[mverta]

_Mike

[Aniki]

Top notch! Like expected...
Thanks for sharing these, Mike!

Looking forward for more...

[joaomourao]

Amazed with the front of the car! The reflection and imperfect surface is so real... I guess the only thing we can see that could get better is the SL...
Great images as always Mike!

[jfrancis]

Daaaaaaaamn!

(and since it came up) I don't even notice the slight noise here and there. It makes it look more photographic to me.

Beautiful attention to subtle textural detail.

[fcoltro]

This must be at autodesk fake or photo as photo!

[hatts]

That moment I realized my skills have a long way to go:

[eric nixon]

It feels great to log-in and see something mind-blowing. Thankyou, its very motivating.

Loving the way the bump map & anisotopy sync together on the track render, and the car wheel are doing something similar, very nice.

Also the smeary spec on the front of the car, really not sure how thats done, cool.

[numerobis]

very nice photos!

[mverta]

I have a rule: if a feature is going be used, it's going to be mapped.

I don't use solid colors; I don't use a single roughness value; I don't use a single layer opacity value; I don't use fixed angles.

Nothing in reality is perfect - no solid color is absolutely solid; no surface is absolutely uniformly rough. The greasy specular stuff exists on virtually every material I make, because it's on everything I touch. Sometimes it's more subtle than other times, but you simply can't overestimate the value of all these little imperfections. It goes without saying that my geometry is always similarly imperfect. I don't have perfect angles; I don't duplicate objects without heavily modifying the copies. I don't use snap aligns, I don't even model to ortho snaps. I do it by hand and by eye, and in my attempts to be perfect, the models are always gloriously imperfect, as reality is. Even the most rigidly machined product has visible inconsistencies and tolerances. It's the layers of ambient complexity, building up, which help sell the final image.

Another of my Rendering Commandments: Thou Shalt Not Use Thy Eye to Judge Materials. Use reference photos, only. Remember, in Maxwell, we are not recreating reality, we're recreating photographed reality, and a camera sees the world differently than our eyes do. I have this little toy car sitting next to me in my office. Looking at it with my eye, it looks different than the render does (not night and day, but still...). But take a picture of it, and it matches the render precisely. I have a number of HDRIs that I subject my materials to, which I have come to trust, and in the end, because Maxwell is recreating the look of low-dynamic-range capture devices (cameras), their images have to be our guides.

[jfrancis]

Nothing in reality is perfect -

It's amazing to me how many times, and I've had conversations about this with other people before, how many subtle imperfections I've worked in to things that have been noticed and removed by clients, even visual effects supervisors, who explain that "their product needs to be portrayed as perfect," or "why would you do that?" or whatever...

Maybe I'm not as subtle as I think. Or maybe I need to work at better places where that level of attention is not only tolerated but encouraged.

[eric nixon]

Just wanted to know which 'angles' are not fixed, I didnt get that bit. Aniso angle?? Then how to control those maps?, I tend to fudge them...

Anyway thanks, was a good sermon

I'm also a big fan of introducing 'controlled randomness', but I'm lazy so its applied mostly as opportunity dictates, weather its modelling, texturing, or movement.

[jfrancis]

Just wanted to know which 'angles' are not fixed, I didnt get that bit. Aniso angle?? Then how to control those maps?, I tend to fudge them...

I think he meant if he uses anisotropy it will be mapped and not a single fixed angle.

[joaomourao]

Mike, two great advices for us to focus on! Many thanks... I will use them!
In a sense, you say that everything is unique in our real world... but working with computers it is easy to do the opposite! So true!
Another easy mistake is to use the eye (we do it for everything) instead of real photographs...

Mike, you are making our job even more difficult!
Cheers!

[mverta]

Nothing in reality is perfect -

It's amazing to me how many times, and I've had conversations about this with other people before, how many subtle imperfections I've worked in to things that have been noticed and removed by clients, even visual effects supervisors, who explain that "their product needs to be portrayed as perfect," or "why would you do that?" or whatever...

This is the general argument I hear, that clients want an idealized, perfect version of their products. But that's a conceptual statement, not art direction. It doesn't mean literally, "perfect," it means it feels perfect. That's a subtle, but important difference. I work for the same big clients as anybody else, and it's never been a problem, but I'm careful about where and how I realize the level of imperfection. Certainly, you have to be aware of the aggregate nature of every element in the frame - are you using a simple plane emitter, or an hdr of an actual light source? That sort of thing adds up quickly and makes a big difference. But also, take a look at a factory-showroom car - there is pooling of the clearcoat around all the edges of the panels and doors; it fucks with the reflection, is totally unavoidable, and is on every photo of every car ever taken in the history of man. I have yet to see anyone replicate this one of many subtleties in a render, and it's a perfect example of the kind of imperfection you can add, nobody will notice, but will take the render to another level. So I think you're right it may be about what you do, and where. Certainly, those subtle geometric inconsistencies are almost impossible to detect when done correctly, but make all the difference.



Take a look at the shell model, and notice the warping along the sides, etc. It's actually warped everywhere, but it's not easy to see in the openGL shading. The original CAD files of course didn't have this - I added this, because the actual cars have this if you look. It warps and distorts all the reflections; makes a huge, huge difference. It's like when people model office buildings and all the glass panels are straight. Have you ever looked at a building? The windows are all fucked up. They all look like house-of-mirror gags in a circus. If we're not capturing that; if we're making huge blatant deletions of things which are in reality 24/7; if we're getting off to such an obviously bad start, how do we expect to end up with it real in the end?

This car model is going to be animated, so it's well past what was necessary for the shots it's going to be used in. But for my final version, there is still quite a bit of tweaking to be done - a few texture stretching things here and there that need to be corrected, the wheels bent a touch, that sort of thing. Every little bit helps. The devil is in the details.

Thanks, everyone, for the kind words!


_Mike

[joaomourao]

The devil is in the details.

Nice updated sentence by Mies! They are both everywhere

As for buildings I guess it is harder to make things imperfect... We tend to have loads of geometry pieces but the most visible ones could be edited like window glass etc...
Cheers!