Modo Lighting

#1

Hey guys!
I wanted to ask the general modo community some advice! I have to take a photo of an alley [taken during the day], now i must model and texture and light a still in modo, but so realistically that you cant tell the differance!
So what i am askin is is to look at the attachments [ pphotos of the alley, one the original the other graded down to seem like night] and give me some sadvice on the lightig setup that i woul use to get the realistic look i have to! i havea 2 week deadline to model, texture and light the scene! so any help will be much appreciated! I am busy modleing the scene at this very moment!
Thank you in advance!
Sheblom
Graded:
](http://imageshack.us)[/IMG]
](http://imageshack.us)[/IMG]

#2

Hey guys
I have finished modeling the alley way, and i am uving it now! But i am having major problems! Besided modo crashing on me all the time! The uv texture dosnt show up in the view port! And i am not sure if i am uving properly!
What my thinking is that i am doing the uving all wrong! or the procedure all wrong! How i would do it is, select the mesh, create a uv map, then create the material for the mesh, and make sure that it is set to the uv map for position. But this sumtimes doesnt work! It look by all mean as the mesh has been uv’ed, but the uv texture i use doesnt come up in the view port!
Can anyone tell me the easiest way to uv pipes, etc? i Have to have this alley uved by tom and [hoprfully] textured by friday! So that on monday i can export it out to lightwave for rendering! So if anyone can please help me!
Regards
Sheblom

#3

Sheblom, Hello…
Nice model work, here’s the drill… Make sure that components are separated (building walls, windows, pipes, etc. which looks to be what you have going on. Select the wall polys, hide everything else, just for clarity, open UV/3D split (I have two monitors for this). Now select the most useful edges where you want it to split, run UnWrap, trying different options, settings, edges? (One gotcha, remember to select the edge loop of any openings and the outside edge for best effect) Then select all of the polys again as polys, run Relax as needed, again adjusting settings for the least amount of distortion. Name your UV map something useful, Save the file often as you work, then Export the UV’s as EPS. Open the EPS file in Photoshop or similiar program as a background reference image, then bring in your texture files and move them around to best effect, save out the flattened file JPG/PNG (Save the PSD with layers, 'cause, you will go back and forth…) Return to modo, Import your image, Select the UV map, with your model in the window, Drag and Drop the Image file onto your model and it should self-select the UV map. If you have any difficulty, Open the Shader Tree, select your surface, then add a Layer/Image Map and use the choices to specify the image file and the UV map. Should work straight out.
Regarding the pipes, the small ones could get by with procedurals, but the bigger ones, you should investigate Peeler. Do a search on the modo site for a video. It works on continuous pipe shapes, so you may have to merge some verts on the inside of the joins so that you can grab a long edge of a large section of pipe, then run Peeler. Again, ship out the UV as EPS, import and color. You also may want to Render out an Ambient Occlusion pass, once you have the UV map solid, then use this as a Layer in Photoshop. It will also help you to better locate the joins. Hope this helps???
Like I said, cool model, but you are going to be pushing it… :>|)
Paul

#4

paulhart: THanks alot man! That help me loads man! Got pretty much all uv’d! have to fix up somethings here and ther but its pretty much done! Now on to the texturing!
Pic:

Has anyone had this problem when they export thier uvs to eps:

Does anyone know what this is?
Regards
Sheblom

#5

A clear case of “funky stuff”… It seems to happen when you have an open UV map to export, but you haven’t hidden the other geometry in the scene, as I had mentioned. It won’t be on the screen, but will show up in the exported UV map. Select the polys of your UV map, HideUnselected, then export. Should be good to go… Sometimes as I am adding new elements, modo creates the UV’s on it’s own, so make sure that you periodically check that your UV maps only have the polys you want and you have ClearMap of the extraneous others. Then select, Hide Unselected and Export…
Let me know if this works…
Paul

#6

I have little knowledge and experiance with UV mapping, but why would the wall be UV mappped? I can understand the pipes etc. But would not the wall and windows be better served with planar maps? Some enlightenment please.

