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.