My personal 3D-Blog

Impact (WIP)

Hi there!

It´s quite some time ago since my last post, but work kept me really busy. But anyway, here are some clips showing what I´m currently working on in my rare free time....

Impact02_WIP from Mel Bellatrix on Vimeo.

(sorry for the low quality, but it´s just a testrender)

Impact01_WIP from Mel Bellatrix on Vimeo.

Global illumination, Final Gather, Daylight System, Image based lighting....

...lighting a architectural scene can become a lot of work. To speed up this process I usually use almost the same basic setup for most of my scenes which is a combination of a daylight system and HDR-image based lighting in conjuction with Final Gather and Global Illumination.
If I find the time, I´ll post a quick tutorial on how to setup a scene like this. Until then, here are some shots of a scene that I ´ll use for my upcoming Showreel 2010 which I hopefully finished at the end of summer.
(Sorry for the low image-quality but higher final gather-values results in much longer render times which I´ll save for the final render)

Wacom-Pen with stand.

Organizer (modeled in max, detailed in ZBrush. But at this level of quality the details are not really seeable)

Unfinished Office with no textures at all! But I´m quite happy with the lighting so far, except for the lower right corner. Somehow the global illumination is´nt lighting this spot properly...

UPDATE
Due to a lack of time here´s just a small update with textures and a slightly optimized lighting (the black hole in the table is on purpose for later compositing-effects)

Material based illumination using MR

I did a few tests with material based lighting the last few days which I think is the most challenging thing in 3D-lighting. I saw a lot of nice pictures and videos around the web showing great lume-materials using VRay or third party-plugins and wonder if mental ray is´nt capable of such a nice effect. Short answer: It is!

There are NO lights at all in this scene. The overall illumination comes from the materials itself using mental rays lume shader! I´ll post some more shots the next few days....

Preview of a game-charakter

Hi again!

A few weeks ago I did a draft version of a game-character for an italian Movie-Director who´s working on a Left4Dead-movie adaption. But it´s just the blank model without any detailing or textures, so nothing special. But I´d like to show it to you anyway, so here it is....

Rendered with mental ray in about 1 minute. No post processing.

I don´t think that I will touch this model ever again, because it was just meant as a little preview. If I ever will model any of these charakters again, than in a much more photorealistic way and from the start optimized for animation.

Cya next time!

Child´s room

Because every hamster needs a home I decided to build him one. And even if it´s a little girls room it will be fun modeling all the toys! The hardest thing will be to reach this warm and cozy ambience that most child rooms have.

First thing after modeling the main-furniture.....

...was to fix the render errors on the carpet. So I made a little testscene to speed up this process
(rendered under mental ray)

The testscene worked right away from the start perfect, with mr-lights so I guessed that the photometric freelight produced the bad result in the main scene. But without photometric lights the scene looks really ugly compared to the first render :-((
Hopefully I´ll find a way to combine the Hair&Fur with photometric lights. Otherwise I have to fake a lot.

Hope to see you next time with a useable solution....

EDIT: Ok...the renderproblem with the carpet was´nt caused by the photometric light. In fact, you are facing soo many problems if you use mental ray for rendering H&F that it´s just not worth the trouble. I´ll render the hair later with the scanline-renderer and add it in the post to the scene. But I did a test with the HairFarm-Demo and it worked absolutly flawless. Too bad I don´t have 800 bucks left in my cookie jar :-/

(rendered under mental ray)
But at least I did overwork the lighting. The light from the corridor is a little brighter and the moonlight creates now a nice diffuse blue around the window. Maybe it´s still a little to subtle, but I don´t want to overdo it to keep the warm ambience.

Hamster

Hi there!

It´s quite some time ago since I´ve modeled something organic so I decided to do so. My wife, who owns two hamster, gave somehow the direction to this project ;-)
My main attention was in mastering the Hair&Fur-System in 3ds max, which still can be quite a pain in the *** ;-) But the only real alternative to the build in Hair-System is "HairFarm" from Cyberradiance which at least cost 700$. Far to much for Non-Professionals :-((

^This is the low poly-hamster mesh (1998 Polys)^. Not perfect because there are a few triangles and the edge flow could still be a little smoother for animation, but hey....I´m still learning with every new model and every day ;-)

^Smoothed Version with final Hairstyle^. The final rendered version will contain almost twice as much hairs for a denser an more fluffy look. The problem with the H&F-Modifier is that it crashes 3ds max if the haircount is to high. So I used a second hamster-mesh, collapsed it into 8 smaller meshes which are driven by a skin wrap-modifier and added a seperate H&F-Modifier to each of them. This way the final haircount can be much higher than with a single H&F-Modifier.
But be warned: Skin Wrap in combination with H&F and meshsmooth is tricky to handle with animation!!!

Hamster Bone_System from Mel Bellatrix on Vimeo.

^Bone-System^
Test and preview of the bone-system using spline-helper. The skin-stretching looks quite nice so far, especially around the neck and chin-area. But the overall envelope-blending is not soft enough yet and may need a little more tweeking. But I´m not sure if I´ll ever animate this hamster, so I´ll leave it like it is for now.

^Draft body and facial animation-test^
I´ve made a little test-animation to make sure that the bone-system, the hair-objects attached with skin wrap and the facial animation-system (morpher) works well together.

Hamster Hair_Test from Mel Bellatrix on Vimeo.

^Hairflow-test^
Because it takes so much time to render dense hair I just did a quick test with the head if the hair would move and stretch correct with the skin

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This hamster really took me some time because of the buggy hairsystem in max. The styling tools are hard to control and the build in undo-function is quite useless because it just don´t work most of the times. But like always, I´ve learned a lot and it was a lot of fun building this little fellow :-)

Palm House

While my Patio de la Acequia-Scene (see below) is on ice I decided to do a little less complicated scene. This one is´nt my best work, but still I learned a lot and that´s the most important thing - I guess ;-)

^Final shot! (rendered with mental ray)^
I´m not quite happy with the lighting, and the sunloungers are far to big compared to the people. Furthermore the grass is far to green and even and the furniture in the upper floor looks kinda flat due to a bad lighting, I guess.