Realistic Bottle (dielectric vs mia_material_x) - please help! [Maya]

#1

Hi there.

Maya + Mental ray

I’m very new to Maya and this is my first real project. I did some training on Digital Tutors but I’m not currently working with someone who could make fun of my scene and teach me some tricks. I’ve also read some posts on CGTalk and I realized that dielectric is outdated and that mia materials provide a pretty nicier result. Oh, I read this too (http://download.autodesk.com/us/maya/2010help/mr/shaders/architectural/arch_mtl.html#Glass).

With that being said…

This is what I got.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/9810145/sticky/merda3.jpeg

The bottles on the right were shaded with mia materials. The others were shaded with dielectric (a bit of phong coef).

Please ignore my place-holder cabinet. I will model and texture (old and dirty) it like an grown up.

I used global illumination plus a bit of final gather. My main light source is a big area light. The whole scene is inside a cube with a whit blinn material.

—> How can I make it (much) better using mia_material_x? I started with glass physical preset and then tweaked refraction and color. Please tell me how, I’m very very newbie. I said very.

—> Should I use some kind of HDR domme?

My goal is to achieve half of this amazingness:

https://www.cgsociety.org/cgsarchive/newgallerycrits/g43/236643/236643_1302135121_large.jpg

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/9810145/sticky/im19.jpg

Thanks a bunch!

#2

Here is my scene.
Please don’t laught at it.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/9810145/sticky/bottlesScene1.jpg

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/9810145/sticky/bottlesScene2.jpg

#3

Hi guys,

This is what i get with a domme. And by domme I mean a sphere with a surface shader that contains my hdr image.

I’m having a hard time to tweak my mia_material_x for the bottles on the right. I mean, it looks worse than the one with dielectric material. I really want to achieve the effect I posted above.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/9810145/sticky/merda4.jpeg

#4

Hi,
Few things to do before we start looking at the materials.
*going by the reference you have given, take off the backdrop shelf and the grey room.If the are necessary change the framing of your image.The wooden texture on the cabinet is too strong for now.You might want to change it to something duller.
*Keep your material of the bottles opaque.With the HDR enabled and your lighting in place keep working the reflections so that the reflections work well with the geometry contours.(look at the reference of your bottles with the cherry, the reflections help in defining the surface)
*once done I suggest cranking the transparency.Make diffuse 0,transparency .99~1 and add some colour to the transparency.
*also look at your render global settings.Check the raytracing values for refraction/reflection.
You should be able to get something close to what you are intending.Looking at your shader snapshot I am guessing that your diffuse and transparency settings are not working to give you the result needed.Try it and let me know, will be glad to help you.
I have attached a render which I quickly made up.No HDR reflection yet.Pardon the quality as I had to compress it for upload.

Cheers.

#5

Thanks Rahul!

I’ll try that right now. In fact, the whole cabinet, including the back and all the shelfs are necessary. Unfortunately the job requires the bottles placed this way. And with this camera position.

I understand that the shelfs are blocking some reflections from my domme, and I think that may be the challenge for me.

  • I didn’t understand what you mean by “change the framing” and how this could help.
#6

Hi jadstud
I can not see your upload images.
But i can tell you how did i setup my scene.
I used "mia_material"shader for my glasses,you can use the shader’presets attribute to setup the shader. and used HDRI for reflections and FG.
I create 5 blue planes to add the reflections details(only for reflections ).
If you want the glass realistic ,you can add dirty shader over the glass by 20mixlayer .
The keylight of my scene was arealight.
that 's all.

many thanks for your support my images.

#7

Hi Jadstud,
by framing I meant the camera framing the objects.As you have already mentioned that this is how you are going to frame your scene, then go ahead with it.I think you will get your results just by the shader tweaks mentioned in my earlier post.
Cheers.
Rahul.

#8

You need to make sure your trasparency and diffuse weight do not add up to more than 1. Put the diffuse weight at around 0.05 and transparency above .9. Maybe reduce reflectivity a bit also.

#9

I always hear and read about people using the mixlayer, but I dont understand how you use it with the mia material and how you would go about a dirt map onto it. Could you explain or post a screen shot off the setup and connections?

#10

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