Finished Room

Finished Shot

Artefact 5 - Render Engines

This is my final artefact. This one is based around comapring render engines. The scene at the top has been rendered using the mental ray render engine that come with 3DS max. If you compare this to the one below it which has been rendered using Vray you can see the difference in quality. The lighting and camera set up is differnet as you cannot use Vray lights and cameras in mental ray.

Research Room - Textured Objects

These are some individual renders of the different objects in the shot.

Paintings on the wall
Box with a uv map image on the front.

Glass Ornament
Glass material from internet

Books
Found some book texture online. Used a UV map and editted the books in photoshop to fit.

Leather Chair
Used vray materials found on internet.

Orb
High glossy reflections

Plant
Clay pot from internet. Leaves created with green colour and slight glossyness and specular.

Research Room - Textured

So ive finished the texturing. I havnt worked on the lighting yet so the scene just a basic vray light coving teh whole scene.

These first three images are of the final scene. One with only the chair, bookcase and plant rendered, one with the books and photos not textured and one of the final shot. Gives an idea of the development.

Room - Chair, Bookcase, Plant

Room w/out books and photos

Final Texture

Research Room - Partial Texture

This is the part textured room. I have got most of the materials from the internet but the pictures ive created. I will be doing the photo frames and the books myself. I also need to edit the reflection on the blue orb thing as you can see the room is empty.

Research Room

So this is my first set up of the room. Im going to see what people think and might change it round depending on the response. Im still learning vray hence the darker picture but you get the idea.

Everything has been created by me.

p.s. the wierd 'S' shsape thing on the right is meant to be some sort of art work. Probably going to to be metal or ceramic.

Research Room - Book

Book. Extruded a box back and chamfered some edges.

Research Room - Fern and Bookcase

Fern Plant

I followed the basics of a plant tutorial. Added some things in myself.

Extruded the leaves. Adjusted them a bit to make it look less uniform. Applied a bend and copied them. The pot is just a lathed shape.



Bookcase

Pretty basic really. Box with the shelves extruded back.

Chamfered the edges to take some of the sharpness off.

Research Room

This is the chair ive made for the room im creating for the research project.

Research Project Update

So its been a while since the research project got a mention on here. This is for various reasons; focussing on client, changing my process and just lack of blog activity.

This project has developed quite alot since the last artifacts were presented. I have decided to use the techniques i researched in the artefacts to produce a indoor scene. For example I found the best ways to light a scene in my first artifact and how lighting works so I will use this knowledge when i am lighting the scene i create, same with modelling, texturing etc.

I am basing my scene on an image i saw in an old edition of 3D Artist. This is the image that I saw. It inspired me to create something similar.



I thought about chosing a real image and then trying to recreate it however, unless the final piece is of outstanding quality and detail, viewing the real scene would allow the viewer to compare and find all the faults with the CG image. If I create a scene that is only based on other images, the viewer will then find it harder to see the inconsistentcies in the image.

My plan, considering the short amount of time I have left, is to create the scene with the best possible techniques with everything apart from the different render engines as I have already done a fair amount of research on the other 4 areas (Modelling, Texturing, Lighting and Depth of Field).

Ive already started modelling some of the objects and Im going to do a few designs so I can get a better idea of the layout and what I want in the room. It will be quite basic in terms of objects due to the time I have left but I will try to make them look as realistic as possible.

Artefact 3 - Textures

This is my 3rd artefact (a week later than planned). This one is based around the different ways to texture models.

I have tried 4 different ways to texture. They vary in technical skill ranging from using the standard 3DS max materials then using normal bit maps then using UV maps to use textures created in photoshop. Handdrawn photoshop images can be used or real photographs.

3DS Max textures:





Bog Standard Bit Mapping:





UV Mapping - Photoshop paint:




UV Mapping - Images:

Artefact 1 - Lighting

This is the first artefact from my research paper. In it I stated that I will produce the artefacts in the following format;

"Lighting – The first artefact will be a series of rendered shots showing how the different styles of lighting affect the same object. These will be with and without global illumination, with and without radiosity, with and without ray tracing."

The first part of this artefact that should be taken into account is the global illumination principle. This is the process of calculating the direction and intensity of the light that bounces of the objects in the scene. It should be noted that both radiosity and ray tracing are used in global illumination but both will be explained in more detail. The goal of global illumination is to recreate the light and feel of an environment as if you were standing in a real world equivalent.

There are 2 types of illumination, direct and indirect. Direct illumination is the light that hits a surface directly from the light source and indirect illumination is the light that bounces off a surface onto another surface. Indirect illumination is what creates the shadows in the scene. Radiosity and ray tracing are algorithms that help calculate indirect illumination. As you can see, from the radiosity and ray tracing examples, when there is no indirect illumination no shadows are calculated. This is because radiosity and ray tracing algorithms calculate the bounce on the light off other surfaces and the strength of the light that is reflected onto other surfaces.

Ray tracing is the more efficient way of calculating the light rays. The ray is traced back from the virtual camera to the objects and environment to the original light source. This saves on memory as you are only seeing the necessary light. It does however have some disadvantages. It doesn’t account for light that has bounced off other surfaces so the shadows appear as black blocks. This is why you have to combine it with radiosity to get a better overall aspect of global illumination.

Radiosity calculates the reflections on surfaces from the light source and from other surfaces. It breaks down the surfaces into smaller elements and then calculates how much light is transferred from one element to another.

Both these techniques can be combines to create a better illumination of the scene. The more reflections and rays that you trace and calculate the more detailed and accurate the scene will become.