WAcky Posted January 29, 2008 Share Posted January 29, 2008 Hi guys, I had a meeting with a client and he's going to give me the 'volume' work but he wanted to see some more relative work to decide if they are to give me the better jobs. This is a design of his that i chose to have a go at. I need some crits on really the lighting and rendering and so forth. The landscaping is off a plan and yes, it is pretty boring. The materials are still being decided upon, the least info i have on materials is the garage door and front steps. So yeah! Help me wow these guys so i can get the better work Its late at night so my PS work is quick. I cant for the life of me get an AO pass to work in max 2008. it just comes out all black so i need to spend some time on that. I dont have any people in the scene because i just hate the look of RPC's. And i dont have any that will suit the scene. I would have liked a wider angle but i just dont have the time to do unpaid work on surrounding buildings... All comments much appreciated! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Trevor Tizard Posted January 29, 2008 Share Posted January 29, 2008 Good start. If you don't have much time I'd: 1 Tone down the glass reflections 2 You have clouds in the reflections, so PS in a better sky 3 PS some trees in the background 4 Add a little noise to the tarmac drive in ps 5 Don't add any perple to this scene - doesn't need them. Hope this helps. Good luck and let us know how you get on. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ricardo Eloy Posted January 29, 2008 Share Posted January 29, 2008 6 Lower your camera a bit. It will give you a better sense of scale. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
joed200 Posted January 29, 2008 Share Posted January 29, 2008 The main thing for me is that I think the reflections of the windows look too mirror like. I would personally reduce the reflectance to allow the interior walls to become slightly visible. With regards to the drive, increasing noise would be a good idea but i might also cast a shadow of a small tree over the tarmac to break up the texture. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MasterZap Posted January 29, 2008 Share Posted January 29, 2008 Its late at night so my PS work is quick. I cant for the life of me get an AO pass to work in max 2008. Guess: you have an exposure control on that dims it into blackness? Turn that off when you do the AO "pass", or better, do the AO in the render with the help of the built in AO of the A&D material. /Z Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WAcky Posted January 29, 2008 Author Share Posted January 29, 2008 Hi guys, Thanks for the replies. All very valid and I will have a go at them when i get home. Cheers! Zap: I have turned my exposure control to inactive, tried with my lights both turned on and off. Used material override with the AO material in the surface slot of a mental ray material. I believe I've followed the mental about max vid exactly but i just reckon theres something going on with max 2008 that im unaware of.... Do you have max 2008. Mind if i send you a small scene where i've tried to set it up properly? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Peter M. Gruhn Posted January 29, 2008 Share Posted January 29, 2008 > help secure... I'll bring the duct tape! ;-) Sometimes I like to move the glass a little off perfectly parallel to each other so the reflections don't line up perfectly. The stone looks a little flat. It shows up most on the wall most oblique. Maybe CrazyBump could help you out w/ a normal map. Try moving the sun over to the (picture) left a little for shadows that cut more across the scene. Can you get rid of the repeat in the driveway at all? One thing I've tried with varying degrees of success is to make a copy of the texture, rotate it, oh say 37 degrees, maybe scale it a little different depending on the material, and mix the two with a noise map set at a scale that works OK. Tweak the noise (top and bottom...) or output to be more black and white, watch the softness of the transition area for what works best with your material. The plants at the end of the turn around show too much similarity. Try rotate (3d) or flip (2d) a couple of them to break the pattern. If they are 2d, watch out that you don't make the lighting on them look weird by doing that. Also a little variety in scale there can help. Yes, we all try to make our plantings look uniform, but the plants never QUITE cooperate. Plants on the upstairs deck are just a hair radioactive (but they're thin and catching bright sun and... and they look like they came from the back room at Spencer's Gifts.) The upstairs deck cables are showing aliasing.... rerender that area larger and scale it down and comp in PShop? rerender that area same size with wicked many samples? Might be able to get away with turning off reflections on the glass to save some time and render an object id mask to aide the comp. The crispness of the edges of the stone walls bugs me. There is no horizon, just sky. Patch of ground and a big hedge should suffice. On the right. Left