What kind of camera did you get Brodie?

I ended up 2nd in both categories

Congrats Brodie!

Iwan will be pissed off though They put my name instead of his.

Monkey Brain and Monkey Dancing

(nononsenseselfdefense.com)

I came to that site for different reasons, but I found it to have a lot of interesting articles about human behavioral psychology, and indeed- also what is happening in public forums. One interesting article was about the "Monkey dance". Basically when someone attacks some of your core beliefs(like politics, religion), then our "monkey brain" that controls emotions kicks in and the Neo-cortex part of our brain that controls rational thought, speaking and other higher brain functions is not in charge of our actions. So it really is natural that a discussion like this would evolve to ad hominem attacks. Some just cant differentiate between things that happen in their perceptive reality and what happens in actuality, so an attack on ones beliefs is interpreted as an attack on themselves.

If we can keep our angry monkey at bay, then there is some hope for some civil and interesting discussions in the corner bar

How long would it actually take an object to get through? Shouldn't the trajectory be bent a little if you take in account the gravitational force of the moon? If there was a solar eclipse on the other end of the hole, would that be enough to get you through? If one end is in an ocean and the other on land, wouldn't that make a one heck of a whirlpool and a geyser?

Thats a lens flare filter from photoshop. Rendered with Maxwell.

Your probably right. I checked some more references and it seems the effect I was looking for is visible only in close up shots anyway. But I do think the image looks a bit more interesting now.

Here are some slight changes and a new theme to the image. Giddy up cowboy!

http://i.imgur.com/kGBlD.jpg
Please tell me when to stop OK?

Here is a new version. This was something that I wanted to do in the start but couldn't figure out how to get a realistic result. So how do you like the dew guys?

Larger image
http://i.imgur.com/CfNjY.jpg

I also understood how important the lighting is when viewing the image, because at daytime it really looks like the exposure in the first image is OK, but when I look at it at night, it looks over exposed. So I guess I should find a better spot to place my monitor the in front of the window

@unknownuser said:

Feel sorry for me?

Nah, I'd feel sorry only for the ones that never try

Yeah, I agree. I guess my eyes just got too used to that contrast and I didn't want to lose too much detail.

Here is a modified image

http://i.imgur.com/XoPkY.jpg

Just gave SU Ivy and the Fur plugin a try.

http://i.imgur.com/bzvnQ.jpg
The scene consisted of about a million polligons and was rendered with maxwell.
http://i.imgur.com/AZXQe.jpg

@gmac said:

I think I'm describing how a photographer would double expose a dusk shot. They burn in the glass so it looks like its radiating out of the space. I see examples of it, but harder to describe. Anyway, thanks for all thoughts and reads.

Greg

Could you please show some examples of this?

I guess I was not clear enough. My main point is that you could make the render realistic but a proper composition is still what defines a good image. You can never fool the eye. For instance what appeals for me more in the reference image is that warm and cold contrast in combination with the tonal contrast leads the eye towards the most detailed- center part of the image. In your image- I feel this is lost and I can not find clear boundarys that would lead my eye around the image.

Brodie, if you compare your render to the reference, then you could see that your interior space is over exposed. In the reference- not even the brightest hot spot is brighter then the exterior space. A good rule of thumb is to keep the interior darker. It looks like you used a sky dome for lighting but for such an open space a physical sky or a HDRI would have been the better choice, because your render looks a bit flat, as if a sepia filter would have been applied, but the reference shows a nice contrast between the blue color that comes from the sky and the warm bounce-light from the sun. The over saturated stairs are also more of a distraction. The background buildings could be left at that exposure but the water is too light so the water line is lost and the reflections in the water are too distinctive.

I think your work would have been the best one if you had used strong DOF, color correction and some other minor tweaks in post, because now the background is too distracting and the contrast seems to be all over the place.

Some renders seem a bit heavy on the post-procesing side, some really lack it. But the model I love the most is the VW Bus. On the render side what I like the most is Gui Talarico's renders.

I'm glad they cleared up the voting issue, that the public voting decides only one runner up.

Unfortunetly I didn't see my render in the facebook submission gallery yet Will they still be updating it? I'm worried because when submitting the images I got so far as the "thank you for submitting" page, but as I understand, my uploaded images had to be visible at the bottom of the page, but the only thing I saw was the two small image icons as if there had been an error and the page kept on loading... I haven't received an e-mail notice yet also.

Edit: The competition has started and it all went OK

Open for voting until 18th of january

The trick is to use sketchup's built in fog. You can use it as a z-depht image of the model. With the z-depht information you can add a fog effect or use it to make things out of focus with the lens blur filter in photoshop. As for the light streaks- those are just blurred lines.

Here is the finished render.

In all recent scenes I have rendered SSS materials seem to generate a lot of emissive noise when rendering with the production render. Nothing like that that appears with the draft render.