« Posts tagged interior

[R&D] V-Ray Brasserie

witteveen center

 

GISettings (http://www NULL.terrymatthes NULL.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/GISettings NULL.jpg)primarySettings (http://www NULL.terrymatthes NULL.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/primarySettings NULL.jpg)I took some time over the last few months to rework a scene I had modeled last year. I’ve redone all the lighting and materials in Vray as opposed to Mental Ray. A big part of this project was crushing render times down while retaining quality in the right places.  I’m in the process of rendering an animation of the environment. There is a lot of glass so if the settings aren’t balanced right between the aliasing and reflection/refraction quality the animation will “shimmer” where the glass in moving. The animation is 5 seconds at 30FPS or 150 frames. This means that even at the current render times of ~90 minutes a frame the animation would take 225 hours. I knew this would be a challenge, but what better way to practice using the diagnostic tools? The longer render times are actually acceptable given these are the minimum settings to avoid shimmering in the glass. If this needed to be done sooner I would ship this off to an online farm or ask some of my friends to render a portion of the frames for me.

I’ve baked out all of the GI so that I can start and stop the render when my PC has some spare time. If I didn’t bake out the GI I would get changes in the grain when starting and stopping the render sessions. I’ve chosen to go with Light cache as my primary bounce solver while Irradiance mapping will be solving all of the secondary bounces. In this post I’ve included 2 shots of my render settings. One for GI and the other for primary rays/Secondary (DMC rays). I tried to include all pertinent information in the shots. If you can’t see the setting it was left at default.

 witteveen center (http://www NULL.terrymatthes NULL.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/witteveenNB NULL.jpg)

 

Some of the materials were made in Substance Designer, while other’s were built right in Maya. One thing in the future I would like to experiment with is instancing. There is a lot of duplicate geometry between the logs and the wine bottles, the cutlery could be considered another culprit. The books and nic nacs on the back shelf are all HDRI shots of a bookshelf inside my living room. Next I created masks for each group of books. To keep things simple I created several 4K texture atlases for the bookshelf items and the pictures. I then merged all the picture geometry together. If I wanted to put a different picture in the frame I would simply move the UV cords of the corresponding faces over a new area of the atlas.

 

witteveenVrayGray (http://www NULL.terrymatthes NULL.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/witteveenVrayGray NULL.jpg)

 

The render settings in the attached images worked for me. I give them as a guide, but each project is specific and your settings will probably have to change to suit the exact needs of your scene. The primary rays are kept as low as can be. These are the heavy lifters we want talking care of edge cleanup (anti-aliasing). Pushing this too high will cleanup up your edges, but it will also force needlessly high samples on areas of your scene that don’t need it. Keep this as low as possible. The DMC (advanced) settings are way way higher. This is where you’re going to see a lot of difference in the clarity of the surfaces. Remember the primary rays are really only there to alias all your edges, not to cleanup your image. We want the secondary bounces to clarify the fine details in the materials. A great explanation of this technique can be found over at Akin Bilgic’s blog (http://www NULL.cggallery NULL.com/tutorials/vray_optimization/).

Before I begin the render I have to create all my material ID masks. I’ll take these into Nuke on my Mac mini with some stills and start the colour corrections in post. When the render is done I’ll apply the same node chain to the animation and then bake that all out as a MP4. I’ll post the animation and colour corrected stills when I finish them and link them to this post.

Good luck and if you have any questions don’t be afraid to reach out or comment in the post below. I’ll admit the comment section is a little ugly, but I haven’t had time to adjust the CSS styles on it since changing formats. One day… one day I’ll have time for everything :) Right? :(

 

witteveenNC (http://www NULL.terrymatthes NULL.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/witteveenNC NULL.jpg)

[Client] Wayfair: V-Ray Sofa

Texture Detail of Couch

The couch was the focus in this scene for me. It was part of a small contract for Wayfair. Their 3D Generalist broke his arm while on vacation and they needed a CG model made of their Novagratz Brittany Sofa. I was given photos of the couch and asked to model and surface it for their web catalogue. I used Maya to create a stub mesh with proper dimensions then took everything into Zbrush to be sculpted. The rest of the meshes were purchased off of Turbo Squid. I then created the materials for all objects in the scene. The last steps were to light, render and finally composite the scene in Nuke. I rendered the scene using Vray. Almost all of my previous modeling was done by creating a scale stub in Maya and then working it out in ZBrush. 3DSMax is a different beast altogether when it comes to modeling. Thankfully VRay seems to work in a similar fashion from within 3DSMax as it does in Maya. I still don’t quite understand the new ‘Slate Material Editor’. It seems that materials I create from within the Slate editor don’t show up in the Compact editor and vice versa. Most of my shaders don’t require crazy node networks so I’m happy using the simplified editor.

