Hi Guys,
The reason why I have posted up this thread is to avoid future questions and remarks that I might have during the process of setting up my renderings. I will channel all my thoughts, questions and ideas into this thread to ease the process of starting a new thread each time I have a new question. I am not sure if the moderators would agree with me on this but it is worth a try. I hope to be receiving as many answers as possible for my queries/doubts/etc. I encourage any new maxwellers out there to post any questions you might have regarding the techniques I have used in my images and I am more than happy to share my settings here.
First off, I would like to start off my post by asking about:
1) Alpha Channels:
I have read a bit about it somewhere a while ago, and if anyone of you may have the answers with you on your fingertips, I would appreciate it if you could post your answers here. What is the quickest way to render so that a sky could be photoshop in easily? I know that there is an option under Vray that you can render and save as PNG. There would not be a default sky for the file. This however does not work so well with Maxwell as there might be a black/blue/gray outline depending on the colour of skies used.
For instance, the image below have a gray sky and it would take me an hour to crop out the gray sky and replace it with the intended sky.
http://minorityexpress.wordpress.com/20 ... 3_pebbles/
2) Image Brightness and Contrast:
Analysing whether an image is good for printout can sometime be a painful task. I have recalled that there were numerous times when the renderings appear crisp and sharp on screen but would turn out dull and dark during printout. I have to tweak this process sometimes and reprint to make sure that the image is not over/under exposed.
For example:
http://minorityexpress.wordpress.com/20 ... ild-grass/
http://minorityexpress.wordpress.com/20 ... _lotus-01/
These two images appear fine on screen, but appeared too dark when printed out. I have to readjust it in photoshop to get the brightness right. Which leads me to the other question...
Are anyone of you familiar with the software photomatix and lightroom where you would merge 3 images to create HDR's? I know that by having three images, you can potentially expose a scene with three different exposures (just like how you would do in real life photography) to get the best shadow, detail and lighting.
3) Rendering with Lights Turned off
I have noticed that in most of my renders, the lights are usually turned on. However, most good visualization artists have their lights turned off in their day renderings and I am yet to master this technique.
Take this image for instance, the lights are turned off and you can actually see the filament of the bulb. Is it possible to do this in maxwell and does it mean that all you need to do is play with the iso, aperture values and decreasing shutter speed to get as much lights in the scene as possible without necessarily relying on the internal lights? Or would you need to know further settings to get this to work? Thanks!
http://www.ronenbekerman.com/forums/fin ... =cam04_jpg
P.S: I am extremely happy with the new Maxwell Grass and I was wondering if it is possible to save the settings into a file and importing it as a material to a new scene? I find it a waste of time having to manually key in the same parameters each time. The same applies to the sky settings as I have to perform repeated tasks. It would be great if someone could inform me as to how you could import the settings just as you would with material pre-set which you have saved.
For simplest way, save the render as either PNG or TIFF which support embedded channels and set the channels option to "Embedded" instead of "Separate". This way your PNG will already be cut out when you open it in PS, and the only thing you have to do is go to Layer>Matting>Remove black matte so it removes the small black edge from where the render was cut out against the black background.