spheres
 

I was browsing through some links the other day and came upon Richard Rosenman's website: http://www.richardrosenman.com/
and saw his sphere projects and thought i'd do something similar. these are not entirely done, and still could use some work, mostly the first and last one.
the first one is pretty washed out and i don't know how to fix it without re rendering. as for the sand one, i plan on adding a pile of sand on the ground and have streams of sand coming off of it if i can. the water one is mostly done, the only thing i might add would be caustics if i had the time to render them in.

http://img88.imageshack.us/img88/6756/mudsphere.png

http://img88.imageshack.us/img88/4404/watersphere.png

http://img88.imageshack.us/img88/4535/sandsphere.png

Are you going to take the displacement route on the sandball because right now it's looks more like an ice cream cone or part of another delicious treat. Also, I think the arbitrary lighting is working against you, it created overexposed areas, blobby shadows(your objects look like they're floating) and it flattened the background. Though, some of the spots look like an FG issue, might want to push FG filter up to 1 or even 2. Happy shading and stuff :ninja:

i already have a displacement map on the sand one, but its hard to see. i wish i had a seamless sand texture as my ripples are way too big.
i also do need to up the FG and maybe change the backdrop's material to something with more depth to it.
thanks for the pointers, i'll continue to work on it.

its a cool project, you should download the scene file tho. (I was just reading the rules on that website)

theres scene files to download? totally missed those

yeah go to the top right of the project tab.

ok, i downloaded the scene files, but now my transparency wont work. i imported my water sphere and the transparency refuses to work. i tried everything from changing the lights and excluding the sphere from shadows to uping my raydepths. i am at a loss at why this wont work. i'm using maya 8.5 unlimited.

Is it all refractive surfaces or just that one shader?

i tried both the ocean material and a mia_material with the standard thick glass preset. both render solid, the water looks like the shader does without transparency and the mia_material renders black, reflections work fine. also the shadows from the whale in the water work fine, so light is going through. =\ i have no idea what is going on.

what are your raytrace settings?

Works ok for me.

http://i300.photobucket.com/albums/n...phere_test.jpg

Check these things:

1. Raytace render settings
2. Shader's raytrace limit
3. If you're using FG check the FG trace settings.

And I think this may be your problem right here.


4. If you're using an obj import, check the shape tab of the objects and see if "visible in reflections", "visible in refractions" is checked on.

it works just fine in my 32 bit version of maya 8.5, but not the 64bit. it could be that because i copied my render preset from the 32bit to the 64bit something got lost or not connected. i may just recreate them in the 64bit version and try that.

That just sounds really weird. If you want you could post the scene or mail it to me or something, you got me all curious and stuff lol.

I thought i had fixed it by upping the tracedepths on *everything* but to no avail.

i'm uploading the file now.

ok, here's the file. sorry for resorting to mediafire, but the uploader here is kinda limited =\
http://www.mediafire.com/?mcmwdy5zmem