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Using this old model of mine to learn Studio and the Material Editor. Thought I'd post things as I go, rendering a detail shot now. Wanted to show Mihai, Herve and glebe what all of their great help and suggestions was producing. Also want to thank jetero for his basic mxm collection and accompanying ior's, gave me some very good surfaces to play with. Still working on the texturing but at least I am getting a handle on the Material Editor...feeling way better about it and Studio than I did a few days ago. Thank you again Mihai!

Lightwave object of 1.5 mil polys, had to break it into 25 seperate objects and create individual MXS's and bring them together in Studio. Going to try glebe's suggestion of one big object file with layers for each surface and bypass the plugin. I am really impressed with Maxwell's handling of the high poly count model...very cool. MXI/HDR illumination, SL 15, 2 hr render time on this test. Cheers, Ron

Fantastic!

Great model! The materials also go nice together....some nice lighting and interesting angle you could have an awesome image. Great to see the suggestions helped...

Sharp !

Already looks awesome to me!! Great work!

Looks good Ron... is there a little Photoshop levels or saturation on this image?

_Mike

Thats INSANE! Haha. I agree with Mihai; its gonna be awesome

Ron, you are a master!

Thanks guys!

Mike - a little boost of the saturation to compensate for the desaturation effect of "Save for Web". That always blands out images, I may have gone a tad overboard, but it's very close to the original when compared side by side...actually the wood in the original render is way more saturated and tends toward the magenta side.

RonB wrote:Thanks guys!

Mike - a little boost of the saturation to compensate for the desaturation effect of "Save for Web". That always blands out images, I may have gone a tad overboard, but it's very close to the original when compared side by side...

I saw it right away...

There's a phenomenon that accompanies photoreal work: the closer you get, the harder the viewer's brain works to judge it. When you're in the 0-90% range, the brain goes: fake. Maybe fake-but-cool; but fake.

Above 90%, the brain can't immediately tell, so it looks again... and some more. The closer you get, the more tests the brain subjects the image to. It's like you have finer and finer bullshit detectors. And the brain only pulls out the coarsest one it needs. If it still isn't sure, it pulls out a finer screen.

In any case, your image was good enough to turn on an extremely fine judgement screen, and the brain's alert was: the saturation is artificially boosted. Now, only the universe knows how it knew that from a digital image, but it did. I find it's best not to question, just adapt and add it to your list of techniques. I stopped adding saturation to my Maxwell images long ago... levels adjust can have the same effect. I find that with proper burn and gamma settings (.8/2.2 to .9/2.45) the brain gets fooled far more easily.

...something to think about...


_Mike

That's really good information Mike, thanks. So I'll try posting the next render straight without running through 'Save for Web' and see if it makes any difference. It's great around here...learn something all the time!
Cheers, Ron

Really awsome render Ron

And great information Mike.

Really great render!!!

Mark, Sandy - Thank you!

Mike - I was thinking about what you said regarding photorealism and the levels one's brain goes to in defining an image. One of the sieves that I use is chaos and dirt. That's one big problem with cg images as far as I am concerned, the objects are often too damned perfect. Even freshly manufactured items have some flaws and marks, however slight. One of my favorite little procedural shaders for Lightwave is a dirt shader. I would love to see someone develope one for Maxwell. All these perfect squeaky clean ior surfaces, metal, glass, plastics, etc. could use some dirtying up. Texture maps are a partial solution. But I am talking about the places that dirt seems to collect and build, like grooves, inside corners and similar spots. I would really love to see that happen. It's not only about light.

Your comments got me thinking. Cheers, Ron

very good render and fantastic material setting. also, i like the color scheme in this image..