nice bubbles though

I'm so-so on the candle but nice flame!

-Brodie

You can just apply the texture to a rectangle. The material does the rest. It's basically a clip mapped emitter if I recall.

-Brodie

Modelhead, thanks. It is indeed stock materials. Well, not really stock but Maxwell has a wizard for setting up materials (glass, satin, glass, car paint, plastic, candle wax, etc.). I just ran through the wizard and kept all the default settings.

I had tried some of the materials that people have created and posted to Maxwell's website but those are sort of hit or miss sometimes and didn't seem quite right. I've found that Maxwell has gone to great lengths to be as physically accurate as possible in their setups. If you've never used it before it's a bit daunting at first because you have so much control over things like how much ozone & water are in the atmosphere, the reflectance of the earth, sun temperature, camera diaghram size, etc. But I've found that the defaults on all those things tend to give the best results so there's rarely a need to tweak some of the more complicated adjustments. In the end I've found it to be a rather easy tool to use.

The renderings take longer than a biased rendering engine (which is the usual complaint I hear from people) but I've found the learning curve and perhaps material settings take less time (at least for me). I can render overnight while I'm sleeping, but I can't create perfect materials.

-Brodie

Very nice. I'd change the background as well but the horizon doesn't really bother me, just looks like you're up a story or two. But I'd brighten it up. Like Stinkie said, it feels rather gloomy. I think it's a combination of the scene outside that looks like a storm just past by and the overall lighting in the scene which looks rather dark. For example the TV, at such a low light level, just sort of turns into a big black spot with very little definition to be able to tell the material difference between the plastic and the screen. I'm looking for some can lights in the ceiling, maybe some lamps, that sort of thing. Those two sconces on the far wall wouldn't do much in reality.

Only other thing I might mention would be the pillows on the bed. The material seems great on the blanket but for some reason it seems to have a white halo around it, particularly on the pillow closest to the camera.

All fairly minor fixes though for such a great model. You've done a wonderful job on the textures in my opinion.

Is this for a client or more of a marketing tool?

-Brodie

Andre, very nice. I tried out that same flame material w/ about equal results. It seems like the sample image that was there with the mxm looked better somehow. I couldn't quite figure out what the difference was...

love that wallpaper!

-Brodie

majid,

Very nice. I like the bubbles and water droplets you added to this one. The glass looks a bit too green in this one, but other than that, good job.

I'd say no, as long as it's a rendering engine that accepts SU files. I think the main thing is to see how the various rendering engines do. But rendering a candle with Revit or some such thing would probably be less than helpful.

-Brodie

Here's my crack at it in Maxwell. Didn't want to get into figuring out the flame so I made a simple candle model and then plopped a scaled down incandecent in the middle. Candle wax was just made through Maxwell's Wizard (SSS -> Candle Wax). Easy peasy.

-Brodie

Fillet shows up under the Tools pulldown

A lot of these renderings have been really great. I think for the next thread it would be interesting if there were more of a benchmark. Ideally, a real photograph along with the setup (light & camera positions as well as information like wattage, type of light, camera settings, etc.). It would be interesting, after having seen all of these examples, to get a better idea of accuracy as well.

-Brodie

Here's another Maxwell rendering. Nothing special going on, this is simply the default glass material and water (default, meaning made through the Wizard via studio).

Welcome. Great images. I especially like the look of the first one. The gym bag under the table is a great touch!

-Brodie

Richard,

Thanks for the comments. The background is...sort of an HDRI. I got a set from Dosch that has like 8 HDRI's each with about 30 backplate images to use as backgrounds. I still haven't quite figured out how to properly map an HDRI in maxwell. If I scale it 1x1 it seems WAY to big. I end up having to scale it like 4x4 or even 8x8 for it to look right in my preview. Of course then I have to worry about the 8 suns I have around my image and reflections and such. How do you scale your HDRI's?

I know you've been working hard to get a decent workflow with HDRI's and maxwell. I'll take a look at that post, got a link? Let's just hope that version 2 makes all that effort worthless somehow I'm crossing my fingers for a cool real-time preview option like the new 3ds Max has.

I was thrilled to find your car paints as I've been struggling with those for awhile. It may have been my scene but they just didn't come out right. I really like the color scheme you came up with though. I'm going to try the shiny plastic materials using a variety of your colors on the project i'm working on now.

-Brodie

Thanks for the tip marked, do you have an example you could post so I can see how that turns out?

Thanks,

-Brodie

A #1! Looks fantastic now. Really great work.

-Brodie

Thanks for the comments guys. You all picked up on the things I was disappointed with as well. It's good to hear some conformation, as sometimes I'm not sure if I'm being picky or not.

Lightening the sky up was actually one of the last things I did. After printing it out and looking at it in a different medium it was easier to see just how dark the sky was. But sometimes I have the tendency to be too subtle with my adjustments and it sounds like I didn't go far enough. Tell me what you think of the image below, if I got it better.

You're right about the cars too, they aren't quite right. It's a dilemma I'm working on. I started with Maxwell's standard car paint materials but they're so bright that it's distracting. Then I found that Richard had made some car paint materials especially for Arch-Viz so they don't stand out so much. That helped me a lot with the colors but then they were too flat. I went and adjusted the materials to make them more reflective but it's still not quite right. It doesn't help that those are low poly cars too so the reflections aren't very smooth. That's sort of a work in progress. If anyone has some suggestions on that I'm all ears.

Here's a link to the full res version https://dl.getdropbox.com/u/384281/2009-04-29%20Harbor%20City%20full%20%281%29.jpg

-Brodie

Uploaded it directly. Should be gravy now.

-Brodie

Here's the latest. Feel free to comment...

-Brodie

I've used GIMP as well. I think it seems to have the most capabilities but it's a bit tricky to get the hang of. If you can get away with using paint.net I'd suggest that as it's easier to work with. However, it does have it's limitations (wish I could remember specifics but it's been awhile since I've used it).

-Brodie