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Any help would be appriciated.

I've been wrestling with MW for a while but can't seem to get past poor looking bitmaps. i have watched Mike Verta's videos but had no luck with architectural type materials.

Is there some sort of "workflow" for adjusting bitmaps?

These are using the physical sky defaults, camera f-11, ISO-400, SS-500

The second is auto leveled in photoshop.

thanks in advance.

you should try to add some bump (height to your maps) to yor bitmap materials, either via bump map or normal mapping.

there is a simple way to create normal maps of your bitmaps

check crazybump
or nvidia normal photoshop filter

www.crazybump.com
http://developer.nvidia.com/object/phot ... ugins.html



if you further questions, just post them

Welcome!

Your images look good, but they are flat, I agree about the bump maps
I see a small scaling problem with your stones and bricks but generally they look ok.
What I think should change is your ground mats... Very reflective road.
It would also be nice to see through the glass, I guess these are stores, they would like customers to be able to see inside. I think some invisible planes with emitter (there is a tutorial by Tom about hidden emitters)

thanks for the quick reply. I agree the glass needs to be more transparent and the material choices need work.

After seeing some of the gallery posts though, i'm not sure i'm adjusting the bitmaps correctly in photoshop. I've tried lowering the gamma, increasing/decreasing the exposure and playing with contrast saturation and levels but I still wind up washing all the images out.

It may have more to do with the camera settings as well...i will have to keep studying.

for the glass front section you should give ags a try. (material database- a team special.... advanced glass solution) instead of using dielectrics.

cbb wrote:After seeing some of the gallery posts though, i'm not sure i'm adjusting the bitmaps correctly in photoshop. I've tried lowering the gamma, increasing/decreasing the exposure and playing with contrast saturation and levels but I still wind up washing all the images out.

maybe you should check out these tutorials, they rock

http://www.maxwellrender.com/forum/view ... t=material

In my opinion, stone maps never look good without some displacement.
Also, the tiling on that other material is too apparent.

Hey cbb, welcome

I'd pretty much second everything that's been said, but also add that it seems like your maps might be a little bit on the light side (a problem I often have with Maxwell.) Try darkening your maps in an image editor, and perhaps ever so slightly bump the saturation.

Alot of promise though

Cheers,
Dr Merman