100 everything else at default, unless I'm going for a special effect. hope this helps, but I'd like to hear other peoples opinions too.

Just out of interest, where are you sourcing your parts from? I'd be interested to see what price your system outline comes in at, as we might me able to "steal" a bit from one area and add it to another...

well, If you're familar with the world of 3D, why not model and texture it in 3D and shoot it top-down.. orthographic... at least that way, you're keeping your learning curve to a minimum, and you'll have a ground texture ready for when you have to do the 3D aspect. also, doing faux 2d in a 3d environment will keep everything in the world that you know and you can price accordingly. just a suggestion..

if your job is just to "colour it in" I would really recommend you try and get your hands on their original DWG (although this looks a little like Vectorworks to me) That will save you hours, because everything will be nicely organised into its layers already. what's your brief and deadline? and if you dont mind me being nosey, what budget do they have? dont take it on, if the budget isnt reasonable. (I wont be offended if you want to keep the money-side private)

not really, you should be able to do either format out of illustrator... impression only works on 2d layer, i think (I may be wrong though) dxf is "Drawing eXchange Format" and is usually more friendly to other software, whereas DWG is native autocad. if impressions only takes DWG's then use those out of illustrator. If it's blocks for furniture that you want, then try autocad architecture... you're really having to go around the houses on this one!

And then you could dxf export out of illustrator which would allow you to use all the (extremely quick) features of Impressions. or you could use illustrator brushes for that water colour fill technique, and then res wont matter.

Have a look at autodesk impression... http://download.autodesk.com/us/impression/2009overview/index.html

love it! how did you do your ivy and grass? they look great. I agree on the contrast issue too. also the arches and rock appear to be cut a bit too surgically.. add a tiny bit of noise-bump to the rocky outcrop and roughen up the arch ends.. also... if I'm being hyper-critical... compared to the ivy leaves, your bricks are too small (in my opinion) they look like lego sized bricks, but if this the effect you're after, I think it's very good. oh yeah, one last thing... a very tiny bit of DOF and a very subtle bit of chromatic abboration (cyan fringing) would add the photo realism, but go easy on these!

that's a good idea, which I'll try.. I'll need to re-add the distortion after in PS, just so that the photo series are all the same. the only bummer is that once you start messing with it in PS, all of your exif data becomes irrelevant.. anyone know of an easy work flow for camera matching stills? perhaps a video tutorial anyone can recommend? cheers in advance. Russ

Hi all.. any help or thoughts would be appreciated. I'm trying to camera match a still image, and have my camera set up to (near enough) the right settings, except for the lens distortion. I'ts quite a "bulgy" fish eye image, although not over-the top. I cant get a preview of the distortion value in the viewport, (all it seems to do is "zoom" in and out" VRAT RT (sp2) is giving me a good preview, but without the background image... can anyone suggest how we might get around this? Russ

I agree with sunglare about the dmc settings, that'll smooth out your glossiness loads, but will increase your render times. you're goona get clumping in your shadows when you render in G1 and then change to G2.2 after. it's because you're stretching out the colours. trick here (if you really really need to do that) is to tick the "dont affect colours, adaptation only" in the colour mapping rollout, but you MUST put in G2.2 in the colour mapping gamma, do not leave at 1. the colours will be the same on output as on your G1 render but you'll have more detail in the shadows. also, ensure that you are playing with a 16/32 bit image, definately dont try that with an 8bit image. it's not worth the tears.

Hi everyone.. I like to render my stuff with z-depth maps and then apply a DOF effect in post, but on occasion, I have glass... sometimes crystal clear, sometimes a bit frosty. the z-depth output always displays the glass and (of course) the DOF on the underlying model is incorrect. anyone know of a quick and easy way of creating a usable z-dpeth/dof/bokeh effect when looking through glass? thanks in advance