Maxwell Render | Official public forum

O.k I opened this thread for Vehicle based renders -WIP or not- and associated questions!

I make a humble start with my ongoing Ferrari project.





Car is based on a purchased model and partly remodeled/ enhanced by me. Obviously all shaders converted to Maxwell.

Verrry nice!

That subtle bump on the paint is hard to set.

Is that on the headlamp an iridescent coating component? Looks great too.

Thanks, although I lowered the bump a bit meanwhile, I thought it was too coarse as well.
And yes, its a coating on the headlamp.

Ben

You're a true master of Maxwell.... impressive realism!

Though your image compression and banding is awful

Ben, thanks for making the thread,
I am struggling with the challenge of building 3d scenes to put the cars in, esp for animations.. I'm leaning towards a kind of matte painting approach but its tough to make/find good ground textures. Here's a test without any scene, just hdri.



and another test using a ground plane.



The 'scrapyard' test was made by collapsing a few premade vehicles into indiviual dynamic elements and then dropping them in a big heap. (just like reality really) It would benefit from some procedural group texturing for rust and dirt (AO) dampness and dust (directionally mapped).. etc

If the cameras position is fixed, the ground texture can be camera mapped (for stills) or in this case spherically mapped for a panning shot... but having a fixed camera really sucks, so I have abandoned this approach.

Hi Eric,

Yes, I know your pain! Creating a realistic environments that can match the richness and high fidelity of a HDR image is very difficult. Still, for my plans there is no way around it mostly. And as you say getting the textures right is the most important thing.
Another problematic thing are unwanted /under developed caustics cast by the car or the rims when you use too sharp a light source. I cant go to SP level 20 for an animation, I try to get it as clean as possible at around 14-15. Still there is some time left until Maxwell 3 which should help in more than one area. All images here are still 2.7.2 though.

P.S. : Great renders!

only fooling around (something with the brakedisk shader broke at some point, I'll fix it)

Thanks, that kerb and the lighting is looking very nice.

Heres one more test render which shows how good hdri on its own can look. The new black magic 2 camera for a match-moved comp using hdri on geo for reflections would be great (plus a film crew.. )



Also thinking about a toy story look within full cg archviz sets, inc interiors, kind of mini RC destruction derby.

Yeah, the shader on your cars look very convincing already, especially the suspension parts. Are yours rigged natively in cinema? Sadly I have little to no knowledge about rigging in 3dsmax, I was planning to use MadCar plugin.
http://rendering.ru/ru_en/madcar.html
Using RC cars is also a clever way to circumvent the visible driver problem.

Ben

Eric, your cars look super cool and also the animations - you don't need a high end video camera. A cheap dslr will do - hell there are 3d integrations done with Iphone shot stuff. Just be careful with the rolling shutter (although plugins can help with that) and it will be fine....what are you waiting for?

Or like I said a while ago, if you have a story board I can shoot the video and do the necessary HDRs to go with it.

Thanks for the encouragement. check out black magic 2, no rolling shutter, thats the minimum quality needed for maxwell IMO.

what are you waiting for?

Well.. intel could cut theyre prices by 75%, that might help, and mw3's improved handling of large scenes is essential too. (I am not efficient bytes wise )

Ben, some of the cars are hybrid rigs , a simplified bullet dynamic rig, with traditionally rigged bits (suspension) following the wheels. But as I got quicker at dynamics I found it easier to find a nice RC cad file from grabcad and make it 'come alive' (sry c4d interface kicks ass here, and that integration is really key or the process could become way to complex)

The fully dynamic rigs all have unique behaviour, and the process of test driving them and evolving them will take a couple of hours minimum , even with experience.



This is what a good grabcad file looks like,, these are the mechanical bits inside the pink fiat

That CAD file looks very cool and having all that rigged up is even cooler. I shall have to resort to 3rd party soft for that stuff. I am still not entirely sure about the storyboard, but it is essentially about a battle of classic against modern.
Here is the opponent to the 599 GTO, a beautiful 275 GTB:

Beautiful renders, The picture, esp that chrome, is kind of dream like, just like the car.

I know your respecting these beautiful machines, I've been trying a 'pimp my ride' approach, its great fun to cut up one of these models, and give it hideous boy-racer mods ....also helps when combining bits from several low poly models.


(sry low-SL test)



one more, a test with MB off.

There are lots of good road textures on cgtextures now. (15mb per day limit ) and I also used 10 ravens.... anyway I've been stitching together ground images to build a modular set of ground-maps (they will include displacement and spec maps, ive made 2 'modules' so far) heres a screen shot, will upload them here as I finish them for maxwell users.., in a perfect world, other texture painters could join-in with more segments until we build miles of road..



1 module,;