Example Images

[Andrew West]

Tim

Thanks for the tip on the Adobe models.  I took a look at those and found them to be pretty primitive.  Even the premium ones seem a little crude, especially for $20 each.  I like to use 3D Sky for most of my imported models.  They are all $6 each and some are really fantastic.    When I absolutely can't find what I need there I will go to TurboSquid which is pricey but excellent.  Now it is worth reminding everyone that Anton has been trying to put together a 3D model site for us here using Form.z.  I have put a few in there but it would really take the whole community chipping in to fill that site with a wide variety of usable models.  It is just a bit of a time commitment to package things up and upload them.  Maybe I can add a lot more during the next major recession. 

AW

[Jaakko]

Here is one design for recycling box for the old eyeglasses. Unfortunately it didn't end up to production.

[rmulley]

On 8/21/2019 at 9:06 AM, Jaakko said:

Here is one design for recycling box for the old eyeglasses. Unfortunately it didn't end up to production.

This is great.... how did you do the texturing on the rope handle ?

[Jaakko]

Thanks!

1. Do a nurbs curve. 2 Make a cylinder = thickness of rope. 3. Give it a cylinder texture. 4. Change texture to a UV coordinates (Edit Texture Tool). 5. Then use Bend Along Path tool to a cylinder, the rope texture should now follow nicely the curves. 

Hope this helps

Edited August 23, 2019 by Jaakko

[johnalexander1571]

Here is a simple composite I just did. The AC unit is a photo, the mounting hardware is what we sell here at our company. I do a lot of stuff like this.

 

Disclaimer... the AC part is a Getty Image that my company purchased the rights to, so please don't use this image for any reason.

Edited August 26, 2019 by johnalexander1571

[Jaakko]

Very nice. Really hard to say which parts are rendered and what is a photo.

[allanjl]

Very nice work! Are the pebbles also rendered?

 

[johnalexander1571]

Yes, I used the S-Scatter tool for those. There are about 24,000. I have a powerful machine. I will tweak my recipe next time, I didn't do enough variation in the scale of the stones. I would do some more texture variation as well.

[Andrew West]

It has been a while since posting anything here so I want to see if we can keep this going.  The point being that the more we show people what the capabilities of Form.z and V-ray are the more attention the program will get.  That in turn could lead to more sales and money for development.  So here is another little project I have been working on lately. 

 

[Jaakko]

Very nice rendering Andrew. Very convincing. How you did the snow to the roofs?

[Andrew West]

Photoshop.  Some of it was from photos I had taken and some was just painted in.  It is often hard to know when to stop wasting time modeling and just leave it for post production.  It is just important to organize your work so that any post production work can be reapplied to models as they evolve (which happens constantly).

[timgarner_10]

Very nice rendering Andrew!! Looks pretty dang real to me, especially with all the subtle details.

[Andrew West]

Thanks

It is the subtle little details that are always the difference in photo realism.  Dirt and defects being the major one.  Texture alignment and repetition is the other.  It takes surprisingly little time to dirty up a model using the right PS brushes

[rmulley]

Been quiet in here lately.... 

[Andrew West]

Nice images.  How are you applying the decals?

 More examples will hopefully help build our little community. Here is one of mine. The nice thing about this image is that no matter how many lights I throw in the mix it still renders fairly quickly. 

[allanjl]

Very nice Andrew. I suppose the image you posted is also done in the way they've asked you. Very well lit, no strong shadows. Real estate purposes. 

Below is my design for a custom home. Thankfully, I'm not required to light up the building the same way. I like to render with strong shadows to show the three dimensional quality of the design, and the end user is fine with it.

[johnalexander1571]

One I just finished last week. Learned about chromatic aberration on this one.

 

[allanjl]

Cool! I'll look that up.

[Andrew West]

Very nice image and effect.  Could you share your settings on this for everyone else?

Thanks

[johnalexander1571]

Actually, the setting I used for this render are mostly the default settings. I did turn on AO, but I have not seen the effect in my renders. I set the depth of field distance in inches to where I wanted the clear portion of the image. Quality was .005 to get the noise free depth of field.

Chromatic aberration is a little trick I ran into recently trying to learn more about mimicking photos. Sometimes, (I am not sure under what conditions yet) cameras displace the red, blue, and green channels. I saw a tutorial on YouTube where the presenter used the Lens Correction in Photoshop to offset the three channels from each other. I just drag the sliders a little bit off center.

 

[johnalexander1571]

Oh yeah, the other number one trick I used on this was to create a sphere that surrounds the scene, then map an industrial HDRI to the inside of it. This causes the reflections on the metal to come from this rather than a single colored background. Also, this allows my VRay point lights to bounce around inside the sphere and on my scene making it look better. I have to keep turning this on and off as I work, but I put it on a layer and it's not too bad. I don't use the HDRI for the light sources at all, however. I go ahead and light with spheres to get the more dramatic effect I really want.

I add VRay sphere lights like crazy to get the effects I want because as Andrew notes, lots of lights seem to render quite quickly.

[rmulley]

On 11/19/2019 at 9:19 AM, johnalexander1571 said:

"create a sphere that surrounds the scene, then map an industrial HDRI to the inside of it. This causes the reflections on the metal to come from this rather than a single colored background."

This stood out for me.... I've been trying to get a texture to be reflected in something but still have a white background but it never worked for me so I'm just wondering what this is actually for....

 

[johnalexander1571]

Hi Richard,

I have tried to do it that way, but there are two differences, I think. I get unexpected see-thru of objects when I turn on this Reflection channel. The other difference I believe is (but I could be wrong) is that my sphere lights bounce off of the inside of the "actual" object sphere and due to the GI calcs I think some of the colors are reflected back onto the scene in addition to the reflections. I try to make the sphere just large enough to work inside. I think that feature makes a sphere that doesn't really exist as far a s GI goes. This trick gets different mileage depending on the situation.

I suppose this is just another way of turning on HDRI lighting and reflections, but I get the unexpected see-thru and I never like the HDRI lighting, so I do my own lights.

[johnalexander1571]

I think those channels are all independent too, for example the reflection channel of it only affects reflections, it doesn't change the background you see. I think you have to have both background and reflections loaded to see the background and reflections too. You probably know that already, forgive me if you knew. I know you've been at this long time.

[Andrew West]

I will add one more piece of information to this.  I have found that when using the environment override tabs the default multiplier of 1 needs to be bumped up considerably.  Sometimes I set it to 8 or more.  But the results are not great as I find the reflections to be pretty blurry.   When mapping a sphere for reflections in my scene you can control exactly how the map is positioned for your reflections.  Speaking of reflections, I always set a material ID color and use that channel to adjust in Photoshop later.  This is how I place reflections on glass for architectural scenes.  Much more accurate

Also, with HDRI lighting to get good atmospheric light I set light planes around my scene and really bump up the intensity of the light to 80 or so.