side. Yellow. At the upper corner of the doorway, there's a vertical line in the yellow. Looks odd. Just above that, the horizontal gray siding looks to be cut off at an angle. Oh, I'm starting to get to picky small stuff, I must be done ;-) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WAcky Posted January 30, 2008 Author Share Posted January 30, 2008 Trevor, Rick and Joe Thanks guys. All great observations. I agree with you guys on the windows. I've been having alot of trouble getting light through the windows but i'll have another go. I dont have a sky that suits this scene perfectly so i might take out the sky thats being reflected and just have a horizon with a landscape or houses. The landscaping and that of the surrounding properties has been set so im not sure if i can just go adding trees. But i'll do it anyways and see what the architect says I had the camera lower at one point and moved it up for some reason. I'll move it back down. I totally agree with you that it does lose the scale of the house.... cheers guys! > help secure... I'll bring the duct tape! ;-) Sometimes I like to move the glass a little off perfectly parallel to each other so the reflections don't line up perfectly. The stone looks a little flat. It shows up most on the wall most oblique. Maybe CrazyBump could help you out w/ a normal map. Try moving the sun over to the (picture) left a little for shadows that cut more across the scene. Can you get rid of the repeat in the driveway at all? One thing I've tried with varying degrees of success is to make a copy of the texture, rotate it, oh say 37 degrees, maybe scale it a little different depending on the material, and mix the two with a noise map set at a scale that works OK. Tweak the noise (top and bottom...) or output to be more black and white, watch the softness of the transition area for what works best with your material. The plants at the end of the turn around show too much similarity. Try rotate (3d) or flip (2d) a couple of them to break the pattern. If they are 2d, watch out that you don't make the lighting on them look weird by doing that. Also a little variety in scale there can help. Yes, we all try to make our plantings look uniform, but the plants never QUITE cooperate. Plants on the upstairs deck are just a hair radioactive (but they're thin and catching bright sun and... and they look like they came from the back room at Spencer's Gifts.) The upstairs deck cables are showing aliasing.... rerender that area larger and scale it down and comp in PShop? rerender that area same size with wicked many samples? Might be able to get away with turning off reflections on the glass to save some time and render an object id mask to aide the comp. The crispness of the edges of the stone walls bugs me. There is no horizon, just sky. Patch of ground and a big hedge should suffice. On the right. Left side. Yellow. At the upper corner of the doorway, there's a vertical line in the yellow. Looks odd. Just above that, the horizontal gray siding looks to be cut off at an angle. Oh, I'm starting to get to picky small stuff, I must be done ;-) THANKS! All great points. Some of these things have been just killing me. Im having alot of trouble getting a decent stacked stone wall happening. Im using displacement but it looks ugly in the corners so I've detached the main face and cloned it + displacement. Its so hard to get the right textures + bump/disp maps and get it to look right. I'd model it but ive got neither the time nor the slightest clue on how to do it effectively. I will try a normal map and see how effective it is. Good observation on the sun, the shadows are def. boring. The sun is accurately positioned for about 1pm at the correct location with a correct north direction, but for a puff piece i suppose i can get away with changing it. I obviously have a bump map on the driveway that has a tiling problem. I think i will dump it and remake it in max with a noise or cellular map. (i spotted this about 10 seconds after i uploaded it! ) I think the foliage is going to be a continuing annoyance. Its the closest i've got to the specifications and they have been all rotated to a unique position. I think some scaling could def work. I might do some work on them in PS later. Perhaps break some of the stems and bend them down or something a bit random. You're quite right about the upstairs plants. I shall give them a new material. I think the direct light plus GI is giving them some crazy luminance + colour bleed. Not sure what you mean about the crispness of the wall... My new hedge material will make quick work of that horizon! The yellow wall has a brick pattern to it but only the vertical lines are showing. I might have a model error. will check. Very well spotted! The grey part on the angle is actually under the house. I might see what i can do to get it looking a bit more friendly. the wires. Im not sure how to go about this. I might have to thicken them up. Using lots of samples and scaling could work but a scale down would just cull the pixels im making up and probably make them alias again... in regards to the glass, i think i will make them a little transparent and add some noise to a bump channel to give them a slightly warped reflection. Thanks again for the great observations. I will get onto them asap. