yet another conference room

[jucaro]

for the past few weeks, i've been toying with mental ray in 3ds max design 2010, with just the default medium settings and some tweaking with the A&D materials, i've come up with this rendering from an old project. But somehow, looking at it, it seems so lacking compared to what i've seen from better mental ray renders.

 

This particular scene is lighted with IES Photometrics and a MR Daylight and Sky and mr Photographic exposure. The rendered output is without post-processing.

 

 

Your comments and suggestions to make this better are highly appreciated.

 

[wasteland giant]

its not bad. The black chairs are a bit flat like they have a lambert on them. There also seems to be some minor speckling on the right side of the image (table material).That said, I could have mistaken this for a photo.

[Gary Ledgerwood]

There also seems to be some noise on the glass shelves on the left and something strange going on with the window frame...

 

Other than that, I agree, very realistic.

[Tommy Burns]

Same as above quotes... It's a very good job otherwise. I did one of these scenes myself a while ago for practise and I found that using a sky portal brought it to life. Did you use one yourself?

[jucaro]

Here's another take. This time with just Daylight and 1 mr_portal light and the IES lights turned off. The image is a bit noisy though. I still need to understand proper optimization.

 

For now, i gave up on the fabric material for the seats and changed it to leather instead.

 

Thanks for the encouraging comments.

 

[Tommy Burns]

Thats some difference I like it!!!

I see the problem with the brown leather and I think that your mapping is to big if you have used the leather preset the mapping is supposed to be small. I would turn on your plasma and put an image there try using self illumination and let it affect other objects it will bring some like to that area. On the right needs to be lit up too maybe show the ceiling lights on (not really correct) or light up the centre piece with some concealed lighting. The window frame material is still noisy maybe up the sub divisions on that one.

You seem to know what your doing anyway just play around with a few things and let us see the results.

[Jimy]

I like the 2nd image better. But it's really the more dramatic/ cinematic lighting that does it. It also adds more highlights and shadow detail to the chairs. The change in material helps though, although you could use the specular channel to define how the light bounces off the leather a bit more.

 

It's almost as if the down lights are flattening your image? Maybe have less of them and be really careful with introducing fake angles on them to provide even more shadow detail.

 

I like the specular softness/ bloom on the chair aluminium on the 2nd image... looks good! Nice one!