Trying to improve with lighting and texture

[briantone]

Hi all,

At the suggestion of a professor, I'm trying to improve my lighting and texturing abilities rather than concentrate on complex modeling.

I would love any specific comments-- I'm using 3ds Max with Mental Ray. Before I move on to more advanced plugins, help with that interface would be great.

Anything that increases realism would be very helpful!

Thanks!

 

 

by the way, a few details:

Final Gather = 1000

Lights are actually set below the fixture, omnis at low intensity. The apparent lighting of the fixtures is from self illumination + slight noise.

[Tim Saunders]

Good start. A simple scene will deffinately enable you to get the handle on lighting and textures a bit quicker. The lighting isn't too bad as far as the softness. It is really dark however. Maybe increasing your overall GI would improve the image? The cieling tiles look black. Every once in a while I have to add just a hare of self illumination to a white ceiling. Also the reflection on the wood doors could be a little blurry to add mroe realism.

[chodney]

Looks pretty good. My main comment would be to increase general brightness of the scene.

I do this with two steps

1) Add a Photon Base Shader to each material.....especially your white walls and floor. Make the diffuse color close to white.

2) Increase intensity of each light

 

Then go back and mess with the Photon Base Shader if you're getting burned out spots.

[briantone]

Hi guys,

Thanks very much for the advice. Here's an update.

 

 

 

Re: Light

1) I used GI / Photons for the first time (I believe on this one I used 10000 Photons, which may be a bit overboard, but I'm not sure).

2) I changed from omnis to spotlights, adjusted the aspect ratio to mirror the light shape, and made it a warmer color.

 

About those nasty tiles:

I fixed up the acoustical tiling a bit, but I'm going to try and create a new one with Photoshop since the actual texture itself is dark.

 

I think this is an improvement.

However, I didn't know how to assign a photon base shader to a material. Can anyone elaborate on this? Remember I'm in Max8.

 

Thanks!

-Brian