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First try 8 hours

Posted: Thu May 26, 2005 9:20 am
by bathsheba
Image

Still a lot of noise, and the glass balls didn't develop much transparency. Wish I had known about the resume-render option before starting it.

Oh well. Half size and leveled out in Photoshop, it could be worse.
Image


-Sheba
Bathsheba Grossman
http://bathsheba.com

Posted: Thu May 26, 2005 9:52 am
by Thomas An.
Sheba,

This is a very nice result for a first try ! Very interesting model as well. :)
(So often here I see first tries that look great ... I guess it is the beauty of Maxwell ... it is easy to make something decent from the get go 8) )

Posted: Thu May 26, 2005 10:33 am
by bathsheba
Thomas An. wrote:Sheba,
This is a very nice result for a first try ! Very interesting model as well. :)
(So often here I see first tries that look great ... I guess it is the beauty of Maxwell ... it is easy to make something decent from the get go 8) )
Now that it's up here, I see it has DOF issues as well.

It's better than I've been able to do with Renderman solutions; it's nice to be able to leverage some of what I've learned doing physical product photography.

Mainly I look forward to a material editor...there's a lot of room for improvement in Rhinoll.

-Sheba

Posted: Thu May 26, 2005 10:42 am
by Para
The render is nice but how did you make the object itself?

Posted: Thu May 26, 2005 11:39 am
by bathsheba
Para wrote:The render is nice but how did you make the object itself?
I just drew it in Rhino. It took several months, I draw very slowly. I'm getting it printed in metal, when I put it together I'll find out whether I did it right....

The more I look at that gold material, the more it looks like American cheese.

-Sheba

Posted: Thu May 26, 2005 12:17 pm
by Maximus3D
Pretty nice rendering to be your first one :)
But i'm curious to how it can take you months to model that in Rhino, as i see it it'd take 20 min tops..

/ Max

Posted: Thu May 26, 2005 3:00 pm
by Micha
Sheba,

very nice images. Also you could try a denoiser like neatimage (demo). It could improve the image. Also, you could try to render the image in double size in "low quality" mode, than denoise it and scale it down to the half size. This could help to get less noise and a good resolution of the edges in the same time.

-Micha

Posted: Thu May 26, 2005 3:19 pm
by Frances
That's beautiful. And an excellent render. I agree that we need color control for the metals. Doesn't gold have a paler color the lower the karot - 24 k being more red and 10k very pale?

Here's a cheap trick you might want to play with. Use the plastic material and use the same hue for your specular color.

Image

Posted: Thu May 26, 2005 8:03 pm
by bathsheba
Maximus3D wrote:Pretty nice rendering to be your first one :)
But i'm curious to how it can take you months to model that in Rhino, as i see it it'd take 20 min tops..
So true. I probably should have been a ditch-digger.

Here it is again at 8 hours, and on the right shrunk and leveled again:
Image Image
I made these changes:
to get rid of the DOF, shorter lens, higher-numbered f-stop, longer exposure
to make the glass show better, lightened the purple a bit and used 16 bounces instead of 6
changed units to meters since I gather that's what Rhinoll wants
tilted the ground plane more so it could be a lot smaller

Shrinking the ground plane speeded things up: the image is less noisy in the same amount of time, even though there are more bounces. Now the only bad part is the caustics on the ground plane.

As to lighting, it has a physical sky, with a gray plane hanging above the object to prevent sky reflections from making the top of the object blue. I know you were dying to know that. :-)

I think this is pretty much a wrap, as far as this version of the software goes.

-Sheba

Posted: Thu May 26, 2005 8:15 pm
by bathsheba
Frances wrote:I agree that we need color control for the metals. Doesn't gold have a paler color the lower the karot - 24 k being more red and 10k very pale?
Yes. In my first render of these the gold color looks like 14K, i.e. brassy. In the second render it doesn't look quite right for any alloy: it's too saturated for a low karat, but not exactly like 24K. To my eye it looks even more like cheese than it did before...more environment to reflect would probably help that.
Frances wrote: Here's a cheap trick you might want to play with. Use the plastic material and use the same hue for your specular color.
Looks like porcelain to my eye, not to yours? People around here do tend to use plastic materials in place of metal, and there are so many more controls for plastics that it ought to work, but somehow it never looks right to me.

-Sheba

Posted: Thu May 26, 2005 8:29 pm
by nik_h
Hi Bathsheba,

Beautiful work as ever. I'm not sure if you remember, but you kindly let me print off some of your designs on our 3D Printer at Strathclyde University in Glasgow a few years ago. It's really nice to see some of your work again.

Cheers,

Nik Herbert

Posted: Thu May 26, 2005 8:30 pm
by Micha
Sheba,

if you like, you could render the scene without caustics. I'm curious to see the difference. Maybe, you don't need caustics in this scene so much and you get less noise on the ground.

Posted: Thu May 26, 2005 9:58 pm
by Frances
bathsheba wrote:Looks like porcelain to my eye, not to yours? People around here do tend to use plastic materials in place of metal, and there are so many more controls for plastics that it ought to work, but somehow it never looks right to me.

-Sheba
Just the red one was what I referring to. I'm thinking cheap Christmas ornament. I did say cheap. :P

For "physically correct" shader, the gold is not very correct is it?

Posted: Thu May 26, 2005 11:46 pm
by Tyrone Marshall
Bathsheba, I just read through some of process for how you create your work and I am wondering if you have had a chance to look at a software called Zbrush?

It seems like this would allow you to main your artist hand sculpture process much more naturally when modeling in 3D.

You can get a demo I believe at www.pixologic.com. I absolutely love the program and plan to do more with it once Maxwell Render matures more, and a little plugin magic is worked. As I am one of those with the idea and vision but not quite the the digital tools yet to make those things something to be seen. Things are getting close.

Anyways, have a look at Zbrush!

Posted: Fri May 27, 2005 6:49 am
by bathsheba
nik_h wrote:Hi Bathsheba,
Beautiful work as ever. I'm not sure if you remember, but you kindly let me print off some of your designs on our 3D Printer at Strathclyde University in Glasgow a few years ago. It's really nice to see some of your work again.
Well, small world! I hope you're still 3D-printing -- the technology advances slowly but steadily.

-S.