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So we got hired to make an animation of the TAMU campus. For those of you who don't know who TAMU is, don't worry, it's an inferior university. It stands for Texas A&M. Ha. Anyways, I'm having to create these detailed models (someone else is doing the site, that's why it's just buildings) but we won't be using Maxwell in the animation. In order to keep my sanity I'm texturing and modeling the buildings I've made in Maxwell and rendered them. My boss saw them and was very impressed. He wants to use Maxwell now for the close up single frame shots. Anyways, enjoy. Feel free to comment.

Oh the irony of using the best for an inferior university .....

Looking good ....

Why is your point of view set so high. It looks like the height is set at 3,5 meters or so. It gives a strange scale to it.

I'd lower it to 1,7 meters or so

Can you please tell me what you use for modeling?
The modeling is very good, the images are a bit flat...(the brick wall for example).

You inferior University looks like a tiny scale model

I think it's the camera hight too

The camera was set at about 5'-8" off the ground. Don't know where the scale problem comes from.

All my modeling is done in AutoCAD believe it or not. I have to say that AutoCAD is probably my favorite program of all time. So versatile. Until they came out with 2007 and ruined everything.

Anyways, update. Did another rendering, but I got the tile color wrong. Should have been lite blueish to white instead of dark orange.

what is your aperture?

try something like 32 or 28.... I am guessing you have something like 200-300mm lens and your camera is unrealistically too far away... making it look tiny

Nope, camera was a 35mm lens. Don't know what was going on with those.

Here's another one I ran the other night just for fun. Doesn't really show much "new" stuff, but I finally got to bring my computer back home from the office so I had to make it do something.

Now that I have my computer back at home the updates for this project will start coming alot faster.

I tried to use HDRI lighting for the first time. I must say that I like the feel of the coloring from the light on the buildings better than just a sky/sun system, but have a few questions.

1.) I used the free sample from Hyperfocal for my background. As you can see it's very pixelated. Do alot of the higher quality HDRI images have this same problem? The same thing happened when I used Tyrone's free HDRI sky from the Off-Topic Section.

2.) I bounced around the site trying to figure out how to get sharp shadows with an HDRI enviornment. I found one thread that said if you have a clearly defined sun spot in the HDRI it should create sharp shadows but you have to play with the intensity of the Illumination channel. I can tell you that I honestly tried over and over and over again but could not get sharp shadows to appear. Does this require a high sampling rate? I only run my exterior shots up to SL10. Do I need to add a super small super powerful emitter to make the sun?

3.) Does anybody have a suggestion on who has the best HDRIs for the money? I was looking around and these seem to be VERY expensive. I like the effect it's having on render time and lighting, and if I could solve the sharp shadow issue it might be worth it.

Anyways, thanks for any input you have... here's the image.



Chris