Critique Please

[J_Bug]

Just wanted to get a critique of one of the many personal projects I've been working on. Just a small section of some city with a few cars in it. I'm currently modeling a car for the close-ups but I just wanted to see if anyone had some input on the environment. There will be other scenes in this animation, this is just the first I've set up for testing purposes.

I guess what I'm basicly trying to figure out is if this would be a good quality to present, as a demo, to a small production company that might be hiring. just trying to get a base of work together for future jobs.

www.dtoxx.com/J_Bug/CityMotion_08.avi

Here is the close-up car in it's initial stages. I still have allot of work to do on the model.

www.dtoxx.com/J_Bug/P911GT3.jpg


Thanks in advance
--Jon

[percydaman]

i think its looking really good but the avi is so short that its kinda hard to get a handle on anything...maybe some good still shots would be helpful. I liked what I saw so far though!

[RErender]

Looking good, the paint material is working very well. The GT model is coming along very nicely too

The critique I have is that the car looks much better then the scene, I imagine you still plan on working on the mats , if you get those to the level of the car it's going to be awesome.

[trixian]

Atmosphere

You could maybe add some slight hazing to the enironment. Just pick the darkest colour of your bg\sky as the hazing colour. Maybe some more secondary bounces to get more detail into the shaded areas.

[mauarduz]

i agree with rerender, id make all monochrome materials on the scene till finnish the car and then do the background, its very distrating as it is

very nice car

:O)

mauarduz

[J_Bug]

Thanks all very helpful and I'll be using all the suggestions.

percydaman: I should have posted a longer one but this was my most recent test. I'm hoping to splice together a bunch of these quick shots but it all depends on how lazy I get I'll get together some stills once I introduce the new model into the environment.

RErender: thanks again for helping me find that sheet it has been extremely valuable. Would you be more specific on where the materials are lacking? These are all low res maps downloaded from the web and basically applied to boxes with some masks and falloff created for the reflections. Do you think I should consider modeling them in more detail?

trixian: Thanks for this comment, I did some tests with atmosphere but I never know where to start with environment unless I want something extreme like fog. The darkest color tip makes sense and is a great trick Can't wait to try this one.

mauarduz: Good point to work with it this way. How is it distracting now? Is the environment too saturated? Or are you talking about the blue/green Porsche being distracting?

All of this will help and is very inspiring . BTW The car is coming along good but slow. Here is a quick update.


www.dtoxx.com/J_Bug/P911GT3_02.jpg

[Da_elf]

hey! we have warned you about posting photographs in here. we are going to have to kick this forum for going against the rules hehehe
sweet render mr J.

[trixian]

Hazing

What I usually do for "clear sunny day" hazing is set the environment start plane...(let's pretend your scene is in 1:1 scale), maybe just 2-3 meters away from the camera. The end plane i usually place at the last visible object in the scene before the bg\sky akes over. Then i check the exponential box in the environment dialogue, and set the fog percent\ammount to something between 10-20 %. This has to be adjusted depending on the size of your scene (unless I'm mistaken, I can't check as I have no max here).
Another thing to remember is that max's atmospherics doesnt take into consideration light values brighter than the clamped value through atmospherics.....so you may have to make the hazing a bit more subtle so the hazing doesn't kill any small hilights you may have in the distance.
(And always make sure no object affected by the fog\hazing ends up brighter or more saturated than the darkest most saturated part of the environment).

[J_Bug]

Hey!!! Thanks Elf... I see how it is

Thanks again trixian I had everything working except for the camera environment planes. I always forget these parameters exist but they help to control the gradation so much more.

One thing I'm wondering though is why you chose to use exponential. I know what the term represents mathematically but in the max help file it states that this should really only be used with transparent objects. I wonder why this would be the case.

I'll post some new renderings soon.

--Jon

[trixian]

Exponential

To be honest, I don't really have a good reason as to why I use it, I just prefer the way it distributes the fog\haze. The word it self indicates (at least in my mind) that the fog\haze gets more dense exponentially, as opposed it being linear. I may ofcourse be completely wrong, but the fact remains that I've had more luck with it on. Actually I find it quite puzzling as to why a checkbox called "exponential" would help with opacity, mapped objects.... maybe someone can give me a technical explanation?