Sportcar
 

Rerender of a sportcar I did some months back, rendered with MR for Maya and an HDRI map...

nice job. :)

wouaa... very nice modeling, very nice rendering=very nice picture

<adldesigner bursts out all the coke he was drinking on the screen>

Excellent render! I would love to know how to handle HDR Images for use in a render. Perhaps a tutorial?

<adldesigner fetchs something to clean up>

Thanks...
HDRI maps are really simple to use... just get the hdrtoxsi.exe (http://www.finalgathering.com/tut/tut_FG/hdrtoxsi.zip ) and convert the HDRI file (eg.: http://www.debevec.org/Probes/stpeters_probe.hdr) into an Map-file.
the command for that:
hdrtoxsi your.hdri your.map
Than just copy the MAP file into your sourceimages. Now make for example an screenshader and plug an file node into color. In the file node you choose the map file (you have to allow all extensions to find it). Now use the Default Color and the Color Gain to control the brightness of your HDRI map. You should for example use an sphere to as enviroment. Disabling cast/receive shadows helps your shadow maps.
Another thing you should have in mind is, that Maya can't display the image in your viewport. A work around is, to use HDRIView to convert it into eg. an bmp file and use that for display and the map file for rendering...
If you want to render it, than just activate your MR settings for render quality (for example Production or PreviewFinalGathe) and enable Final Gather. Rays around 500 and min radius of 1 and max radius of 10 worked very well for me...
If you don't want to have the enviroment in your aplha channel, than just set the alpha color (the last one in the row, it should be white) in your screen node to black.
That's it. Using an temporary file to store the gathering solutions helps when rerendering the scene!
Hope that helps!

Excellent piece of advise! Gotta make a tutorial out of this one ...

Thank you very much!

beautifull... simply beautiful

great advice can't wait unitill I can finally try HDRI tomorrow

nice render man..

sweet image maya dude!

i liked this the first time, and you have made improvments. and a nice explantion on how it was done.. thx man

looks great!

* drool hits keyboard *

too realistic for me !!!

HEY where did you get a picture of my car?:beer:

Great job!!

Car
 

Great Job Klaus...Really great...especially like the middle part of the car...lot's of details...have outdone yourself again...*takehatof*...my "guru" :beer:

b u l l e t

P.S.: For everyone to explain: Klaus was my Maya-teacher from January to February this year....thx again Klaus