Do you mind sharing how you lit your scene and what shaders you used?
cheers
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31
05-05-2007
, 10:53 AM
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Do you mind sharing how you lit your scene and what shaders you used?
cheers
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32
05-05-2007
, 06:46 PM
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stunning stuff, I haven't had a moment to do more on mine, essays, web pages, the list is never ending and the pressure never stops.
incredible
take it easy and life will be easy
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06-05-2007
, 12:37 AM
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For shaders I used simple blinns at around 50% diffuse color - blue for the body parts and grey for the aluminum. For the face I used 50% grey lambert. The dark metal parts are 30% diffuse grey blinn. For the rubber around the abdomin I used a 30% grey blinn with the reflectivity reduce to .2.
For lighting the scene I use no lights just the default lights.
I set the camera environment to light pale blue almost white.
The ground is just a nurbs plane with default lambert shader.
Then in the mental ray settings tab I chose the preset raytrace fine trace setting and then check the final gather preset box.
With default lighting enabled final gather will tend to over blow everthing so to compensate all my colors are farely dark 50% or less diffuse.
Notice how dark the body color is in the material ball compared to the final render color. Everything will be much lighter in the render due to the default lights in the scene and final gather. So all your colors will have to be much darker then they appear in hypershade. What I usually do is pick an area of bright highlight and then adjust the color in that area while doing spot renders until the highlights are not over blown. You sometimes have to make a compremise so that the shadowed areas do not get to dark.
That's it.
I tried building fancy shader networks and using hdri domes but find it takes 40 minutes to do a single render which usually looks like crap. The time it takes to do a single render is so long that trying to tweek the settings to get a good render just takes to much time and inevitably my system crashes with a "low memory warning message". So I have taken to just sticking with simple procedurals and presets.
Last edited by ctbram; 06-05-2007 at 01:50 AM.
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06-05-2007
, 04:31 AM
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-Great work
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07-05-2007
, 01:20 PM
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yes there are few in the world lucky enough to have the time tweaking 40 min renders.., simplicity, if thats what one would call it, wins this round.
take it easy and life will be easy
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08-05-2007
, 06:48 AM
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I used the measure distance tool and measured the width of the widest part of the scene (hand to hand) as 12.7 and then enabled min/max and used .12 and 1.2 based on this measurement.
I also increased the number of gather rays from 100 to 1000 although I have no basis for this number. This is the reason mental ray makes me insane! No where can I find instructions on how to properly come up with these values and the user guide reads like a poorly translated japanese to english stereo manual! So I just pulled the number 1000 from my ass. If 1000 is good why not 100000 or 10000000000000, other then the fact the render time went from 10 minutes to over 25 minutes. Once again it was a lot of freaking work to get a render not really a whole lot better then the basic ones I have made. There are still splotches and short of picking ridiculously large values for gather rays and randomly jiggling any of the other 50 properties in the hopes of improving the render I really have no clue what else to try.
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08-05-2007
, 06:57 AM
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color, ambient color, diffuse, reflectivity, eccentricity, ... etc.
Even better would be a simple table with a column that reads like shiny metal, shiny plastic, brushed metal, dull plastic, clear shiny glass, frosted glass, tin, steel, aluminun, brass, gold, chrome, porcelin, chalk, coal .... etc.
and then a row of values for color, ambient color, diffuse, reflectivity, eccentricity, ....etc.
Then you could use the table to get a base material type and with a intelligible description of what the shader properties like diffuse really do you can make adjustments. But then again I have nothing better to do then randomly push 50 different property sliders around in the hopes of randomly getting a matterial that looks like something I want. lol
Last edited by ctbram; 08-05-2007 at 04:55 PM.
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08-05-2007
, 10:00 AM
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i have still had completely no time to do anything else except uni.., have to do it for an assignment i want to use it in..
she look great.
take it easy and life will be easy
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39
10-05-2007
, 11:13 PM
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Added Decal to the Shoulder...
Oddly enough I has some problems with this section. At some point I must of upped the subd resolution and then somehow baked it into the Base 0 resolution. So instead of 2x2 faces to apply the decal too, I had 4x4 faces.
