Its great work. I like how you are adding all the details now that make it real.

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Matt
http://theprophetmoses.deviantart.com

thanx varnished for the compliment...well... there r some flaws in it... i rendered a glass photo frame in the hall with standard raytrace map with the v-ray and it showed the warning "not compatible". On rendering, the glass was rendered black. is it coz i used standard material? well...i didn't post that image.

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I think its just that raytrace is not compatible with vray, you can use a vray material and set the reflect and refract slots to make good glass.

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Matt
http://theprophetmoses.deviantart.com

thanx varnished... i used the vray material , set the refact slot and it's rendering correctly with no faulty msges.

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Looking really good. I like the internal lighting best, the others need a bit more contrast.
yeah, theres a few unsupported things.
raytrace map is not supported so use vray map instead or use a vray material as suggested by Matt. I like using standard materials for certain effects such as multi-layer and oren nayer blinn. sometimes you want to have a regular shader for control of the specularity. I'll generally use vray material for anything that is glass or metal or for translucent effects but use standard materials for stuff like cloth and wood, rock cement etc..

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thanx tyson.... well how do you creat a glow around the light... i mean a light has some glow around it... so can we give that effect to the light? i find that vray takes a much longer time to render... this image with a resolution of 800*600 took 25mins approx. to render and suppose if i remember something which is to be added then again we have to render. so it's a lenghty process...buttttt the beautiful results r worth it.
u mean that v-ray is most suitable for refractive and reflective surfaces...right? hmmm... i see. Can u just tell me the market price of vray? well... i don't intend to buy it now as i'm just a beginner , but i saw somewhere on a site that it's price is $900. is it correct in ur opininion? that's too much. it comes to Rs. 40,000 approx. in Indian monetary value.

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Yeah these things are expensive. Its a hard business to start if you want to have your own studio. Vray is worth it. Paying for software helps to support its development but I understand that its very hard for students to afford to spend thousands of dollars on software, either shell out the dosh or risk using illegal versions. If you are making money from your work you should not hesitate to purchase a license.

1. OK, glows on lights can be achieved either in post by using photoshop or in max using render effects. duplicate the layer in photoshop and push the levels until you have just the brightest parts of the image visible. then change the layer mode to screen and then use a guassian blur.
Render effects can be added to objects using object ID or to materials using material ID. You add the glow effect from the render effects menu and then set up the glow parameters. the effect is applied after the render completes. Look in the max reference for a detailed procedure.

2. Vray is certainly a good choice for rendering anything with reflection refraction. Its much faster than scanline for these effects and easier to set up than mental ray. Brazil is good too and theres a free version of that with a few limitations ie: you can only render at 512X512 maximum. Vray is also in my opinion the most versatile and easy to use GI renderer at least compared with mental ray. I use vray for almost everything but you still can't beat scanline for pure speed. if you don't need GI or reflections etc.. then just use scanline. Scanline and mental ray also have several cool things that I use often such as mental ray's fast sss shader but you can run into problems when you are trying to composite renders together ie: mental ray doesnt support image motion blur and its own 3d motion blur doesnt sinc up with vray 3d motion blur.

3. You can speed up render times by lowering subdivisions, not using glossys, using shadow maps instead of area shadows, lowering anti aliasing settings. Lowering hemispherical subdivisions, using lower irradiance map settings, and using light cache instead of brute force for secondary bounces.

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Absolutely right .... the price is worth it if u earn good money frm it. is the glow effect there in the reference ? i'll look for it.
yeah...i've heard too that almost all the 3d professionals r using vray as the rendering engine. I too saw in many of the tuts. that vray produces amazing realistic effect to the image. yeah scanline is a fast renderer but only for normal uses. I downloaded the free ver. of Brazil from Splutterfish.com. well..dunno anything about it, also downloaded the reference manual.
I heard somewhere that only vray shadows should be used with vray coz other shadows won't produce a good effect.
Thanx for telling the Bionatics site name ... i downloaded a trial vers. which contains six trees and they r amazing... fully realistic. and much better than what's there in the 3ds max default trees. Yeah, but these trees take much time to render.

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Shadow maps are an important tool even using vray. they are far quicker to render but lots of large shadow maps can chew up memory.

Heres a breakdown.

Vray shadows are raytraced which means they will have perfectly sharp edges and calculate opacity maps such as leaves etc.. They also have an area light setting which means you can get nice soft realistic shadows that are sharper near the base of the object and softer as the shadow and the object get further apart. the blurry part of the shadow is called the penumbra.

Vray lights automatically give you area shadows and the size of the light effects the bluryness.

Shadow maps are 2d bitmaps that are created at render time. They are made out of pixels so their resolution will effect how sharp and clear they are. they don´t calculate
opacity so things like leaves or glass will cast solid shadows. I often use shadow maps on all my extra fill lights with high sample range so they all blur together and you can´t really tell that they are casting shadows. You could just turn shadows off for those lights but that tends to make the image look flat. If you use only area shadows and you have lots of lights the render times will be significantly increased and if you have lots of lights all casting hard edged raytraced shadows then you´ll get lots of odd looking shadows criss crossing the scene.

It helps alot to approach lighting the scene using the three point lighting setup as follows.

1. first create a key light. the key is the brightest light with the most obvious shadows.
It is also the light with the most obvious location. eg. the sun from a window, a bedside lamp or maybe even a tv screen in a dark room.

