Contest entry

[Eric]

I think your image look great. Perhaps this is just a personal thing, but I'd like to have seen lighting in the pools. I think it would have really helped to light up the foreground - I haven't followed this thread, perhaps that's already been discussed earlier.

 

 

I'm curious how you rendered your seperate passes. That's something I've never really seen discussed too often (though I've been away from the forums for a while). Was this done with a specific rendering plugin?

[Tim Saunders]

brian will have more input. check out this thread on where he first started using it.

http://www.cgarchitect.com/vb/showthread.php?t=11243

[Brian Cassil]

Thanks for the comments everyone.

 

The idea of adding people really wasn't something I had considered until Olivier had mentioned it in this thread. I had started putting in some "studs" and "babes" in and thought if this was supposed to be my "dream home" why not put me and my own family in. So that's us in there, and now that it's done I totally agree with what Olivier said about it adding some character. I think it even works well with the lizard watching over us. Big thanks Olivier, I wish you could have been at siggraph so I could have told you so in person.

 

The simple structures was indeed intentional so I could really focus time on textures, mood, and bringing everything into harmony. I learned pretty quickly from the CGA competition that those were things I needed to work on. I still need to work on them some but I think at least this demonstates an improvement.

 

I'd like to have seen lighting in the pools.

I agree that lighting in the pools is a cool effect and I actually did play around with it but in this case it just wasn't working. I think the problem was it created an uneasy tension between the lighting on the interior, and around the fire. Maybe it could have been done successfully but I gave up on it.

 

As far as the elements go check out the thread that Tim linked. I spent some time at the Autodesk booth yesterday asking more questions about work flows with elements and got some more good tips. If I thought anyone was interested enough I could right a quick tut because it's really quite simple, yet adds tremendous flexibility.

 

As promised, here's a link to the high res version. Again, please criticize anything except my kids.

http://home.comcast.net/~cassils/Brian_Cassil_-_Desert_Edge.jpg

[Tim Saunders]

As far as the elements go check out the thread that Tim linked. I spent some time at the Autodesk booth yesterday asking more questions about work flows with elements and got some more good tips. If I thought anyone was interested enough I could right a quick tut because it's really quite simple, yet adds tremendous flexibility.

QUOTE]

 

i am extremely interested! spending the time at the autodesk booth, does that mean the elements you discussed was not final render based?

 

the closest thing i have been able to get to the render elements you are doing without a rendering plug is psd manager. it's not too bad, but i'm shifting to vray free (eventually the full monte). psd manager is just for scanline (as far as i can tell).

[Brian Cassil]

I haven't used the PSD manager but I believe it uses the same idea only better and saves everything to a single PSD file instead of separate images. Elements will work with any type of rendering in max. Different plugins will add different element types.

 

I was actually surprised to see as many people gathering to see the demo on elements because I was sure I was the only one that wasn't already using them. I guess I'll go ahead and to that tut.

[ipdesigner]

*good job Brian!

*excellent!