[crit] Photorealism without plugins?

[CHRiTTeR]

Well, I shurely do think so!

Only the standard 3DS-MAX scanline renderer??!!
Good Job! How many lights did u need for that result?

Any tweekin' work in PS ?

[Skyraider3D]

Hiya :)

I used 79 lights and loads of tweaking. Minor tweaks everytime though, and lots of going forwards and back again, testing effects. DOF was applied in PS too. I painted a blob in a new layer over the area I wanted sharp, then gaussian blurred it dramatically (like 100 pixels) twice. Selected it, inverted the selection, went to my original layer and applied a mild (1-2 pixel) gaussian blur. This way the blur fades nicely in and out of the main area of attention.

LOL... I am writing "tutorials" in the middle of the night again... :rolleyes: going to bed now :)

[Damien B]

try depth of field just a little
:thumbsup:

[Putois_Blagueur]

Plugins should be free...or included in 3DS.....
You fight a shadow, rendering without plugins, but you're right when you say that they're too expensive.:thumbsdow

[diazgl]

hmm, very nice job!!! I'd change the floor texture a bit, cos the bump looks smooth (your bump resolution is prolly low). 79 lights....thats a killer!!

[Marcel]

Hi Ronnie!

That's a great result. I assume it is supposed to be a RC model (from the size of the floor)? Really great modelling and texturing AND lighting!

If you used 79 lights, then you probably used a skyrig setup. To be honest I really don't see a lot of that in your image.I'd expect a nice ambient shadow under the plane, and on the wings near the fuselage. (Maybe you should check if you ambient setup is doing is thing, by aplying standard gray materials)

You could also try faking Softshadows with an array of shadow mapped spotlights.

I took the liberty of playing with your image in Photoshop (sorry, couldn't resist), to see if I could improve it. Jugde for yourself:

http://members.rott.chello.nl/mvijfwinkel/airtractor_2.jpg

I played with the colors, and added a little more DOF to the image. (I could give you the PSD if you want to)

If you fake DOF, it's better to do it with more gaussians blurs, each with a high blur setting.

Met vriendelijke groeten, :)

Marcel Vijfwinkel

Sorry about your name being blurry in the pic, The DOF went right over it!

[Skyraider3D]

79 doesn't need to be a killer. But I just hadn't optimised them properly I guess. When you get a very low shadowmap resolution, you can get away with countless light in Max. But because it was a low-poly model, the shadowmaps needed to be a bit bigger, so it rendered slower.

Here's an imagine I used an insane amount of lights in:

http://home.wanadoo.nl/r.j.o/skyraider/gallery/yak-9d_4.jpg

Each plane has about 30,000 polys, and a couple of huge (2000+ pixels) texture maps. Each plane is lit individually. But because of the low shadow map resolutions, render times are still pretty good. Amazingly, it renders a lot faster than the render shown above!
The light setup is as follows. Each plane is lit by a bundle of directional lights, acting as the sun, and a sphere of directional light, acting as global illumination:

directional light: 12
gi-lights: 62
number of airplanes: 4
total lights: 296!!!

Insane huh? :) But it works great! The trick is just to keep the shadowmaps really low-rez and blurred.
The biggest backdraw I found was that you can not use any colour in the shadows, or Max goes crazy. Ideally I like a bit of blue in my shadows, but if you do that with so many light, you get a blue glow instead of a shadow for some reason... weird bug of Max...



Marcel, it's nice, but it actually resembles a bit an older version of my image I made and posted on another forum. I got comments about the DOF being too strong. So I made it less :)

[Marcel]

But I really don't see the ambient effect of the skydome, are you sure that it's correctly set up?
(I mean in your first image, of the yellow plane)

And I think that in the second image, your background is a bit too saturated. If you'd tone down the colors of the background, it would look more real.

(And I never had the effect of overcoloring shadows with skydomes. Do you even have that when you use very little saturation in the shadow color?)

Marcel

[Skyraider3D]

yeah, any colour in the shadow and it acts mental. Even rgb 1,0,0 becomes bright red... very weird...

And the shadow is there, just not very visible
I used the same light setup as here: http://home.wanadoo.nl/r.j.o/skyraider/gallery/airtractor_2.jpg
Just with a stronger "sun" and more 'random ambient lights'.

[bealobo]

Hi!

about the first pic. it looks very nice although it does not seem that realistic to me because of the soft ambient, I do not know if it is due to the ligthing or what but I quite find it too soft, the colour of the plane becomes too light for a toy. Also the floor should be a bit more bumped.
Just my oppinion! hope it helps.
Great job for sure anyway!

Bealobo:bounce:

[lildragon]

heya Sky

that last pic is really stylish, you said you used the same rig here? might we see some wireframe shots? I'm always interested in pulling off nice lighting with max's scanline..

nice job

cheers

[Skyraider3D]

scene wireframe:
http://home.wanadoo.nl/r.j.o/skyraider/temp/airtractorlightsetup.gif

The top render had an additional array of brown omni lights scattered on the floor.

+model wireframe for those interested: :)
http://home.wanadoo.nl/r.j.o/skyraider/temp/airtractor_wire.jpg

[lildragon]

very cool, so I'm guessing the sun light is the main shadow casting light, and all the other arrays simply have low intensity settings and shadow map sizes? Intricate setup nonetheless :)

cheers

[Relic9]

Goed werk Ronnie :thumbsup:

[CGTalk Moderation]

This thread has been automatically closed as it remained inactive for 12 months. If you wish to continue the discussion, please create a new thread in the appropriate forum.