Rotating a Texture without effecting the rest
 

Hi all.
I have this table that I'm rendering. There are no lights atm, just trying to get the wood grain down to start.
As you can see, the top is correct and so are the shelves.
My issue is with the sides. I need to rotate the texture 90 so its up and down. But every time I do that, it changes all of it.
I do have a different blinn for the top and the sides but the wood texture is the same for them all.
What am I doing wrong?

Scott

http://i140.photobucket.com/albums/r...aya/Table1.jpg

search for something called UVs. they are the coordinates for the textures placement.

Thanks Hammer.
Trying to get this to work and then improve it as much as I possible can. This is all new territory for me.
And to top it off, this is for a guy I do woodworking drawings for that wants to add this to his website.
Pressure is incredible. :headbang:

Alright. Man what a morning!
Learning UV is fantastic!!! I love it.
So far:
http://i140.photobucket.com/albums/r...ya/Table-2.jpg

Ok. Got the doors and the rest of the table textured.
Got a light there too.
Now to make it look more real.

Any ideas?

http://i140.photobucket.com/albums/r...ya/Table-3.jpg


Thank you so much so far.


Scott

PS. Walls can be changed and so can the floor. Again this is more first time. The guy wants it to look like it fits into a room so if I need to put more furniture in or even a pic of a room would work... let me know.

You should bevel some of the edges to make it look more natural. ;)

Actually if it is a sheet of veneer plywood, there wouldn't be any bevel of any kind just square edges.
But thank you.

Shadows would be a good place to start :D

micro bevel, nothing is that sharp.

I guess you're having fun with UVs because its new to you but I personally hate the suckers lol. Even if its a teeny tiny bit of a bevel it will make a world of difference in cutting back that "CG" look. I think the shaders need to be tweaked some, right now they're more on the ambiguous side. Plus the repeat on the floor texture may be too high. The renderer you're using plays a big part in your approach to lighting and you never did say.


Hey I should add that to my FAQ :nod:

Thanks very much all.
I have been at this all day and any info is fantastic.
GecT... yes so far its fun. I like the control of what I can do. But ya.. I was pulling my hair out trying to figure it out.

I will correct and show again.
At least every time it looks better... ;)

I used to hate them as well, but now I enjoy them. Quick too. What the wonders of being an intern will do to you eh? ;)

How real do you want it too look?

As you won't get far without a decent lighting setup for aspects like self shadowing, specularity and lots more fun things to explore.

Cheers,
Chris

As real as my skills can get me.

I beveled it. now to work on the shading of it and redo the floor.
Was in NY working yesterday - ALL day... I hate the city.

Dude, if you hate NYC you should never visit London.

Its the people and the parking rules.

Ok,
Sorry for the delay, got busy doing school work and other things.

Here is the newest with lighting/shadow/ and a new floor

http://i140.photobucket.com/albums/r...ya/Table-4.jpg

Its getting there but still want to make it stand out more - more real (ya i know redundant term there).

I'm all ears to hear more ideas on what to do.

for a start i would increase your anti-aliasing settings to get rid of the jagged edge. Then change the reflectivity on the material for the ground (its too reflective imo) and soften the shadows a bit by increasing the filter.
I also think the lighting looks like its burning out the floor a bit.

Changed the setting of the light so floor looks better.

http://i140.photobucket.com/albums/r...ya/Table-5.jpg

I think this is much better:

http://i140.photobucket.com/albums/r...ya/Table-6.jpg

Any better? Is it improving or do I need new glasses?

yeah, the anti aliasing quality made loads of difference.

next thing to read about is bump mapping.

Hammer,
I tell ya I'm learning a lot with this! I'm going to be so ready for the Maya classes when they start!

Ok.. Boss is loving it but of course wants better.

I know that I can't achieve this quality but its what is in his head:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Glasses_800_edit.png

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...s_800_edit.png

What else am I missing then to get this to look like a real piece of furniture? Just point them out and I'll go from there.
Learning is all the fun these days!

Thanks,

Just off the top of my head, you should try adding a few different lights, add a strong directional light like you have with ray-traced shadows, (small light angle and bump up the number of rays I think), add a fill light with low intensity to relieve the really dark shadows (shadows are seldom so dark), add a "rim" directional light from behind maybe to make it pop a bit more. I would add some minor detailing in the furniture and walls, add baseboards and maybe an electrical outlet to break up the wall a bit. The handle looks a bit boxish and harsh.

