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# 40 07-11-2009 , 07:56 PM
NextDesign's Avatar
Technical Director
Join Date: Feb 2004
Posts: 2,988
Hey Archania, don't worry about it! It takes time!

Here are the steps I went through to create that render. If it doesn't look right in the end, I must have missed something while writing it down. Check the scene file I will email you to see what's going on user added image

1) Delete all existing shaders and textures

2) Delete the texture from lambert1's color slot (never use lambert1)

3) Grouped the scene into more logical areas (old lights, set, and table)

4) Duplicate the persp camera, and lock the new camera's transforms. Name it "render" (Use render to render, and persp to work, fancy that.)

5) Create a new blinn material. Name it wood. Map 001_28.JPG to it's color slot. I also assigned it to the specular color by creating another file texture node, and, under color balance, lightened and desaturated it by setting the color gain to 0.25, and the color offset to 0.5. Changed it's Eccentricity to 0.4, and it's Specular roll off to 0.9.

6) Delete mesh top1. Overlapping geometry.

7) Assign the wood material to table.

8) Your UV's are all the same size, no matter how large the object is. This will make certain pieces have a larger wood grain than others. I fixed this by going into the uv texture editor, and scaling some of the object's uvs until they all looked the same. I then went into the hypershade, selected the wood material, and clicked on graph>input connections. I then changed the two place2dtexture nodes, and changed their repeat uv to 2 (in both fields).

9) Hide your old lights

10) Wishing I had a screen capture program for the mac.

11) Duplicate the wood material. Edit>Duplicate>Shading network. Call this new material darkWood.

12) Graph the network as you did in step 8. Select the file that is giving the material it's color. Change it's Color gain to 26.75, 0.163, 0.728. Change it's color offset to 0.047. Give the material a richer highlight by selected the specular color map, and change it's color gain to 0.504, and it's offset to 0.287.

13) Assign dark wood to the floor.

14) Change the two place2dtexture nodes repeat uv's to 10 and 9. (A cheat so we don't have to go into the uv texture editor)

15) Create another blinn. Call it wall. Pull it's eccentricity to 0.540, and it's roll off to 0.2. Assign this to the wall.

16) Look through your render camera. Go to View>Camera settings>Resolution gate. Do it again, but this time clicking on overscan. This allows you to frame up your shot better.

17) In your render globals, scroll down to renderable cameras, and click the trash button next to persp. We don't want to render out of that camera. I also set the image size to half 1080p (960x540). Now go to the mental ray tab, and under quality presets, choose preview quality. (I'm using 2008, so it's in a different place in 09/10)

18) To make the render faster, under final gathering, I pulled the accuracy down to 20, and the point density to 0.25

19) Take a render. Black right? This is because we don't have any lights visible at the moment. But we're not going to use any. Under mental ray, under environment, click on the create button beside physical sun and sky.

20) Render again. Ahh! Everything is reflective and blown out! We'll deal with the washed out colors first.

21) I added three other walls, and a ceiling, as well as two windows and a skylight (we need to let light in right?) to give us a room, as this is an indoor scene.

22) A new light will be created called sunDirection. Grab this, and rotate it so that it's pointing through all the windows.

23) Render again. Looking better? Good.

24) I decided to use glossy reflections half way through. You can do this by using the Mental ray mia_material_x. Open up the hypershade, and create three of these nodes. Open up the attribute editor on the first one. On the top right, there will be a button named presets. Click this, and choose Glossy Finish>Replace. This will make a preset glossy surface. Do the same for the second one, and on the third, for the wall, choose Matte Finish.

25) Connect the textures of the blinns to these new materials. You'll want to connect them to, under diffuse, color, as well as, under reflection, color. The wall should just be a color set in the diffuse.

26) Assign these shaders to the objects. A trick is to right click on one of the exisiting blinns, and choose "select objects in ...". Now just right click on your new mia material, and choose assign to selected. Do this for all of your blinns.

27) Once done, you can select edit>delete unused nodes, and, if all blinns have been unassigned, they will all be deleted.

28) Take a render now. Looking good!


Imagination is more important than knowledge.