DanCBradbury

ambient occlusion

Your cg blend with a real picture was awesome. Did you use the IBL technique and the environment sphere to do it? Your car doesn't appear to reflect any of the scene, which leads me to believe you didn't. It's a really easy trick to do, and adds a great amount of believability to the blending of cg and live action. It also looks like you went for specularity over reflectivity. Specularity may be easier and faster, but it doesn't exist in the real world. All specular sizes and intensities can be achieved with surface bump size, height, and reflectivity values. Nifty modeling Stian. I really like the color.

Zaryin, did you add a normal map to your set? If you havent you realy should. I've found that ambient oclusion does very odd things with the displacement. Is that what happend to your desert?

Good to hear it. NOW WHEN CAN WE SEE THE SALEEN!! Oh but there is. YAY!! i always hated those stupid lights. Well... the only problem i had with them was that they didnt start with 100% darkness shadows. Is there anyway to change the values of the default light?

that model you made was pretty cool. Is it a wizard that converts black and white images into patchwork? Anywho here's the phone model. phone.zip

I guess i should do that too... but i cant get over some of the big problems. One of the most annoying is after you do your first render, every patch is drawn black so you can't tell with what you are looking. I worked for about half an hour and i came up with this.

lol. I delete those annoying lights the second i start a choreography. I wish there was a way to make them not part of a default choreography setup. Here's my basic c1-ico-f2(25) properties: @yves... what's all that mean by the way? lol width 500cm fall-off 75000cm color 255,255,255 intensity 10% Attenuation 0% Rays Cast 2 Bias .05cm Darkness 100% There's nothing that specifies that the car has to be 8cm high, or the rig 1300% scaled. I just set mine up that way. So adjust your light intensity untill you have everything lit the way you want it. I adjusted my intensities untill the furthest piece of ground had just barely reached pure white. One thing though, make sure none of the bulbs' width touch any part of your model. This could result in supershadows, artifacts, and a ruined render.

Well, the tires are now white walled. It makes the car seem even more retro-y-er I also reshaped the doors and door frams so that the curves matched the back and front weal wells.

I use an 8% intensity light. When the dome is scaled the intensities are scaled as well.

The light rig is scaled to about 1300% at 6660 cm high, and my car is scaled down to be about 8 cm high. Well, i can tell you, there isn't a single crease anywhere on the model. The areas you're showing there are mostly 3 and 5-point patches that refuse to cooperate. I went through and fixed up those areas a bit. I really don't like working with the geometry near the front lights, because it's the densest part of the model. Change one CP and they all have to be changed. I made the paint material's reflective blend less so that it slightly reflects the ground. The paint, windows, and headlight glass are still using HDR, but I've abandoned HDR in the chrome areas, and am now using the original Uffizi.tga. It looks much better now. I made a progressive render to show some of the changes to paint and geometry. The creator had brought up something about white wall tires. I may just do that now. The tires are regulation size though. It may be the camera angle or that you can only see the very bottom. Here's a wireframe to show you their size in the weal wells.

You should not convert your files to v13 yet. It's only an alpha.

The trim is still chrome. Uffizi is a very dark hdr, and there's realy nothing for the chrome to reflect other than the sky above. I realy want to find a sky scape with mountains, a visible sun, and clouds. Only problem, I havent seen any real hdrs like that. Thick paint you say? Hm... It could look that way because the ground isnt being reflected corectly. I'm sure HDRI has nothing to do with it, but i'll tinker around with the paint settings. Here's a different hdr render and a shot of all the materials i'm using. I need to manipulate the paint reflectivity values until the floor is reflecting white instead of blackish red like it is in the row shot.

I hope I didn't scare everyone away with hdr. I can assure you all it's very easy to manipulate. The pixelation on the chrome was caused by over saturation of the multipass sub-pixel averaging. I lowered the chrome's env opacity value to 4, and it fixed the problem right up. I didn't like the paint cell turb any more, so I changed it to a solid color. Am i done yet? Do other people have projects that last months and months, and never seem to end

Not neccesarily. Displacement will give depth and dimension to even these floor panels from any angle. Another good point is that, unlike normal and bump maps, displacement will create shadows where they would normally be. You cant get shadows with normal maps, or bump maps.

I forgot to post these. It shows the difference between relying only on displacement, or using both a height map and normal map.

Here's a displacement render I did which combinds a height map, normal map, and color map of a Doom3 floor panel. When you combine the normal map with the height map it gives the displacement a much cleaner look. You guys should realy try it out. Floor.mov

You didn't know that? Well, of course thats how it works. I'm currently rendering another displacement test, it should be done in about 15 minutes.

yeah, it's a pretty cool new feature. That first one kinda looks like a topo.

awe, i destoryed the image files already. lol. But just to let you know... the normal map to grey scale conversion made the areas that wree supposed to be flat, bow like crazy.

Here's a render i did of the Doom3 jumbodoors. Now mind you it was a normal map that i converted to greyscale, so the conversion isnt perfect, but you can get a good idea of just what we can expect from this new feature. I did my render with 6 patches (NOTE: quality of displacemnt goes up when you add more patches)

New render! I turned the env map opacety way down to about 4 for the car paint so that the reflection of the clouds abover werent so very bright. The designer said it was too overpowering, and oversaturated so i brought it down a tick. And eric, hope you fixed what ever was causing your problemo, and if not, try adjusting the env opacity levels in the materials. Also if you are now using v13 all those opacities have to be changed anyhow.

Hm... can you post a pic of what that looked like, or (i know you may not want to) send over your project file so i can take a look at it?

Sounds about right. That's pretty much what i was thinking was happening. Then the only way than to decrease the amount of pixilation is to lower the .exr env value? Hm... is there anyway to average out the exposures in HDRshop so that the change in brightness aren't very drastic? Anyways, here's a spin .mov i made last night. And let me know if that .exr link dies. I can either rehost it at a different sight, or explain how to make them. SpinRed001hdr.mov

lol... glad to see that i wasnt the olny one who thought that kinda looked like a... well... i wont go there.

Thanks Dahr, but you must give great credit to Yves and Collin. Without them, I would have never had hdri in A:M and no understanding of how env maps acutally work. Nope, there's no specularity at all. Specularity is just a cheap trick, though effective, to try and replicate reflectivity in a very fast way. So if you have advanced reflective cabablity like hdr, then specularity just gets in the way of a better, realer look. So basically, there is no specularity in the real world, it is all reflection. Thanks guys. The zip file is ready, but i cannot fit the vital 8.6 mb .exr file onto the download section here, but it is up for download here. Enjoy @Yves: is there any reason that the bright pixelated regions, like those on the window trim and grill, do not smooth out, even at 256 passes? Should I file an error report? carpaint.zip