Lots of stuff you could add, just some thoughts, but it's definitely improving!

I'll take any thing to improve it I can.
Gives me something to do when I get up at 4am! lol

Thank you very much!

there is still a lot to learn... when does your maya class start?

I believe in the spring. The layout of the classes are weird. I have Foresight Development and an internship right now.
The classes are every 5 weeks though (except for the internship - 15 weeks). They go by quickly. So have I'm doing sooo much better then when I was taking Mechanical Engineering at NJIT back in the early 90's.

Your wood is lacking specularity. Take a look at a real piece of processed wood, and you'll see a slight sheen to it.

If you're very ambitious, and want things to look "photo-real" without much effort, take a look into un-biased renderers. There are a bunch out there.

Maxwell (commercial $$$)
Radiance (was free)
Lux render (free and open source!)

I've used Maxwell and Lux before. Both are good, but be aware, these will take upwards of 10+ hours to render! The nice thing about Maxwell, is that there is an extensive shader library, including pretty much any type of wood, metal, etc.

Also, if you haven't already, take a look at this tutorial here: http://www.simply3dworld.com/movie_p...tml?tut_id=164

Thanks NextDesign.
I will look into them - I heard about Maxwell I think there is a demo version to get and play with.
So among the other crap I have to do today, I'll be playing with it.
And I think I am getting a job finally after being off since March. God I hope so.. Unemployment only goes so far.

Yes, there is a demo of Maxwell, however it watermarks your images, and limits the resolution.

Sorry about the delay. I recently found employment after 7 months of sitting around the house.
I'm still at it though trying to light this dam thing correctly.
I played around with Maxwell - WOW there is a lot to that program! but figured I would go back and play with Mental Ray.
I changed the lights to directional and am able to get (what I think) a not bad picture.
The only issue is that it looks good in the Render View but when I save it out to a jpg file - It looks like crap. Any ideas on that one?
This is what it is:
http://i140.photobucket.com/albums/r...a/Table-10.jpg

I have seen what you all can do and completely understand that this rendering thing takes time to understand but I believe I'm missing something - Setting wise? Using the wrong lighting?
But I'm plugging away at it. Watching tutorials where I can to help understand all the settings that I can adjust but can't seem to get there.

Thanks,
Scott

Don't save out as a jpeg... try saving as some other format, I guess like a tiff or something, and if you really want a jpeg, use photoshop or similar to convert your tiff where you have more control. Just a suggestion.

Well I found out an answer. It looks like on my one monitor the pic looks great and on the other it looks like crap.
And of course its on the HP (main monitor) that it looks like crap and on the SV? monitor it looks just fine. I don't understand it but will have to look into adjusting the HP one.

Scott

Notice that in your image, there are no specular highlights. Final gather does not emit specular highlights, therefore making everything looking flat, like you have here. You must add in lights to create that specularity. If you also have any ambient lights, nuke that as well.

If you need any help, PM me the file, and I'll take a look at it. :)

Also, with Maxwell, I find it quite easy to use if you go through their tutorials on their site.

Alright. I've been playing with the scene for a few minutes, and have written down what I've done. I'll post it up a bit later.

http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c3.../APG10_mia.jpg

Holy Crap! That looks fantastic!!! Alright.. tell me your secret on what you did!

Really, you wern't that far off mate! Only about 30 steps that I've written out, every button press, etc. Still not happy with it though.... But I guess it should be up to you tweak it from now on :)

I'll send you the file, as well as post up the changes for all to see :)

LOL. Now your trying to make me feel better.
I guess its that last bunch of steps that took it over the edge and the ones that I was trying to figure out.

I really appreciate it though. I can use what I have learned and what you have done and apply it to other models then. Texturing is really a master art form.

I'm very glad I brought it that far from knowing basically nothing.

This is also one of a couple the guy wants me to draw for him and I hopefully will be able to bring the next one to life on what I have learned doing this one.

Thanks again NextDesign for all your help on this and for everyone giving pointers on this project.

I'm going to be really set when the Maya classes begin next year. Just gotta get through some other classes first.

All of you guys/girls are fantastic in what you do and I hope to one day be at that level. And looks like with all your helping I may reach it one day.

Scott

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 :)

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!