Cheers
Snosrap

#7

You are quite right, planar mapping is a fine choice in many contexts, but I always have more control with UV mapping, when I need it. An example would be the inside ledge of the windows, which will be a stretched texture map in a planar projection, or oddly displayed with a cubic projection, but if I UV map the wall and ledges, I can go into the UV map and pull those edges out towards the center a bit, giving me more “real estate” to texture when I take it into Photoshop. I can actually get the brick to “turn” the corner, without stretching of the texture that you can see in both pictures were the edge turns and goes back to the window surface. Just choices. I would go into my UV window, grab the “back” edge next to the window, move it away from it’s adjacent edge and have a lot more surface to texture, after I have shipped the UV’s out as EPS. Once I have returned to modo, I can then choose to further adjust these edges or tweak them, ship them out again, and further texture them.
Hope this verbal explanation helps.
Paul

#8

Thanks for in depth explanation paulhart. That makes sense.

Cheers
Snosrap

#9

Hey man!
THanks alot for the help! that was the problem! so igot it figures out and spent the weeekend texturing my ass off! Still need a lot of tweaks and to be dirtierd up a bit! Lit in Lightwave with fprime 3!

#10

Well done, moved along fine. If your light source is the same in this scene as your example, it is missing the strong incidence angle surface flash, beginning top left and working it’s way down into the picture. Some random grime maps will also help, remember to include a copy of the texture layer choice in the luminance channel in the grime map implementation for a more realistic look. Some of the surface grain starts to feel a bit too uniform, so again a turbulence map breakup in the luminance or alpha aspect will help, sometimes putting two different ones into the equation helps to generate a more random surface effect, one high frequency, the other set to lower frequency. It also helps to render out an ambient occlusion pass to the UV map of the wall surface and then composite the ambient occlusion selectively back into the final??? or SG_AmbOcc is great, the nodes version also works fine, but doing it separately allows more control in the final composite work. Don’t know your work flow/pipeline, so you may try to do all of this in Lightwave surface attributes??? These are all tweaks to your otherwise fine work that will push it closer to the expectation of photoreal recreation of the alley scene. You have come along way. Well done. modo is currently my tool of choice for UV work and modeling, but Lightwave remains a workhorse for many final aspects, including this kind of texturing and rendering.
Paul

#11

paulhart: Thanks for all the help man! I tried to emplemt some of what you siad, but i am still working on it! I have been working on getting the camera angle right all day! but because i guestamated all the measurments for the modeling everything is off! But i got it as cloase as i could! So here it is and please tell me what you think!!
Sheblom

#12

Fine work, if more tuning is requested, here are some thoughts…
It appears that the focal length of the lens needs adjustment as we have a curve in your pipes and wall going up, whereas the orig. is straighter, just leans in. The front wall edge leans in more in the orig. so tweak the lens focal length and reframe. The wood needs more grain and color saturation, part of which may get addressed by the overall lighting, which needs to be warmer tan light. It is picked up on the windows, wall, wood… the lower portion of the wall is too saturated towards blue, the top half in undersaturated and needs to be warmer as do the windows. Check the shadow value of the underside of the clump of black pipes, it is an ambient warm tone, surprise… and the reflected light on the surface of the glass, also warm. The cast shadow on the wall below the pipe needs to be softer. More paint flaking on step and lower walls. Needs the “hold out” sticks on the leanout windows. The near wall corner is too wide, I need to see more of the near window, and the windows in general are still not tall enough and too wide proportionally. The specular gloss on the wall extends too far towards us. Here is “quick & dirty” adjustment for discussion. I appreciate your effort and the challenge, you are doing well, and I don’t “nit pick” unless someone sincerely asks, so carry on and feel encouraged.
Paul

#13

Hey man!
THanks for all the help! I really appreciate it! My bosses saw the pic and are happy wiht it for now, so they have moved me on to figuringo ut how to make HDRI images! So here is the last render i made! Hopefully i can come back to it some time but for now i have to work on other things!

#14

Very nice work!

#15

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