Some of my work. Comments Welcome

[Thox]

Hello Everyone,

I present below some of my work from the last two or so years. I would be grateful for any feedback on these images and any improvements you think may be necessary, good or bad.

Regards

Thox

[Thox]

[Thox]

[Thox]

[Thox]

[digtlpete]

First off I would like to say that you have some nice stuff going on in these renderings. For the most part I think the buildings look pretty nice. The area that I think your images are lacking in is the parking areas and landscaping. Since the parking area is such a dominate feature in the images I would spend some more time developing the asphalt and striping textures. As far as the landscaping is concerned I think it would help to generate some displaced grass. I'm sure if you searched this forum you could find a good tutorial. Also I think some better tree models would be helpfull. All in all I would say that your images look clean and professional and with some work on textures, and lighting they could look fantastic. I hope this helps.

-Brian

[sea2stars]

Agreed. With some changes to your texturing and entourage you'd have a significant increase in quality:

- numerous texture tiling issues that really detract from the images
- possibly ditch those cars for anything close
- try some different trees; if you're looking for something free, Google Arbaro
- same comments about the grass and parking areas
- possibly a different light setup in some of the shots; more contrast

[Thox]

Thanks for commenst guys, much appreciated. I take your points about texturing, entourage, etc.

With regards to the grass, these are displaced, in fact I'm using daforces grass textures, in this image

http://www.temail.co.uk/images/Image10.jpg

You can see the grass being displaced. Although I agree it doesn't give the best look, any seetings help would be appreciated. I generally use 2d displacement, with an amount of 100 with a -10 shift, with a uv map of 4000.

Some advice on car park texturing and lining would be helpful. At the moment I am using an aspalt texture with poly's to mark out the line markings. Not the most effecient, but gets the job done. I have tried Unwrapping the car park surfaces before and painting them in Photoshop, but I can't see to get the texture to work as it comes back into max all pixelated.???

The trees are from Bionatics, personally I thought they were ok, but will look at other options, suggestions welcome...

I am using low polygon cars from Lowpolgon3d, again I thought these were acceptable, but if you have any suggestions regarding these I would be grateful. Except of course RPC cars, have used in some of the images, but they are generally memory intensive.

I take your point about the tiling issue with the textures. I would like some help/advice with this if possible. How do you go about breaking up the tiling affect? I have tried using a mix map with an overlay to break up the pattern, but that only works within that square. How do I get the overlay to work on the whole textured area rather than the initial texture itself?

Lighting is something I am always tweaking and improving on.

Many Thanks for your comments, more advice and comments would be welcome.

Regards

Thox

[shelsby]

thox

good images though I agree with many of the points raised earlier - guess you're well in with Tesco then!!

Cars - try sugar 3D, great models - i used to use the low poly cars but they just don't cut the mustard anymore.

For trees, i normally use proxied versions of evermotion foliage, either that or onyx.

cheers

steve

[sea2stars]

Parking lots - Yeah, I tend to use polys for my line markings too. As for texturing, I rarely use just one texture, but end up having 3 or more mixed together, along with some masks for small cracks, patches, etc. If you unwrap a parking lot, you're going to need a fairly high res image in Photoshop for it not to come out pixelated when rendered.

Bionatics trees? Odd. Some of them almost remind me of the standard trees that come with Max. It may just be a matter of texturing, lighting and filling some of them in better.

Anything low poly I tend to use only for medium to long distance shots, and there's just something about those cars. Overexposed? Oversaturated? If you have the time there are plenty of free/cheap, quality 3D vehicle models out there to start a library with. Of course there are also expensive car model packages too. Are you using proxy objects? For a parking lot and a handful of cars to populate it with, they are a beautiful thing.

Texture tiling - I guess it depends. You can mix 2-3 textures; using noise or a grunge map. Some of my materials are many levels deep. For anything repetitive (masonry, flooring, etc) I usually go procedural and create a large texture using the Tile Map plus some noise. You can also create your own textures. For some of my grass textures I use fairly large images.

Hopefully some of the gurus will pipe in too. This is all a learning experience for everyone and I'd love to hear other peoples views too.

[Thox]

Again, thanks for the all the comments, all very helpful.

With regards to textures, what size images are you using? As you can see from the images above, some of the car parks are quite big so size texture do you think I need for these large areas. I currently use a 512 x 512 texture, which is obviously repeated. If I were to include mask for cracks and the like, this would also be repeated in the pattern, so how do I overcome this?

Many Thanks

Nick

[sea2stars]

A 512 x 512 texture should be fine. I guess there's going to be a pattern regardless, it's a matter of making it less apparent. For masks I sometimes use a large image file, a grayscale PNG to cutdown on the image size. I'll also tile my textures to various degrees, modify their brightness and then mix them using a noise or grunge map.

Here's a WIP from a project a few months ago.

Again. I'm sure there's better ways.

[paulison]

Hey Thox. Thanks for sharing your work.

I'm not a guru or anything, just a pretty average vray-er but thought of a few things.

regarding textures, sometimes the ones that tile really bad can be fixed by manually fudging the texture up in photoshop a bit. copy, mirror, rotate etc to be twice the size so that the edges mirror into the other edge of the texture. The problem is that this adds a seperate tiling effect from the mirroring, so you usually need to use the clone tool to mix things up. You may already use this method though.

Sorry to say this but in general i think your images look slightly flat but i don't really know why. Maybe rendering at a higher resolution with different GI settings may help, but i have a feeling that its a combination of flat textured materials without enough 'effects' going on combined with the actual designs (which you cant help, right!?). Hopefully someone can elaborate a bit on this.

Id say that your work is about 80% of the way there but as i also encounter the same problem, jobs generally dont seem to allow the time and budget to get it up to the 90-95% level that people want to reach. So considering this, I think your work is quite good and i can relate to many of the perceived issues others have mentioned which are generally only picked up by the real pro's in the industry. My clients dont usually care anyway :P

just lastly, I've used some suga-3D cars and find them to be a bit plasticy so if you use them you will need to correct some of the materials used (IMHO). I tend to use other cars even though we own quite a few