Thanks Leotril
I think you can use maya’s glow effect it works with mentalray, and you can specify any object to glow… not sure why you need tiff or something to glow objects. But if you want to have it done in post, you need glowng abjects render pass for that view. so you could adjust it in aftereffects.
Goodluck!
@Dodgeas3d: Dude that is awesome! The shaders, lighting, and the neon glows are realistic. And the composition is great too.
@Zap: Great work as well! Not really feelin the texture on the garage wall entrance but overall it’s really nice. I love the truck and the overall lighting.
@Leotril: The camera angle is nice…in your face. Nice start. Chrome tires are in? 
j/k
Update:
Not much of an update if any…just rendered larger and tweaked things in Shake (doin this on my lunch break so not much time). I guess mine is different in the sense that I am not trying to do everything in maya this time. Trying out puppet’s Mega_TK shader for splitting the render into many different passes and experimenting in shake. I toned down the neon glows and tweaked the overall color. Will try to work moreon this and finish hallway this weekend. 
Fire away…
Whooooo, man, that was a FANTASTIC image.
I actually see my comment on your first image was somehow never posted. Oh well, I drooled quite a bit, I really really like it. This new one is just off the wall perfect.
/Z
Am I missing a post???
I swear I wrote some replies last night, and I can’t find it on-line today! :banghead:
I need to be more creative to find new ways to compliment you in each post - I love what you’re doing with the scene.
I think in your last image the big area to work on are the different areas of colored light: the sense of darkness in the side areas from available light coming down that street at night (maybe the dark areas have street lights in some parts, but still it should be darker overall as you move away from the entrance.) Then the colored illumination from all that neon would be lighting the building, giving different colors to the street and sidewalk. Then the flourescent light inside the garage would be a different color from the headlights or other light sources, and some of it would be spilling out around the truck and lighting some of the street in the center of the image. In such a mixed lighting situation, even a building surface textured in gray maps would still be differently colored in different parts of the scene.
You could use a reflection image (of a building at night or something), mapped to a card across the street, just to bring out the reflections in the front bumper and windshield, and hopefully hide the fact that there’s nobody driving the car.
Inside the garage, maybe it could go more green, the back wall could be darkened especially at the top and bottom, and the same with the columns toning down the highlights and making the back ones fade a little deeper into the interior color?
-jeremy
@ACamacho - Great work! I love the colors and variety! The windshield reflection is angled just right. Try to give the truck something to reflect that’s in front of it, too, so the front-end keeps that nice reflective look. In the Parking sign, it looks like we have the glow from the tubes illuminating the sign, but the tubes themselves aaren’t glowing brightly enough to look like the light sources. Where the sign is reflected in the windshield, on the other hand, it’s more like the opposite problem. I guess problems like getting reflections to match the look of the thing itself are symptoms of trying to build too much in the comp and not enough of the lighting in the scene itself?
@Leotril - Great start! In terms of rendertimes, maybe stay away from true GI. There are other ways to get glows from the neon to light things - you could use lights positioned at the neon, render an occlusion pass for each neon color and screen in colors based on the occlusion distance, just use FG…
@Dodgeas3d - Awsome scene! A real winner you’ve got there! The feel of the night lighting, the glints and chrome and wet pavement, all really look good!
-jeremy
There was some major site downage, I think I lost a post as well.
Thanks. This is turning out really well; I’m suprising myself.
And I’m really trying to go for a “color scheme” here, with a red/green appearence w. a hint of blue from the inside. So this is one of my most “art directed” images ever, methinks.
Actually I was more going for putting in some minor extra lights, so it would not be so dark so quickly away from the entrance… after all it’s a city, not a lone concrete parking complex in Nowhere Town. Methinks.
I’m here now, with some material fixes, some slight light grazing the wall in the upper right (very subtle) and greenish spots along the wall (far left) and a kind of light on the “upper floor” of the parking thingy.
This image also has some subtle DOF, but you don’t really see it in this scaled down photobucket render (the real render is 1600x1200)
Yes, that’s kinna what I’m going for. Red/green from neon outdoors, and “blueish” from inside.
Yeah, I was pondering building some faux “across the street” geometry for this very reason. Thanks for the tips.
