Nov 22, 2009

Of (Christmas) balls and 3D

I have finally in my possession a reflective ball. It's something that I have been looking for here in the UAE for months now. I have almost given up hope of trying out mental ray's production shader with my own background and reflection images. A good friend (Hey, Glyndon I hope you can read this) told me to wait for Christmas and true enough Carrefour is now selling decors for Christmas and I bought two pieces at City Centre for 2.50 Dirhams only. I know I won't be able to obtain perfect reflections from a cheap 7 centimeters diameter Christmas ball but it IS perfect for a simple scene practice. 
The Christmas balls.

Nov 16, 2009

Exterior ArchiViz

This is my first go at an exterior architectural rendering. It's a work-in-progress. This was started months back when work was not "getting in the way" of learning 3dsmax and mental ray. And then work at the office started to pick up. So I had to finish as much as I can before work really gets in the way. I can't seem to get a good POV at first but I decided to render it anyway. This was modeled in Sketchup and exported to 3dsmax.



Click for higher resolution
These renders are just lighting test of mr sun &sky as well as finding a good point of view.



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I'm still not satisfied with this half-done output. It still needs a lot of work but I'm glad it turned out well.

Side note: The design was done by a good architect friend. Thanks Mervin for letting me use this. I'll improve it when work don't get in the way of learning this wonderful new craft. :)

Nov 10, 2009

Train Scene for download

For those of who would want to see how I worked out the train scene, below is the link to download the 3ds max 2009 file. It's rendered with Mental Ray. I left out the HDRI and some of the materials from the file because they are proprietary stuff. You can easily substitute them with what you have. Anyway, they are properly named so you won't get lost.

Forgive my modeling skills, it's something I am not really proud of.:)


And here is another render. It is a bit better than the last.

Nov 5, 2009

Image Based Lighting

I've been scouring the net lately for tutorials on Image Based Lighting. There were several that I've found to be very helpful. Of course I have to try it out for myself. So I exported a model I did in Sketchup to 3ds format as a test subject. It's a simple wooden toy train. If you would take a closer look, the train's wheel are not smooth. I did not use turbosmooth modifier on it thinking it would come out okay but then again it didn't. This was probably because of the way the model got exported or the way I modeled it. Whatever the cause for that, I had to find out for my next time.





I love the way it lights up the entire scene and the soft shadows it creates.
More to come.