andy wants some glowing orb

the rendering part of my brain is collecting cobwebs and dust. here's a little scene to shake the dust off.
i think i'm a little bit rusty though.

grass-o-matic was used for the grass and with the proxy script of Master Zap for making things a lot "lighter" to handle. the main lighting is only a HDRi plugged into the sky slot. mental ray glow material for the orbs and for andy's eyes.

Click for higher resolution

after the long long break

here is something for the vacant time wasted in the office.

it's just a practice render. mental ray 3.6. modeled in sketchup.

empty room. click for higher resolution.

empty hallway. click for higher resolution.

Exterior Archiviz - part deux (early evening)

Just as the title says.

Night scene.

Quick render. It is my first go at this kind of setup. I hope I did it right.

Post processed.

This one is adjusted to get the bluish tint that is usually found in photographed nocturnal scenes.

Settings. Click for higher resolution.

As promised last time out, here is the setup. This was lit by an LDR plugged into a skylight and instanced to the environment map. A few photometric lights to light the rest of the scene. The background sky is just a plane and was rendered in along with everything.

Exterior Archiviz - part deux

Finally finished this good old scene. The results are much much better that the first time it was rendered. Changed the POV, the lighting and added some new colors to make it feel livelier than the previous one.
It took only 20 minutes to render this at the original render resolution of 1125x1800 pixels with default FG.

Out-of-the-box render.

This is the post-processed look. Same look and adjustments like my two recent posts.

"Photographed"

Night Scene

This scene is where I got my blog banner. It's the same from my last post Lomo. I got a bit crazy that's why I rendered it the way it is now. Well it's a personal challenge. I needed something to tinker. Anyway, a night render was something that was in my to-do list. Thought this was an interesting set for such and a photo from a magazine where two light bulbs are laid on a parquet floor just caught my imagination and got stuck in my head.

Wired!

Click for higher resolution.

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

Click for higher resolution.

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.

Click for higher resolution.

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.

Click to enlarge