A “just for you” render:
/Z
hello!
great images guys. thanks for this challenge jeremy, im enjoying it…it really is a big scene and needs alot of lights! whew!
anyway, heres my contribution…
ive only started assigning some default shaders on the building and tweaked a bit of the car shader from mentalray…then i started lighting the scene…
[i]click for the larger version
[/i]as you can see i used area lights for the flourescent lights…i am really hesitant in using the light(render time issues) …and i’m thinking of using another light other than areaLights…any suggestions guys? thanks.
thats what i got for now. no fg or gi, preview preset on mentalray.
hoping to hear from you guys…
best of luck to all of us!
herbertagudera -
For neon light onto nearby surfaces, if GI and FG are out, you could try rendering an occlusion pass for each color (one with occ from the red tubes onto nearby surfaces, one with occ from blue tubes onto nearby surfaces. The tubes themselves should be solid white in the pass.) Then for the red light for example, you could invert the occlusion pass from the red tubes, multiply it by a red color, multiply that with your ambient pass, and screen it over your beauty pass with the other lights.
-jeremy
thanks for the tip jeremy, i’ll be posting another update maybe later tonight…i havent tried rendering in pass for this challenge…so i guess now is the right time…thanks again man!
Ooh I’m gonna do this one too. Here’s my first test:
Using Maxwell. Yeah it’s all a bit odd at the moment. The car looks like tin and not all the shaders have been replaced from the initial ones they came with.
Hi, very nice challenge and great mod.
For the first time, GI of day :
Sunday evening i’ll post all render.
bb
Well I missed out the start of the competition ! I’ve done the first version of max file (I used 8.0 version to make it more compatible) the only incorrect surface I had found was building near the left neon (thanks to Jeremy), sorry for any other inconvenience. I waited a message from Jeremy but it didn’t arrived
Great works since now. This challenge seems huge…it seems suitable for a demo reel
Keep it going
Giorgio
okay, so jeremy was kind enough to give me some tips on the neon lights. so i decided to do it…but it turns out i was going the wrong way, so i dialled 911 and on the other line was aCamacho…i asked him to enlighten me with what jeremy was trying to say. he kindly did. so here is an update:
i didnt render a new beauty pass,just used the previous one. the neon green pass kinda went out of what i was going to, gona find out whats wrong later. anyway, i hope i got it somehow right…hehe
thanks
Hello MasterZap. Your render looks awesome so far. A bit bright overall, but by the sky color it might be around 7 o clock? not too dark still.
I want to ask you and other guys using MR, how can you render such a res. image with FG without render issues, due you have bump, ton of textures, geometry, reflections, etc. Do you have any trick to speed up the render?? (FG is my nightmare)
Ill be following this thread : D
Nah, I was going for a “late evening” look not a “night” look really.
First of all, use mental ray 3.5; bump+FG was an issue back in the day - no longer so. I go into this on my mentalraytips.blogspot.com blog. (FG points are now stored using the unbumped normal and with directional data, so the indirect illumination is looked up directionally at the render phase. In the old days pretty much every bump had to be resolved by the FG phase’s adaptivity and given it’s own FG point, which is completely unnecessary now, you can use ridiculously low FG densities and get a perfect image for bumps)
Also, in mr 3.5 it’s trivial to get a nice, smooth FG solution by using the new style FG (which uses no radii, but only a ‘number of closest FG points to interpolate’ setting). The trick I use is to intentionally make an oversmooth FG solution, and then use AO (which is built into mia_material/arch&design) to regain any lost details - works like a treat.
My FG for this scene is the easy part. I use a density of 0.1, 50 FG rays, and 30 points in the lookup (using the mr 3.5 new non-radius mode “auto”). On this scene the FG goes by pretty fast.
/Z
Priceless info. thanks for the input. I should get updated with mental, some of the new attributes just are “new” to me XD and very useful blog
ah, btw, do u still need to precompute AO or FG in the areas will be reflected? or it doesnt make a change at all?
Who’s lighting rig?
edit: Sorry I totally misunderstood you. Read your post below. I should have posted my lighting setup too. Although for a scene like this it’s pretty cut and dry.
Jeremy can you delete this post?
