[Airwaveflyer]

Hi all!

I have seen a need for explanation on how to make succesful image compositions in maxwell in the cases where you don't have the luxury of a hdr environment to create perfect refractions and reflections.
...well first off, don't hassle with doing the final work inside maxwell, make a good foreground plate and composite it in another application like Adobe Photoshop, After Effects...

This is not any fancy work like some other people here produce, it's a quickie which will hopefully it will make the life easier for someone.

Ok here goes...

This is what you need:
Background plate
Grid
Scene

Make the grid image into an hdr or mxi. (if you don't know how...read other forum posts) The image was quickly made in photoshop and should have the the size 2048 x 4096. (Yes, I know it's messy. I'm not proud of it)

Now set up the renderproperties HDR section like this: (this is Rhino-plugin but I'm sure you can translate the settings to your app)


Set the rendersize to the same size as the background image.
Set the shutter/f stop to something like 1 and 100

In my case I hid the table and the hit render, that gave me this result:


Now use the info from the grid to place the background image at the right place on the grid, something like this:


Now break out your photoshop skills to fill in the blanks....it does'nt have to be all perfect if it is'nt a high gloss chrome thing your doing, in which case you have to spend some more time perfecting it.

My 30min work looked like this...


Convert the image into an hdr or mxi and save it as f.ex. Refl_Refr.hdr

Now change the rendersettings into this:


Unhide the table and render, adjust intensity values to get result that look good. Render the final Foreground plate and save it as a tif or tga.
It will look something like this:


Now bring it into photoshop and trace around the outline of the the bottles and the table to make a layermask of the foreground.
Put the image on top of the background image and adjust the different layers to make them work together.
The final image looks like this in my example:


Ok there it is...my first tut... I hope you like it...

Have fun...

Airwaveflyer

[tom]

Very nice tutorial, thank you Airwaveflyer!

[jespi]

Thanks Airwaveflyer, very usefull tutorial

[jdp]

thanks a lot.
and excellent way to join the community!

cheers

[Maximus3D]

Cheers & thanks Airwave nice work putting together the tutorial. And a interesting way of compositing stuff with the background plate. I can't say i woulda thought of doing it like this.

/ Max

[thxraph]

very nice technic & tutorail Airwaveflyer, many thx for sharing, this will definatly be usefull

thxraph

[Xlars]

I just returned to Maxwell, for a very similar assignment I have right now, after seeing this tutorial (and after considering both Final Render, Brazil and Vray). Thank you very much

[DrMerman]

Nice method, cheers mate

[corneliu]

simple and very useful ... so just awesome

[x_site]

... the only reason why i still come back to this forum these days.... always a couple of good tips to help with the workload.

I love it.... many thanks.

[Xlars]

I have tried using this method and run into a problem .. when using U scale and V scale (set to 3) the reflections in the final image seems to be tiled (3 times). Stange thing is that I do see the background perfectly through the glass. I tested with a glass sphere (with a small thickness) and a crome ball. Do you see the same behaviour?

[Airwaveflyer]

Yes I did, I think that the setting should be named repeat instead of scale...

...if you read the note at the top that I added you'll se that I relized the same thing as you did...
Set all of the scalevalues to 1 and the go on as before...you'll have to do some more mattepainting and also you'll have to make the background bigger (2048 x 4096) to get enough detail in your refraction.
I'm working on updating the tutorial asap..

BR

Airwaveflyer

[Xlars]

...if you read the note at the top that I added you'll se that I relized the same thing as you did...

Ok, I see your note now .. doing with a scale value of 1 makes, as you say, need for some (much) more matte painting.

I wonder if a solution (until a scale factor is introduced in Maxwell) in such cases where both refraction, reflection and background is the same, would be to map the .mxi to an inverted sphere (or should it be an inverted cylinder?) to be able to scale that object up/down before applying your trick with the checker map. Of course loosing the ability to individually control the hdr/mxi channels before compositing. What do you think?

[Airwaveflyer]

to map the .mxi to an inverted sphere

No, I tried that and it would have taken forever to clear that scene...the noiselevels where just too high....I have updated the files now so they should represent a functional workflow....(altough a bit harder )

It should get you through your project at least and the next time you'll be sure to ask them to shoot a chromeball at the same time they are shooting the background.

BR

Airwaveflyer

[Xlars]

Great tutorial, thanks (a lot more to paint now though ). I guess this would also be a great oppotunity to point out some possible improvements in Maxwell Render for handling these kind of assignments eg. to also have a scale option in the mxi/hdr channels