Time to come out of the shadows

[Adrian A. Brown]

Hi all!
Well I figure it's about time I come out of the shadows and become social around here. I've been a long time reader (StudioDM) at this board but never posted anything. I definitely get my daily inspiration here, but I’m mostly just a hobbyist and not quite at the level as some that post here. There are truly some incredible artists on this board I look up to (well except for Maxer, Rerender, ZeroFractal, Suurland, Pardun, Schlorb, Rosenman, EGZ, 3Dform, Osmosis… you guys suck ) . Anyhow, I’ve finally got myself a little spot on the web where I can actually show some of my work. Here’s a couple of my latest that I’m fairly proud of.





Blowup details




I usually use Vray free but really wanted to try out displacement on this latest illustration so I use to demo version. The stone (obviously), the grass, and roof shingles all use displacement. Hope was that with this image I could talk the architects I work for to buy me a copy of Vray, but sadly even as much as they liked it they still would buy it. I think it’s about time I go freelance.

Here’s the link to my new web site http://www.thepixelartist.com, well at least where it’s going to be. If you scroll down I've got a couple hidden links to a temp gallery page and some Vray test scenes I’ve done over the last few months.

A. Brown

P.S. I really need to give props to Vlado, Peter and everyone else working on Vray, it is truly an amazing piece of software. If only Microsoft, AutoDesk and Discreet worked as hard at improving their software… well you can only imagine. Love the new site too by the way.
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[Dman3d]

Nice stuff! How is the house lit? The rig?
Love the subtle nature of the light.
Awesome.

P.S. I hate those guys too.

[GoncaloP]

Amazing work! It matches so nicely with the vegetation

Gonçalo

[Adrian A. Brown]

Dman3d / GoncaloP, wow how could I forget you guys, you're both on my suck list too.
Thanks for the comments, means a lot, especially from you guys

Dman3d: "How is the house lit? The rig?" It's only environment lighting and one direct max light. I use high environment light (1.8 - almost white with a little yellow for late afternoon sun) and more subtle direct lighting w/ soft shadows (darkness turned up to 1.5)

[RErender]

I can see why they wouldn't buy V-Ray , that stuff sucks. They look way too real, especially the last one, how is one supposed to distinguish that from a photo? :P

Glad you have decided to join us, looking forward to more of your work.

[BorDy]

I like it very much. The environment is incredible, the shadows are great. I'm gotta learn to do this with Photoshop, because my houses look lonely .
I'll browse your site too.
There is one thing that I can ask you . Don't you think the brick walls could use some bump or displaysment? The look strange to me may because they are close to the big stone of the chimney.

Awesome work , keep it real .

[Adrian A. Brown]

Hey bordy

There is one thing that I can ask you . Don't you think the brick walls could use some bump or displaysment? The look strange to me may because they are close to the big stone of the chimney.

Yeah I kind of wanted to do that but I was a little short on time and the actual output of this was a 36X24 display board of the first image so it unfortunately would never have shown up. The second image was done as a quick extra to give the church board an idea of what it looked like from the parking lot.
Besided my poor little computer (hp laptop 1.2 Ghz celeron w/ 512 MB ram) had to work long enough with the displaced stone, grass and shingles. I was afraid it was going to catch fire.

[Dman3d]

Thanks for the answer on the light setup. Very nice.
I think the tree shadows really punch the lighting - allowing for
more contrast and sublety (is that spelled right?) in the lighting. - good job!

VRay is pushing things out of my head to make room, it would
appear spellienfg is one ot tehm.

[Syclone1]

VRay is pushing things out of my head to make room, it would appear spellienfg is one ot tehm.

A little off topic but I got this the other day from a friend, thought it was kinda funny.

"Acocdrnig to an elgnsih unviesitry sutdy the oredr of letetrs in a
wrod dosen't mttaer, the olny thnig thta's iopmrantt is that the
frsit and lsat ltteer of eevry word is in the crorcet ptoision.
The rset can be jmbueld and one is stlil able to raed the txet
wiohtut dclftfuiiy. "

-dave

[bakbek]

Amazing stuff...

