Interior College Atrium (Work In Progress)

[iaga]

Hey Peeps, as a friend Amer Abidi advised me to post the work here to receive help from more people as well as him so here goes... Please let me know how I could improve it. In addition, if anyone could advise me on how I could sort out shadows for RPC when orking with VRay - cos as you can see Ithere are almost no shadows from the RPC people or plants.

[amer abidi]

Yup, I think posting here is better than sending private messages since you get more feedback from a different diversity of experienced artists.

 

Well, what i do, is create shapes around the people to cast shadows (depending on effect i want ofcourse), and then through their object properties, i unclick the 'visible to camera' option. That way i get to overcome RPC shortcomings with GI renderers.

 

whether you decide to draw a standing profile (for direct light shadows) or a vaer low poly blob representing the full body (for soft shadows) is up to you and your desired effect.

 

Alternatively, you can always render the rpc's and their shadows alone in scanline and composite them over you image in photoshop.

[kippu]

the problem with RPc's is not the shadows ..its because they are self illuminated ,its very hard to use them since they will never match the lighting that you are using......you could use them as white silouhettes to give the sense of human interaction

[iaga]

Thanks for you comments so far all. With regards to switching to scanline rendering and then compositing in PS, how would I just extract the shadows for the RPC from the rendered JPEG, BMP or TIF file? IS this where alpha channels come into play?

[amer abidi]

yes, apply a matte/shadow material to the floor, walls and stairs (or basically any object that will recieve an RPC shadow), and then isolate the RPCS and these matte objects, render out and save as a TGA (which stores al rendered RPCs and shadows, and keeps everything else transparent and stored in the alpha channel. In photoshop, just drag this new image over the one you had previously rendered without shadows, and they will merge.. you can then fine tune as you like since it's a seperate layer.

[iaga]

Ok Amer I will try that now and presumably I need to be using standard max lighting for RPC to cast the shadow in scanline?

 

Thanks for your help btw.

[Lester_Masterson]

Yes, just use standard "raytrace shadow" lights. Shadow map makes nice boxes on the ground.

 

You can save as TIFF as well, just make sure the "alpha" button is checked.