7 unit development in Melbourne

[Stan Zaslavsky]

hi all,

its my first post here and i just wanted to say hi.

 

i've recently got back into CG after being away for a while

 

and am working on this for a client - have a look at enclosed:

 

i welcome all critique - its still well in progress.

 

 

i'm using 3D Max 2009, mr for render output

 

cheers,

stan

[SandmanNinja]

I think it looks good.

 

Is that a HDRI or mrPhysical Sky?

[Stan Zaslavsky]

atm mr physical sky - i'm working on getting some clouds in - but mr is not behaving itself with bitmaps

 

thanks for the kind words

cheers,

sz

[kris McIsaac]

building is looking good.

 

Crop out some of the foreground grass.

 

3D people look too big.

 

those trees are not the best

 

cars are on the wrong side of the road

 

Could be a bit brighter or more contrast, what are your settings. areas in sun seem a bit dull. In saying that Melbourne is pretty dull outside right now

[Claudio Branch]

Your image has good modeling work and the building textures look alright, but you can make this piece alot stronger.

 

Exposure Control - either turn it off or dive into some research about how it works, because right now, yours' isn't!

 

Entourage - it's hard to go wrong with green trees (try'em, you'll like'em:)), the people in the scene appear to be 7' - 8' tall (use your shrink-ray), and the grass needs more curb appeal (displacment or Hair/Fur)

 

Composition - tough with a long skinny form, but changing the aspect ratio of the frame will work wonders! Park your cars off to the sides somewhere, not in the middle of the frame.

 

You're image has the potential to be great, just get your hammer out and start banging away!

 

Good Luck...

[Stan Zaslavsky]

building is looking good.

 

Crop out some of the foreground grass.

 

3D people look too big.

 

those trees are not the best

 

cars are on the wrong side of the road

 

Could be a bit brighter or more contrast, what are your settings. areas in sun seem a bit dull. In saying that Melbourne is pretty dull outside right now

-------

 

thanks Kris great feedback - especially the cars, good pickup.

 

for trees i'm using simple generic oaks - the client hasnt yet specified the landscape plan so i'm just using something to give him an idea. will get to real stuff soon.

 

for cropping out the grass - is there a way to make the render look like its a landscape shot?

 

i spent about 4 hrs researching mr and its settings - still a bit perplexed. i'm using the mr sun in jan at 11am so its nice and high, the settings for mr Photo Exposure are: S.S =1/512 s, f-stop = f/8, shutter speed = 100. just defaults and havent yet worked out which will do what.

 

is it better to use Log Exposure for the time being? its at least a little easier to control.

 

also i'm working on the scenery a bit more - i need to put some more houses in the background so the reflections off the lower right windows isnt from the sky.

 

cheers

[Stan Zaslavsky]

 

Entourage - it's hard to go wrong with green trees (try'em, you'll like'em:)), the people in the scene appear to be 7' - 8' tall (use your shrink-ray), and the grass needs more curb appeal (displacment or Hair/Fur)

 

Composition - tough with a long skinny form, but changing the aspect ratio of the frame will work wonders! Park your cars off to the sides somewhere, not in the middle of the frame.

 

You're image has the potential to be great, just get your hammer out and start banging away!

 

Good Luck...

 

thanks Claudio - great feedback.

 

at this stage no havent worked out Exposure control - will keep plugging away - the plan is to work out how mr works so then when i get vray - it'll be even easier.

 

 

i'll try out changing the aspect ratio - maybe another setting will work best.

any ideas on getting a more landscape looking shot?

 

cheers and thanks for the comments

[Claudio Branch]

 

i'll try out changing the aspect ratio - maybe another setting will work best.

any ideas on getting a more landscape looking shot?

 

 

I would start with 1280 x 720 and experiment as needed...

[Stan Zaslavsky]

hey guys,

here's an improved render - i'm still not very happy with the sky - settings are mr - EC - SS = 10, F/stop - 1, speed = 800, Image Control - Highlights = 0.8, Midtones = 1.0, Shadows = 0.8. Whitepoint = 6500.

 

i'm still working on the trees - client brought the landscape plan last night . Claudio - the American Elm so far is not much better than the oak

 

what do you think abot the current image aspect ratio?

