WIP - Mission Hills Facey Clinic (1st Mental Ray render)

[RyanSpaulding]

Studio/Institution: Cogdell Spencer ERDMAN
Client: Facey Clinic
Genre: Commercial Exterior
Software: 3DSMax + Mental Ray
Website: http://www.cogdell.com
Description:

See attached. Not completely happy yet, but deadline hit. Had to learn MR on the fly after over 2 years of no rendering at all and just don't have A&D shaders down yet. Looks flat to me, but I'm unsure how to do better reflections and the like on panted concrete, ect. CC is absolutely welcome and helpful.

[Justin Hunt]

Not a bad effort at all, as for the flatness, it seems as though the highlights have been clamped too low. What are your exposure settings? It might also help if the sun was coming in even further from the left.

 

The windows need a bit of transparancy to be believable.

My typical glass settings are, diffuse level down to 0.3 and light blue green colour for the diffuse, Tansparency between 0.6 to 0.8, Reflection 0.5. Thin Wall tuned On and Use Transparent Shadow ON. Sometimes I set the Relative Intensity of Highlights down to 0.5 to darken the refections.

 

If you want more light to pass through the glass set the Object properties->mentalry->FG to be "Pass Through"

 

Tone the refections on the blue car down .

 

I really like the grass

 

jhv

[RyanSpaulding]

Hey Justin -

 

Thanks for the response. I've attached an image of my settings. I think my material is just too basic right now...I need to step it up. I got lazy as my modeler did not properly group items in layers...and it's a sketchup model so most comes across as black in the viewport...so I didn't UVW map the facad. Thanks for your help.

 

The grass is a patch done by ONYX Grass and instanced.

 

My glass is definitely too reflective. Problem was when I tried to create actual glass texture, it wasn't reflecting enough and couldn't get light inside the building...and I lacked the A&D shader experience to know how to tweak this well.

 

I've also got an issue with the image in the frame buffer looking different (brighter & washed out) than my saved image. I end up having to bring it into Photoshop, and adjust levels and color saturation quite a bit (non EXR because the image has no sky). Am I missing something here in my Gamma settings? A simple gamma adjustment in Photoshop doesn't do it.

 

[ATTACH]38737[/ATTACH]

[Justin Hunt]

The only thing I set it ticking Affect Mateial editor and colour selectors.

I have recently started to use the Backround switcher in the environment slot, this gives you the option to have the mrsky as the backround and an HDRI (or an other image) for reflections.

 

What file format are you saving to, normally I save to 16bit tiff with alpha.

 

jhv

[RyanSpaulding]

Here is what I ended up with. Thanks guys.

 

[ATTACH]38845[/ATTACH]