[bathsheba]

Well, looks like you know all about STL and wax rapidprototyping... so if they pay, give 'em what they want!

I'd love to...just as soon as I can figure out how to get a smooth polish or paint job on the bits that are impossible to reach. It looks simple, but there's no RP process that can do it.

PS, it's not really a mathematical model, I just drew it.

Really? Now I bow in your general direction! That is VERY impressive. What are you modelling in?

For this one, Rhino all the way. It's not a very sophisticated model -- certainly I could never match the furniture, shoes and so forth that I see on these groups -- but I hope it will be a good example of my particular obsession. Have to see how the metal print goes.

-Sheba

[bathsheba]

The problem I think is not really thin sharp speculars, but thin lines (in general) that are almost horizontal or vertical:

That could be true; I notice it particularly in speculars because of the high contrast. Anyway, all the same to me, so long as it gets fixed. Now that I've noticed this, I see it in a lot of images.

I'm sure that it would work to render everything 3 or 4 times larger than life, but given how slow Maxwell already is, that's not really going to solve the problem for me. I can let a 10-hour render run overnight, but I can't tie up a machine for 20 or 30 hours.

So one possible "fix" for now would be to slightly rotate the camera in either direction.
Bathsheba, could you please try and see if that takes care of those lines in your particular example? Just rotate the camera say 10-15°. The canvas can easily be straightened later in PS.

I'll try it, but won't that just transfer the problem to whichever highlights become nearly horizontal after the rotation? This object is not as extreme as your test case, but it does have a lot of highlights in different directions.

Regarding this particular image, I was planning to change the lighting setup anyway. I see now that using a simple one-poly emitter, with an object that is shiny enough to reflect it, leads to ugly highlights. I made this image to test using an MXI emitter map as an environment. Now I'll try drawing a fuzzy "sun" into the map, rather than using a separate emitter. If that works, it should produce softer highlights.

Thanks everyone for your suggestions,

[bathsheba]

So one possible "fix" for now would be to slightly rotate the camera in either direction.
Bathsheba, could you please try and see if that takes care of those lines in your particular example? Just rotate the camera say 10-15°. The canvas can easily be straightened later in PS.

I'll try it, but won't that just transfer the problem to whichever highlights become nearly horizontal after the rotation?

That's what happened. I overwrote the image by mistake, but rotating the camera just relocated the jaggies.

-Sheba

[Mihai]

Yes, that accured to me too I was looking mainly on the reflections in the middle of your object, but for the ones on top it would only displace the jaggies.

Perhaps another solution besides rendering at 4x or larger size is to render one with only a diffuse, or very little reflection, composite the one with strong reflection over it and just delete or blur carefully where the jaggies appear. Not very elegant but hopefully the NL guys will come up with some filtering method.

Btw, I really like your sculptures, very beautiful and inspirational

Using the shapes as lamps is also a great idea, are you going to make more of those? Are the lamps made with plastic powder, no flexibility in them?

[oscarMaxwell]

Perhaps another solution besides rendering at 4x or larger size is to render one with only a diffuse, or very little reflection, composite the one with strong reflection over it and just delete or blur carefully where the jaggies appear. Not very elegant but hopefully the NL guys will come up with some filtering method.

Yes, of course. You don't worry, I'll fix it as soon as possible.

Best reagards.

[bathsheba]

I think I misunderstood the scale of some of your work... other then employing very small people with sandpaper on their fingertips, what about using the wax deposition technique, and flaming the surface where you cannot reach? Still probably not satisfying. Rapid prototyping still has a ways to go.

Yup, we're all waiting for .0001" resolution, and .005" is the best we get. (Wax printers will do .002", but only in tiny models.) I would like to hire those small people...or the other option would be to make the stuff 10 feet tall. But that has its own set of problems, mostly to do with funding.

I think you are surpassing many users here with your ability – don't sell yourself short! Anyone who is as obsessed as you appear to be (in a very nice way of course) will be great at what they do :D

Thank you, obsession is the correct word. I'm a monument to the virtue of specialization: if you want to be in the top 20 at what you do, pick a subject with 19 people in it. :-)

ObMaxwell: This is the latest version of my image:

That's about 3 hours, looks like it would need several more to clear out the reflections. Maybe it's overexposed, and it has a problem in front where two surfaces are not tangent matched. But I'm pleased with the lighting. And I like that the scene setup is extremely simple:

The dome is an emitter with an MXI map, and there's no environment lighting. If we could apply envmaps to the sky it would be even simpler, but I can deal with this.

-Sheba

[bathsheba]

Perhaps another solution besides rendering at 4x or larger size is to render one with only a diffuse, or very little reflection, composite the one with strong reflection over it and just delete or blur carefully where the jaggies appear. Not very elegant but hopefully the NL guys will come up with some filtering method.

Looks like they're on it. :-)

Btw, I really like your sculptures, very beautiful and inspirational :)
Using the shapes as lamps is also a great idea, are you going to make more of those? Are the lamps made with plastic powder, no flexibility in them?

Thank you. The lamps are made of a nylon material which is quite tough: it can flex and recover, and it doesn't break easily. The lamps are made under a licensing agreement with Materialise. I'm making more designs which I hope they'll produce, but it's their decision.

Maxwell is perfect for designing lamps: it's the only renderer which actually predicts what the light will do.

-Sheba

[Micha]

The rendering and the object are great ... do some body have see the stripes in the white background? I get this stripe noise pattern sometimes. Is this a known bug?

[bathsheba]

The rendering and the object are great ... do some body have see the stripes in the white background? I get this stripe noise pattern sometimes. Is this a known bug?

There is a bump map of very narrow vertical stripes applied to the background. So if that's what you're seeing, it is really there. :-)

-Sheba