2. Create a fill light. Opposite from the key with very blurry shadows usually tinted blue with a low value. you can have lots of fill lights around a room all with very low values like say ten all with a multiplier of 0.1. It helps to make them instanced.
With vray, GI will give alot of fill and using the skylight is very effective but you may still want to use fill lights to define the objects more.

3. Create a backlight. a strong light from the back to illuminate the rim of objects. You notice it all the time in movies there always seems to be a bright light coming from nowhere that defines the shape of peoples faces etc... It makes objects look more three dimensional.

Theres so much to the study of lighting. Its probably my favourite subject, hence the longwinded posts about it.

Here are some images that illustrate what I´m talking regarding different shadows and lights. the file names explain what is being used.

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U have given a very good account of lighting. Thanks for the valuable information. i downloaded a book on lighting which i've just started reading. it too speaks about all the the three lights which u have described above- i.e. the key, fill and back light. But I've a question- when the v-ray can do GI and Indirect illumination... in which it itself creates a fill and back light.... then why do we need to do manually? plz answer. U have a great indepth knowledge of the software ... wish u were here and I cud learn frm u the 3ds Max. well... i tried viewing ur images ... but i think there is some problem now...coz they r not opening... i'll check them later. Thanx.

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Thanks. I get a kick out of chatting about all this stuff so I appreciate the questions also.

While its true that vray and other renderers can provide a realistic lighting solution even when using just one light source, you have to think about your artwork a bit like a photographer does. A photographer will spend alot of time thinking about how to light his subject and create images that are more evocative and artistic. The D.O.P or director of photography on a film project is a very important part of making a film look really great. If you look at movies closely you will be able to notice that often even when a scene is outside in full sunlight there are rim lights and kicker lights coming from the sides to accentuate the actors or create extra mood etc...

In CG we have an immense amount of control and there are many different techniques and tricks that we can use to make our images look great. If you rely too heavily on GI methods like the vray skylight alone you´re images can end up having less impact.

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i checked all ur images Tyson...i didn't hold of the 3rd image.... the second image too has shadow map and the third also. but why the pixels r visible in the 3rd one ? what setting did u do?
yeah i noticed some times in the movies the extra lights which u talk abt. But i didn't understand one thing- where should the fill light and the backlight be placed in the scene?? thanx.

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Regarding the images. Number two is a shadow map with a hi resolution, meaning the map created at render time was around 1200X1200 pixels
the 3rd image is using shadow maps also but with only a low res map around 100X100 pixels. the second one uses much less memory so if you turn up the sample range to blur it you can have lots of lights without running out of ram.
to get it to look jagged like that you need a low resolution shadow map with very low sample range. by default the sample range is something like 4.

The fill lights need to go opposite the key to put some light into the shadows created by the key. In a room they might cross back from the darkest corner.
or when lighting a face they would be directed toward the side in shadow.

The backlight generally gets placed directly behind the subject like a statue or something try different angles to get a good rim light effect. In a room you might need something like a lamp that adds some rim light.

Heres an explaination of the settings, I took a few diagrams from the max reference too.

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i too tried using different resolutions with the sample range. i think tyson... i think i got some hold of these things(Key, fill and back lights).
well.. one doubt.... do these all the three go simultanoeusly? i mean the key light and the fill light will go hand in hand... but does the backlight too has to be projected with these simultaneously or it can be left sometimes??

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A back light can be left out if you don't want it. Generally a back light is used to bring the subject out from the background. As you don't really have a subject such as a character or something, your situation is a bit different. I'd suggest adding some sort of feature to the back wall such as a painting and then try and light the painting with some downlights. Check out this page to see what I mean:

http://www.lightology.com/features/1007_art_lighting_feature...

This will add depth and contrast to your image and also look cool.

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http://www.3dprevis.com

yeah ... that's what i was also thinking, backlight is not necessary everywhere. i read somehere in the lighting book that the back light is also called the rim light or the highlight. is it so? it gave the example of sky with a pic.
i'll check your link... thanx steve. well...the power just came in my area. today there was no power for 7 hrs and it's disgusting as the climate is too hot.

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Yep, the back light is also called a rim light or highlight (though I haven't heard it called highlight all that much)

Sorry to hear about the power. What did you do for 7 hours without your computer??

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http://www.3dprevis.com

good question.... haha.... well just read some books for 2-3 hrs then went for a walk in the evening and lo! it started raining like cats and dogs when i was on my way back to home, so took shelter under a tree , finally reached home and then tried calling the electricity board for the power... and thus after 2-3 hrs , the power was restored. The place where i live is still under dev. the roads r not so good...so the whole place has been filled with water and as i'm writing now...it's still raining heavily. so that's the story.
i've a book on lighting by Nicholas Boughen. in that it was written Highlight or rimlight.
well... for how many hrs do u work on ur pc??

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The renders look great, you're really showing some improvement in your lighting and the models are good as well. Can I suggest using a vray light material on the computer screen? Put the same bitmap you've got there now in the map slot and it should look pretty good. You might have to adjust the multipler a bit and it will probably slow you render but it'll be worth it.

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http://www.3dprevis.com

thanx steve...fo the compliment....well... i haven't used vraylightmtl till now... but i'll try using in this image . i'll use omni lights in this image with the vraylightmtl and post the image later on.

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awsome work looks really cool

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One life Live it
http://www.scotts-designs.co.uk

Thanx scott.... well... there is some more work to be done in it... i'll do it and post the pics....

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Looking forward to it.

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http://www.3dprevis.com

sure...i'll .

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