LoftInterior_Web2 (http://www NULL.terrymatthes NULL.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/LoftInterior_Web2 NULL.jpg)

A lot of the time developing this scene was spent on the couch’s material. I wanted to make sure the linen came through really strong and crisp. Rendering the couch without losing the detail in the bump was my main concern. I ran with a 4K diffuse map and a 4K bump map to create most of the detail in the material. A spec map was also used to control how the highlight spread over the couch’s surface. The raw render is 4000×2666. Below is detailed snipped of the full resolution render.

Texture Detail of Couch (http://www NULL.terrymatthes NULL.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/detail NULL.jpg)

Most of the folds and creases in the couch were created in ZBrush. I didn’t want to add too much wear and tear to the couch as it was designed for use in a product shot. Usually I would render out a default material pass to show the shapes in the scene, but this Global Illumination pass does a fine job.Sofa Interior Global Illumination (http://www NULL.terrymatthes NULL.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/couch1920GI NULL.jpg)

I haven’t had a chance to use the UVW pass on this shot, but I would like to play around with it in the future. The idea of being able to assign a new texture to the couch in post sounds really cool. I think it could have some really useful implications for product rendering. I’ve been thinking more and more about exteriors lately and I think I might try to model an outside scene in the near future. For now I’ll leave you with render passes created in 3DSMax for Nuke below.

Passes for compositing interior scene in Vray (http://www NULL.terrymatthes NULL.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/NukeCouchPasses NULL.jpg)

Apartment Render Update + Maya Fur

Detailed Portion of the Full Resolution Render

I’m just about 70% done my apartment render so I thought I would post an update. This is a to scale model of my old apartment. I had some previous renders, but the scale was off (really off) and it was causing all my lightning to be blown out. After Fixing the scale I noticed I was getting black renders even though Global Illumination and Final Gather were working properly. The issue was that my portal light’s intensity wasn’t near strong enough. I had to jack it up to about 2 billion! Crazy. I eventually toned it down to 1 billion, but anything under that and the light really dies off quickly.

As far as assets go I have modeled a sofa table and television which don’t appear in this render, but they will be in the next one. I think I’m also going to take out the couch for now because I just ordered one of the best leather sofas (http://fineleatherfurniture NULL.com/leather-furniture-blog/blog-list/513-the-best-leather-furniture-manufacturers-quality-not-quantity) to replace it, and I don’t have the space needed or time to give the old couch model the love it needs.
The shag carpet was really fun to work on. I’ve never used the Fur System in Maya before, but after the Introduction To Maya Fur (http://www NULL.digitaltutors NULL.com/11/training NULL.php?cid=42&pid=264) on Digital Tutors (http://www NULL.digitaltutors NULL.com) I really was excited to give it a try. I used carpet texture on a plane and told the fur system to grab its base and tip colours from that. going forward I think I might make the base and tip of the fur a little thicker. Other options were played with such as “scraggle”, “poll”, and “inclination”. It’s worth noting that under the Fur Feedback Description node there is a section called “Details”. Under this section you can add randomness to all the attributes. If you’re interested in all of the different fur properties there is a good textual resource over at http://caad.arch.ethz.ch/info/maya/manual/MayaFur/UserGuide/2CreatingFur.fm.html#176880 (http://caad NULL.arch NULL.ethz NULL.ch/info/maya/manual/MayaFur/UserGuide/2CreatingFur NULL.fm NULL.html#176880)

When it came to picking a backdrop I just grabbed something off of Google image search for the time being. I quickly used the layer properties of the render in Photoshop to drop out the windows as they were solid white. For the final shot I think I’ll climb my old fire escaped and snap a shot with my Wife’s camera. She has a nice Cannon 40D. I don’t plan on using HDRI for image based lightning just yet, but maybe I will set myself up so I can experiment with that another time :)

One thing I did notice in the render was the aliasing lines in the ottoman’s fabric. The lines stayed there when I raised the anti-aliasing to adaptive sampling set @ 64 samples. They went away when I tested that area with 256 adaptive samples.

At any rate here is the shot and if you have any question just ask in the comments or fire me an email. I’m around computers all the time so I respond fairly quickly to questions. I’m going to have this done in the next couple days so expect a finished post soon. I will also include depth of field in the final render. Above the full scene render is a detail render of the scene at full scale.
Detailed Portion of the Full Resolution Render (http://www NULL.terrymatthes NULL.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/detail NULL.jpg)

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Apartment Render Test 02 (http://www NULL.terrymatthes NULL.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/apartmenttest2 NULL.jpg)