This seemed to me to be trivial until I tried to apply the shader with the decal image to the 4x4 subd faces and found that instead of one copy I got 4! I thought oh no problem I'll just do something with the 2D placement node to stretch a single copy onto the 16 faces. Half a day later and nearly bald and mute from pulling my hair out and cussing at the top of my lungs I could not fix it!
I finally figured it out though. I converted the subd to polygon mode and then applied the shader and then used create uv and planer projection to stretch a single copy of the decal on the shoulder pad.
All I have left now is to add some minor details to the heat sinks on the back of her head and also add a small detail to the center of the ceased area in the chest plate (a circular badge detail with a light in it) and the modeling and texturing will be done.
Than I want to rigg and bind it.
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10-05-2007
, 11:15 PM
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the image...
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11-05-2007
, 12:14 AM
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11-05-2007
, 06:09 AM
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hey, Phrosting ,thanks for sharing that with us, why dont you show her to us?? picking her nose?? one wonders what they teach the youth in these trying days
Or maybe you hate robots, maybe you hate girls
take it easy and life will be easy
Last edited by mirek03; 11-05-2007 at 06:15 AM.
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43
11-05-2007
, 01:17 PM
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You said the renders took about 25min, out of curiosity what specs does your machine have?
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11-05-2007
, 02:46 PM
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take it easy and life will be easy
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11-05-2007
, 04:23 PM
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The hdri renders take around 20 minutes on a single machine and 10 minutes if I network render. I have 2 systems (pretty much the same specs).
As for using maya 7.0. That is not a bad thing. I have started to be become quite dissapointed in Maya 8.5. I think it is more of a step backward actually. Why? Well for one thing I have discovered a serious memory leak when trying to use hypershade and hardware render mode (keyboard 6). I find if I have hardware shading on and use layered shaders or even a simple shader with a file node and then just do simple things like adjust the coverage properties with each change in the property value maya uses more and more page space until in a very short time maya crashes with the error message - free memory low - memory fault thrown (*). I never had this problem with maya 7.0.
(*)note:
You can test this by turning on task manager (ctl-alt-del and then go to performance. Create a shader like a blinn and attach a file node to the color property then just open the 2d-placement node and start changing properties of the placement node while in hardware render mode (be sure to apply the shader to something in the scene) and watch in horror as your page file usage with each change in the properies goes up and up until maya 8.5 will crash with a low memory error and in some cases you scene file will even get wiped!. Nice huh!?!)
Also, as far as what you gain by going to maya 8.5 is very limited vs what you lose. You get the bridge tool, and limited edge and ring loop selection tools but hell mjpolytools and byron's polytools out perform the ones put into maya 8.5. No renderman support. For the most part all autodesk has done is rename and move things in the gui in an effort to make things more comfortable to max users. Personally I think changing nurbs to surface and polygons to mesh is retarded especially since they did not do it uniformly so you have all four terms scattered about the menus now making things more confusing, for me at least.
And after upgrading to Maya 8.5 I can no longer use byron's polytools and Renderman alnog with a couple other plugins I used to use.
Without getting all whinny and preachy, I really thnk Maya is in need of some serious upgrades to its modeling tools. The features of Drasters Nex should have been brought into maya's modeling tool set ages ago. I don't want to invest in Nex because there is no guarentee it will be supported in future versions of maya. Also, Drasters draconian licensing scheme forces me to buy a copy for each system I use even if I can only use one system at a time. In the immortal words of South Parks Cartmen ... Ghey! I have been playing with both 3ds max and Modo and I am sorry to say they both have a more extensive toolset and more efficient workflow (for modeling). Maya's particle system and animation system still have a slight edge over Max but that gap is closing.
So I guess I did get a bit whinny and preachy but it is out of a passionate desire to see maya improved. As it is everyday I lean more and more toward switching to either Modo, 3ds max or both, even Silo is started to look tempting. If people switch to 3ds max, that is no loss to autodesk, but if they force people to Modo or Silo it will affect their bottom line and that I am afraid is the only thing that will really spur change.
-rant off-
Last edited by ctbram; 13-05-2007 at 11:48 AM.
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