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Here's a quick one i started on today, it's a scanned horsemodel i found on a site and thought i'd see what if anything i could make of it with Maxwell.

As i want this lil horsie to look golden & old and also dirty, such as it been through alot and it's surface been badly messed up i had to "cheat" by creating a dirt material with C4D and then do some postwork where i'll comp the Maxwell and C4D renderings together into one final image. I hope that's still ok..

The Maxwell rendering so far.. remember it's still rendering and that's why its' very noisy now.


C4D's renderpass of the dirtshader, this will be comped in with Maxwell's rendering once finished.


And here's an very early pre-comp of them both


That's all for tonight! i'll be back tomorrow with updates on the rest once all that's finished.

/ Max

Look like a donkey to me, not a hourse...anyway, it's very nice Max.

Very nice Max - as usual your materials are excellent.

I've also been playing a bit with mixing renders on a job lately (whole renders of a glass bottle). It's good way to go to overcome some limitations and time constraints.

b

hyltom: Donkey, doh! ofcourse, you're right somehow i saw this as a horse last night when i were working with it. Thanks for correcting my mistake and for your comments.

Brett: Thank you the material.. i tweaked a old shader, actually the one i used to previewrender the knife model with (still gotta try to finish that wip). Aha, so you also been blending in normal renderers into your unbiased creations. i thought you didn't work like that, but you're right about the limitations forcing us to do such things. I wish it wouldn't be necessary but whatever gets the job done.

I guess i'm done with this one now, can't see what else i should do on it i'll shed some light on what i've done now. It's still quite a bit of things i did in post to it..

- Maxwell rendered for 12,5 hours, but the endresult was still very noisy
- Dirtrender + Maxwell's render was both brought into PS for merging and postprocessing (read below).
- Colors were tweaked in PS, giving the image a little bit more contrast and intensity.
- Noise was heavily reduced in post on the background and some on the model itself.
- Background was smoothened out a bit more and it got a new colortone.
- Shadow was smoothened more by hand
- Dirtmap was blended in 2 times with different settings each time for each layer.

Here's my result, i hope it's ok..


/ Max

Well you see i like horsies... so i like this very much





Great worn metal, the dof is what seals the deal.

Adrian: Hehe, horses are nice aren't they. And they taste good once you had them on the bbq for a couple of mins.. thanks! glad you like the metal and the dof, i spent quite a bit of time on those two parts to get them to look and feel good.

I played a bit with the rendering now in PS and tried to age it more, make it look more old'ish and worn like a photograph would do (i think). Here's the result of that.



/ Max

Very nice, Max! Very Nice!!!
Maybe the contrast is just a little bit too high...
I love that 'aged photo' effect. (Sometimes I do the same thing with my renders, just for fun...) It makes images look even better. BTW, did you use filter for that one, or just played with the ordinary PS settings?

PS: Maybe you should try making it in wood - you know, the old dark wood...

m-Que: Thank you! glad you seem to like it. And i agree about the contrast, it's to high and been so from the start, i boosted the hdr intensity a bit to high when i rendered it and then it blew out my highlights on the mesh.

The aged photo i also think looks better than the original render above, it has much more atmosphere and it feels alive even tho it's aged. i used quite many different filters and plugins for this, including Filter Forge and then mixed them all up and blended all the layers to get this look. Btw, if you look closely you can see faint fingerprints on it i added those as a nice little realistic touch.

Wood, hmm.. good idea! but there's a problem with that, wood requires a nice set of UV's to not look weird as proper mapping is kinda necessary for closeup shots like this of a wooden object. But i have a nice closeup wood material i made which uses displacement with visible splinters in it that sticks out, it'd work for something like this. Maybe i make some other mesh and render it as a macro like this one and use a wood material on it.

/ Max

wich fusion mode have you used for the dirty pass layer? it seems it darkens the right corners of the final!

Really nice as usual Max!! i think the aged render is really pleasant for children (but we are still all!)

def4d: I used multiple modes as i have several layers i merge together. But they're blended in with overlay, color dodge, normal, darken and soft light. thanks! hehe yea i guess children likes old stuff, and some old people too..

/ Max

Really nice work, max.

Koufax: Thanks! nice to hear from a master of the arts like yourself. I have another idea for a similar shoot, gonna start with it as soon as i fixed my computer today.

/ Max

really nice Maximus

yep! wonderful. That compositing with a dirt shader was very creative! dirt-shaders are cool btw, with maxwell or rhino could do something like that...

Aji: Thanks so much i'm ofcourse glad you like it.

Björn: Thanks a bunch! mm yep, dirt rocks and it makes the simplest of models feel alive and much more realistic. Atleast that's what i think, it adds so much to the realism it hurts. But i wish Maxwell had a native dirtshader builtin, that's a dream i have.

One thing that i see now i should have done is to make the dirtmap rendering a bit more gritty with a more varied distribution, at the moment it's a bit to even which makes it feel more like a standard occlusion map than actual dirt. I'll sort that out for my next upcoming experiment.

Maybe something like this can be done with Maxwell and Rhino, it should be possible if rendering something out with a white skydome, then all the tight areas and corners gets shadowed evenly (i think) and you could use that to merge in post like i did with this. I haven't tested this yet but it should be possible.

If the idea i got now is possible to recreate then i'll start a new wip thread today and let you guys see what i have in mind. but first of all, my defrags and system repairs/scans needs to finish.

/ Max