Cottage (maya/mentalray)

[jonosf]

Hey all- my first posted wip for c&c.

 

This is an old wrightian design I created about '91 and have now rebuilt it and everything in Maya and am learning to render using mental ray - a slow process at best! Please let me know what's good/bad. I'm still working on exterior grass (havent found an acceptable way to do it yet), brick is just procedural and is being reworked, door wood needs texturing. Using white IBL and one distant spot for shadows. Background is simple cyc not casting shadows. And not sure how to deal with colorspace issues working between my PC and Mac...

 

Thanks in advance for any tips and comments.

-jono

[IHAB]

I feel thefirst one looks plastic materials,I don't know how to fix ,Im not an expert in maya also,I'm still a beginner but I love this software though not producing any output from, just trying its modeling techniques fro time to time,I feel it is very pwerful.

[lemog]

The first feeling for me is the interior appear very flat...

 

If you are beginner with Maya, maybe it's better to start with the Maya Software Renderer... to really well understand basis of lighting with Maya...

 

Gradually while adding each lights, step by step while setting up shadows, color of shadows, color of lights, origin of lights...

 

By example, you can used a directional light, for the sun with raytrace shadows... that give you straight sun rays, with hard shadows...

...and place many spotlights at the real position in the room... why not in depthmap shadows, to obtain something sweeter... and why not a pointlight for the little lamp at left... and if needed, a very low pointlight near the camera to enlighted a little the dark parts in the shadows.

 

Don't forget that you can give colors to your lights, very useful to obtain rich atmosphere...

 

And take care with material with too much reflections...

 

For the grass... you can used without problem a tile texture of grass... even small... at this distance, that will be perfect...

 

You can find much tiled textures on my website if you want... (and it's free)

 

http://lemog.free.fr

 

(many grass textures in the "nature" section http://lemog.free.fr/lemog_v5/thumbnails.php?album=42 ) :

[manta]

Well I love the design, and the second pic, I think you have some material issuses in the first pic, as if you didn't know that, have yo tried using MR displacement for the grass...

 

Are you using GI in the first pic...with all that glass, I would think it would be very bright in that room...

 

And I think adding some bump and blurry reflections to some things would give it alittle more reality...

 

I think that maya's materials are a bit more difficult than Max's, have you tried using any of the MR shaders over at highend3d...