[Claudio Branch]

Stan it is coming along nicely...the new A/R looks much better to me.

 

The overall exposure is SO much better too. The lighting on the model is looking very good. Get the sky and ground under control next.

 

Don't sweat the trees for now...you can swap those out at anytime.

 

Great progress...keep going, keep posting!

[WAcky]

Yeah forget about the trees for now. That should be something you concentrate on last. One more tip: Change your filter to Mitchell or Lanzcos for your renders. It will make for a much sharper render. Change it back to box or triangle or whatever for test renders.

 

Look for some sky domes textures with a landscape in it so you can get some nice reflections.

 

I would probably take a look at ambientlight.co.uk or got3d.com for vegetation. Dont bother with the max vegetation, its horrid and for the price, 2d elements are far better.

 

Give the building a bit of breathing room. I know its a pain to model the street and all that but the building feels suffocated at the moment.

 

May i ask where in melbourne this is being built?

[Stan Zaslavsky]

hey guys,

 

here is an update to the render. i've gone over to a dosch hdri sky and i'm kind of getting the mr settings. still a little to go - welcome any c&c

 

cheers,

Edited July 9, 2008 by StanZ

[Stan Zaslavsky]

the client didnt like the extreme colour contrasts

 

so here is enclosed something a bit milder.

 

thoughts?

 

cheers,

Edited July 10, 2008 by StanZ

[ChrisBolton]

Hey Stan,

 

Firstly, as most people have said, that is nice modelling! It a nice looking piece. Its looking a bit flat at the moment. A few things I would suggest would be:

 

- Specular, i dont think i can see any specular maps there, which will nicely highlight sections in the light and give it a bit more character and deffinition without you having to play aorund with the contrast.

 

//For ambient occlusion//

 

- Also, if your using mr, make sure your model is unwrapped if you want to encorporate this into the texture but if its just for an image then you can composite in photoshop after. Im refering to Ambient Occlusion.

What i normally do, is get the textures and the lighting in until im happy, render the scene, and then;

 

- make a new material with the diffuse as white, in the self illumination slot, choose ambient occlusion, and set the samples to 64 or 128 to get a quick yet nice level of detail. Then apply that to all your objects.

 

- Turn off or delete the scene lights.

 

- In the environment panel, turn off any hdri you have in there, and set the tint level to 0, and set the environment background to white.

 

//What this will produce is basically occlusion shadows that give alot of real depth, we use these and bake them in the games industry into environment maps and instances. You can take this image (if it is at exactly the same view as your normal rendered image) into photoshop and paste it over the top as a new layer, and change the blending to i think screen, or multiply, basically which ever does the job, then you might want to play with the opacity of the layer over the top to get what you want.//

 

Thats AO out the way.

 

Another thing I would suggest is two different coloured lights, for the sun obviously use a yellow bright colour nearer to white, and then for any ambientdiffuse lighting (omnis, or mental ray lights etc, basically anything that fills the space) use a nice blue light, combined with a hdri in the environment slot, this would take alot of tweaking i would suppose to get what you want.

 

Also I would arange your lights differently so they cast shadows that more define certain angles of your building, to give it more depth, as at the moment it looks very uniform from that angle.

 

Maybe think about framing the building with foliage or somthing in the foreground?

 

My main advice is to just take a nicely photographed building that may look similar, look at where the shadows fall, what makes a good photo, where the highlights are (are they on the corners of the edges or in the texture, which will then involve the specular), and another thing that would work wonders would be HDRI reflections on the windows.

 

If you dont know how to use HDRI then theres a tone of easy short tuts online, just search google and, but the main way is to choose a hdri material in the mat slot, import your hdri image, use spherical mapping, play with the mulitplier and gamma levels, and then 'instance' (drag) the material into you environment map slot, either in the MR renderer environment options panel or in the ('8' renderer/environment/env map slot) in the normal max env pannel.

 

I gotta get back to work now! lol but hope some of this helped!

 

Any more questions about any of that drop me a mail or post back, and ill see if i can elaborate or direct you to some tuts.

 

Regards

 

Chris