Lomo

Been toying around the image processing software lately. Scouring the net for some sort of inspiration and one type of effect has caught my fancy - lomography.

It's a photographic look that adds (imho) artistic flare to an image. A somewhat ordinary image like this, which is by the way rendered in 3dsmax mental ray, could be more interesting if given some post-processing magic.

3dsmax(mental ray) Out-of-the-box-render

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Bedroom

Something to break the IBL stuff around here. I can't be stuck on just one thing so this scene breaks the monotony of irradiance particle and image-based lighting. Here I used the good old (but very useful) mental ray sun and sky.

Raw render.

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Smart IBL and Irradiance Particle

My irradiance particle "study-mode" is back in action! 

I have encountered a very cool site that provides high resolution hdr stuff long before I have gotten myself hooked on this Irradiance Particle thing and the whole image-based lighting gig. It's www.hdrlabs.com. It's where I get my hdri's but I never bothered with the Smart IBL GUI. 

To make the long story short, I got bumped in the head and  this idea of using Smart IBL's user interface to setup my scene just came to me. I import only the background and reflection because I want to control the lighting using irradiance particle as my lighting solution. It's fast and easy scene set up. Plus your hdri's get sorted. More info can be seen at their site. Great free stuff. I totally recommend it.

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In Between

Something that's kept me out of the Irradiance Particle testing-learning-testing-learning-thingamajig. This is also posted at http://www.cgpinoy.org.
 

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Click for higher resolution

The background clouds were not post-processed but plugged into the mr skylight haze slot (like in zap's post).

What?

What happened to Jeff Patton's website? I can't access the old site with the informative forum and tutorials. I was hoping to look for his sky dome tutorial. Now I won't be able to finish my irradiance particle scene properly. I draw a lot of knowledge from that site. I really hope it would be up and running again with the same information as before and more.

Irradiance Particle (update 3)

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Work has suddenly picked up again and this is the only update I have to offer for this particular scene since my last post. And one "extra-income" (some sketchup modeling stint) which I could never pass up also came along the past weeks. That's the reason why this got bogged down a little. It feels like forever to finish. I really hope to finish this like it should be. 

Here I added some grass using the grass-o-matic and plugin some trees using Onyx trees.

Shaderlight

Here is something new that I have been busy with. All this render-your-exterior-scene-in-unique-way thing has got me to look for alternative ways to make my exterior archiviz stand out. I am greatly pleased with the way ctrl ghost of mental ray renders image-based lighting.

But while in the process of "learning" irradiance particle in 3dsmax mental ray rendering for exterior archiviz, I have tumbled upon this new render engine for Sketchup. Enter Shaderlight "An interactive, photorealistic renderer for Google Sketchup." The software is in its beta stages but out of my curiosity I tried using it for my Crockett residence scene. 

Since I was into learning IBL (image based lighting the non-production shader way), using irradiance particle this simple and small but wonderful piece of render engine does the job in real time(!) using Sketchup's physical sun or HDRI's. You can change materials using Sketchup's default material editor and tweak them simultaneously using Shaderlight's material editor as your scene renders progressively. You can freely move the camera around and change views inside Sketchup and you can see it change instantly as it renders. Did I mention it can use HDRI's as light source?  And one thing I like the most is that there is no need to export your scene, it renders right inside Sketchup (well, sort of. Actually it opens a render frame window where you can take snapshot of the render as it progresses.)

I can ramble all day about how I love its simplicity. Head on out to http://www.artvps.com to have a look. I almost forgot to mention it also has something for 3dsmax. nice. :)

 This came out directly from Shaderlight without any post processing.

 Click on image for higher resolution.

Here is a test. It's a snapshot of render in progress. I have used one of the default lighting presets (golf course evening) which also comes as a background should you choose not to use a custom one. In this scene I changed to a custom background to suit my need. Forgive me on my grass material though. I was eager to try it out immediately. 

Cheerios!

irradiance particles and hdri. update 2

I have gone to a totally different direction with my exterior archiviz test.
From my regular lighting solution of using Daylight with mental ray sun and mr physical sky, I have taken a new path - Image Base Lighting using HDRI's through Irradiance Particles.

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A few more adjustments. Somehow, I would have to invest in some decent HDRI's. That would come if only I could land in a decent job that would pay me and this hobby. :)