I must say it lines up high with some of the best i've seen. mostly a love the way all the parts in the scene blend together smooth... so smooth.

i've seen your vray test gallery and wanted to ask how u made those grass in the pic with the cube and the plant ??? i doesn't seem like displacment to me... the one with cube sure isn't.

nice work, keep it up.
Bakbek.

[kippu]

OMG

wow wow ....oh those guys suck alrite ...now u are also in that suck list ....

btw those trees are ??????

danke

very good and nice logo of ur site too

[Adrian A. Brown]

Again thanks for the comment

bakbek

i've seen your vray test gallery and wanted to ask how u made those grass in the pic with the cube and the plant ??? i doesn't seem like displacment to me... the one with cube sure isn't.

The one with the toon is good old max scatter and three point spline turned into a poly. If I remember right Thomas Suurland has a great tutorial on this on his web and it's much better than the one I learned to do it from. The other image (with the box) was done with the tree druid grass plugin that if you look hard enough on the web you can still find. You'll never use scatter if you have this plugin. If you can't find it email me and I'll send it to you. (I think thats ok to do since it free on the web?)


kippu

btw those trees are ??????

I guess you're asking how I made the trees? The trees are just image trees and bushes on a plane (people too) that are place manually in the scene in max. The big tree in the front is just a part of the original photo, I made a layer mask through the rendered image layer in photoshop (thank goodness it was where it was suppose to be in the rendering). The shadows from the trees are from the same type of planes invisible to the camera/reflections

Adrian

[Dogzilla]

not bad

[dejaVu]

Adrian,
All I can say is your work is AVERAGE...veeeeeeeeeeery Average in fact

Some minor points:
1. The glass in the windows lack dynamic range in the reflections.
This is one of the hardest things to get right, and we struggle with getting the right balance and level of reflections all the time.

2. Some areas have unusual differences in Luminance values, eg in the second image the shrubs seem too dark compared to the lighting on the ground surface and house (my guess it that it has to do with the image maps - a suggestion would be to increase the output level on the image maps so that they match the overall lighting better - or render out the image maps as a separate pass and tweak them in post)

3. Grass is too dark and perhaps too green...a slight yellow shift would help with some variation to break it up a bit.

4. As already mentioned, some bump on the bricks would help.
Even if it won't be seen on the display panels, we notice here...do it for yourself and for us it would be such a shame to not "finish" it off.

These are only very minor comments. Otherwise it's pretty average and I'd ditch the architects and go freelance. You could always subcontract back to them. From my experience, architects are tighter than a fish's bottom, so if they won't buy VRay based on these images, they'll probably never buy it...

Looking back now, going freelance was the best decision I have ever made professionally, even when it was tough. If you can make it work, it's the icing on the cake - or the GI on the render

[Adrian A. Brown]

hey dejaVu,
good to hear from you, been a long time fan of your work. Really appreciate your comments. I wasn't really sure though if you were being sarcastic or not on it being an average rendering. I'd like to thing it's at least a little better than average :P But then again I am just a guppy in a veeeeeeeeeeeeery large pond of incredible artists. So in that case I'd take average any day.

Anyhow, totally agree with your comments. So let me ask you, I really tried hard to recreate the look of the glass on the original house and it is close (see image), but your right, brights aren't bright enough. The problem I had (and hopefully you have an answer) is that as I tried to brighten my reflection the darker colors (dark greens in the trees reflected that are in shadow ect..) would start to show. From what I've observed this is not realistic. Bright lit / high contrast areas reflect fairly strongly at almost all angles to the glass, while dark colors / shadowed areas are almost completely void of reflection until at sharper angles. I've used a standard max material (the vray material just doesn't have enough control, hint hint vlado ) with a falloff map in the reflection slot. I used perp to simulate angular reflection and keep the brights maxed and the darks very low, but its still not quite right obviously. I just haven't figure out how to do this in Max yet. What do you suggest?



Thanks in advance, Adrian

P.S. Kippu I haven’t forgotten about your PM, I just haven’t had much time to post a tutorial on how I set up my trees. I’ll at least try to PM you with a screen capture of my scene so you can see how the trees are setup (unless anyone else wants me to post it here)