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MasterZap Posted January 30, 2008 Share Posted January 30, 2008 Hi guys, Zap: I have turned my exposure control to inactive, tried with my lights both turned on and off. Used material override with the AO material in the surface slot of a mental ray material. I believe I've followed the mental about max vid exactly but i just reckon theres something going on with max 2008 that im unaware of.... *clarivoyance mode on* Let me guess; you have some "sphere around the scene" or other similar thing to map your environment to? If so, your entire scene is by definitino enclosed, and hence gives a black AO result... unless of course you set the "max distance" in the AO shader. Did you do this? Do you have max 2008. Mind if i send you a small scene where i've tried to set it up properly? LOL, yes I "have" 2008. I also wrote those shaders in 2008, so yeah, it's here all right... /Z Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Peter M. Gruhn Posted January 30, 2008 Share Posted January 30, 2008 > Not sure what you mean about the crispness of the wall... The stone walls near ends. The corner edges. They look like they are made out of Boxes with perfect clean edges running in a continuous line from top to bottom. Stone would difuse that edge. (Looks like you did chamfer the edge, good man yourself ;-). You can look at this http://www.cultured-stone.com.au/ProMoj1.jpg. Zoom out in your browser (say to 25%) for a similar scale. You can see how one stone sticks out and another doesn't. Chews up that corner. No clue how to hack that. Displacement could have done it, but that wasn't happening for you. Set the height segments to 300 and add noise! ewwwwwwwww Leave it alone, it isn't that harsh. > but a scale down would just cull the pixels im making up > and probably make them alias again I have gobs of faith in Photoshop's resampling algorithm. I messed around with the problem myself and the problem comes in part from being missed by the sampler. You can use excellent maximum sample rates, but if the wire is thin enough the renderer will sample on either side of it and say "nothing there" and not even TRY to anti-alias the wire. If you render it blowup then you increase the chance of the wire being seen and putting actual pixels down. Once that happens trust PShop to shrink the pixels to size. Or you could turn minimum samples too high. I was looking at a page that indicated there is a way to do per object sample rates in MR but I couldn't figure how to do that with the Max UI, maybe it isn't there. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Peter M. Gruhn Posted January 30, 2008 Share Posted January 30, 2008 Another option with the wire is that it isn't as bad as it looks and what I'm seeing is web optimized over JPEGging. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WAcky Posted January 30, 2008 Author Share Posted January 30, 2008 Peter > Re the walls. I will try some more with the stone walls. Probably one of the hardest types of material to simulate without modelling? the wires: I'll give it a go for sure. Sounds like a blowup with high samples is a good idea. Zap > Yes, it was a stupid question I actually worked it out. I didnt know that you had to delete the light and select I thought you could just turn the light and exposure control to inactive! derr. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WAcky Posted March 7, 2008 Author Share Posted March 7, 2008 Hello again! Well since i last posted alot has changed. For one i got so fed up with mental ray's crashing so i moved to Vray and no more crashes! Anyway here is the latest render. Its been a while and i've tried a lot of new techniques. Aside from learning a whole new render engine i've also tried out 2d foliage in photoshop as opposed to 3d in max. I'm enjoying this method and my skills in photoshop made it a little easier. Im also a hugh fan of the matte masking method. Wow is this workflow awesome. This was so useful for colour correcting my stacked stone walls as the front sides were so much more saturated than the rest of the wall. I think i almost rendered out every element in a matte pass for great colour adjusting control. If you haven't tried it...do! Anyways thanks for the comments so far. Please continue! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lhanh29 Posted March 9, 2008 Share Posted March 9, 2008 much better.keep in touch. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sdavrella Posted March 9, 2008 Share Posted March 9, 2008 Wow, this 2nd image is much better! Congrats for your improvement! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
WAcky Posted March 10, 2008 Author Share Posted March 10, 2008 Thanks alot guys Glad you like the updates. Im sending it off to the architect tomorrow. I'll post back on how i go. Fingers crossed! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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