Cafe Bawag

[Pif]

Hi,

this is my recent project. I am still not quite happy with 2D parts of the image (people, bottles) but I think that overally it looks good for 3-day work.

I?ll post my settings tomorrow if time permits.

Pif

[Micha_cg]

Cafe Bawag

Good work.

I'm curious to know: which GI modes did you use and which parameters? The render time looks so long.

[tkyte]

Very nice

Very nice indeed.
But your right, the people do look flat.

Ted

[FOG Lite]

Vampires? At a cafe in the afternoon?

Give them peeps some shadows! Reflections! It's like they've sold their soul or something. (I get busted for this frequently (not the soul-selling bit, being too lazy/ rushed to give everything proper shadows and reflections in PS.)

The rendering is great though, you're right, very good for a couple days work. I would be interested in seeing your settings as well.

[Micha_cg]

Cafe Bawag

... I would try to turn the people a little bit in dir to the windows. So, a shadow and light on the people could come. But I'm not sure it will work.

[Pif]

Cafe Bawag

2 all: thanks for your comments. Personally I hate people in architectural renders but client wanted me to put them into the scene At first I used lowres 3D seated people and they didn?t look bad but from certain point something in the scene went wrong and their UV coordinates were damaged. They started to render with black wiggly stripes:

WIP - well rendered 3D people


WIP - 3D people with some very serious injuries


I tried to paste 3D people from fresh scene where they rendered correctly but they were rendered with stripes again. When I copied "damaged" people from my "buggy" scene into empty scene, they were rendered with black stripes.

I am not sure if it?s V-Ray?s fault. Much more likely it?s some Rhino?s RCM bug or some bad object in the scene is causing UV coordinates damage - I didn?t have time to search the bug so I had to use 2D people on the plane.

Funny thing is that I had to put bitmap of the person on flat plane in Rhino, draw a polyline along her shape and cut the plane with this polyline so I got real 2D geometric shape. I had to do it this way because texture clipmaps are still disabled in V-Ray Beta 11.

I had another problem - almost all glasses in the bar were rendered black. I used normal glass material - I don?t see anything bad with it. I was experimenting with IOR but apparently it had no effect. Also object normals point in right direction. Here?s my glass render and settings:





I had to lower reflections to very low value otherwise it looked like chrome - this is strange, I usually set both transparency and reflection to almost 100% ind windows and they look right.

Micha: I don?t think that the rendering time is way too long because the rendering is REALLY huge (5700x3600 pixels = A3 300dpi) and about 50% of all surfaces has blurry reflections. The same image was rendered about 2-3 hours @ 1900x1200. I will post my settings later today but don?t expect any special tricks, it?s pretty basic setting.

FOG Lite: People are real 2D planes in the scene so they cast shadows but the plane is almost aligned with directional light source so the shadow is only thin line. I don?t know why the woman on the left doesn?t reflect on the floor; maybe it?s because the floor is burned out from the Sun.

2 all: do you know some good source of 3D peolpe with UV maps? I purchased 3D people from got3d.com but they are lowers and not usable for close-ups...

[oluv_cg]

Cafe Bawag

2 all: do you know some good source of 3D peolpe with UV maps? I purchased 3D people from got3d.com but they are lowers and not usable for close-ups...

it is a pity that you had to substitute your 3d people with 2d maps. even if the 3d-people look low-res, i think they still better fit in such a great scene than 2d-maps that always will look "flat".

the best ressource for 3d-people is axyz:
http://www.axyz-design.com/

another one is lowpolygon3d:
http://www.lowpolygon3d.com/

unfortunately all of them are in max format. you would need max to save them down to 3ds for example, or use some other translation plug-in like deep exploration etc.

also it is a bit costy, especially lowpolygon3d has quite high prices, and i doubt their models will have better quality than these of got3d.
axyz are great and they have new models now which are suitable for close-ups even with normal maps, but we won't profit much from it in rhino

the advantage of axyz-people is that their textures are quite organized. i never tried it, but if you like to play you could exchange the textures among them, and dress them differently...

by the way, how did the models showing black stripes look in rendered viewport? did they also have stripes? try to render these with treefrog or rhino render and see if they have black stripes there. if not then there must be something wrong with rhino - vray connection. maybe even rcm?
let me know what you found!

[Micha_cg]

Cafe Bawag

I have used the free 3D people from got3d too and has no problem anyway.

I think, if the low poly people would be smoothed, than they would look much better. Could it be, that we Rhino need a smooth option for rendered meshes? Do somebody use 3DSMax? I think, there is an option like this in Max. Or is it a render engine issu?

You could try to smooth the meshes per Rhino tools, but maybe this destroy the coordiantes. Here more infos how to fix meshes:

http://news2.mcneel.com/scripts/dnew...m=224668&utag=

[FOG Lite]

2D People

My favorite are the peeps from realworldimagery.com. Unlike the Got3D people they have the alpha maps in the same file. I get kind of annoyed with Got3D's "257 maps!" but then half of them are alphas. But everyone always loves the foreground trees.

Too bad the 3d people didn't work, they looked great. Actually sitting in there and fully engaged with the surroundings. I gotta try those.

But that's what we get for working with betas, there are all those big warnings when we're installing them but we just don't seem to learn. (You've actually done a tremendous job with what's at hand though, kudos.)

[Pif]

Cafe Bawag

oluv: thanks for links to 3D people, I din?t know axyz-design. Maybe there will be some way how to convert MAX files into Rhino with UV maps. I?ll have to ask somebody with MAX for help.

I recall that I tried to render "damaged" 3D people with Treefrog and they were still damaged so the bug is probably on Rhino?s or RCM?s side. It was displayed correctly in rendered viewport, though.

Micha: I had no problems with 3D people, they rendered quite normally until certain point when something broke. Maybe I am too demanding - my scenes usually don?t go under one million polygons. But I had also many other problems with textures in V-Ray - they were missing, crashing, not rendering although loaded etc...

[BTW thanks for useful link to Rhino newsgroup! I purchased many CD?s from
Evermotion Archmodels and sometimes I have problems with some polygon objects but mostly they are fine. White chairs in the coffe house are taken also from Archmodels.

FOG Lite: I know that I am very brave to use betas on commercial products but on the other hand this is the best way to test software. You won?t discover many bugs when rendering simple object on a plane but when you are rendering 2 million polys scene with 60 layers, 100?s of objects and 10?s texture maps, you can be sure that bugs are popping up pretty quickly But I must say that V-Ray is extremely reliable in comparation with Maxwell. I was not able to render any of my complex scene in Maxwell - it gave me five screens with error messages about polygon object normals etc and the render didn?t even started.

[andreas]

Cafe Bawag

>Maybe there will be some way how to convert MAX files into Rhino with UV >maps. I?ll have to ask somebody with MAX for help.

just export them as 3ds with their uvw coordinates worked great here

[joe_b]

Cafe Bawag

What is the transparency of your diffuse layer? If the diffuse layer is not transparent then the refraction layer won't be seen, thus your objects with the glass material will not have any refraction.

[Pif]

Cafe Bawag

joeb: what do you mean by "transparency of diffuse layer"? Should it have certain color? White, black?

[joe_b]

Cafe Bawag

it should not be black...black means it is opaque and nothing under it is visible. If you look in the tree control for the materials, it represents the exact order that the layers will appear in from top down. Refraction is the last "section" of the material, thus, if anything above it is opaque, it will not be visible.

[edit]
You can kind of think of the transp. as like a "weight" control I suppose.

[Pif]

Cafe Bawag

Thanks, joeb, now it looks much better!