Anyone up for the challenge?

[alexinfla]

My boss is on the fence as to whether or not we should purchase nXt.  We are a manufacturing company and we need to generate a ton of images of our products.  He's waiting for me to produce an image that convinces him that nXt is the way to go.  I personally have been using CAD, modeling in 3D and rendering for the past 25 years.  That being said I was hoping to see if someone might want to take up the challenge of producing an image for me that would knock my bosses socks off.  With all of the other responsibilities I have in the office I just don't have the time to adjust lighting... render... adjust reflections... render... adjust lighting.... render... adjust reflections... render... adjust material... render... so on and so on.

 

Anyone up for the challenge?  I was just hoping that someone might have a typical environment with great lighting that they could drop a model into and produce something rather quickly.  The model only has three or four materials.  I'll attach the appropriate files if anyone shows interest.

 

I know it's probably asking a lot but I figure it never hurts to ask.

 

Regards,

Alex

[Chas / Aug Posekany]

I don't know how Roy set up the example he did. I usually don't use different HDRI images but may set intensity differently for reflections and refraction.

[Chas / Aug Posekany]

I'll take a swing at this,....it's right up my alley. This is the type of thing I work with every day.

[Chas / Aug Posekany]

hERE'S MY $.O2

[alexinfla]

Chas!!!!  I didn't see these till now.  They're awesome!!!  Right on the money!!!

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

Make sure you ask him how he did his-- they may be a little more complicated (involving alpha compositing??)

[Chas / Aug Posekany]

Roy,

These are pure nXt and nXt image editor. The ground plane has a totally flat white applied with it tagged as an alpha. Then make the adjustments in lighting using a .nxt format file to get the shadowing right and save out as a jpj file. Thiss drops in a totally white background instead of the background and groundplane alpha'd out. 

I guess I did use photoshop to resize them all.

 

I'm not real happy with the HDRI I used on them. The ones I have for indoor reflections I'd like to use (especially with all the SS) all are pixelating badly.

I used an outdoor HDRI that was desaurated as far as possible. I really thought the desaturation settings would do better in killing the blue tint. All in all they are not bad.

I also used my trick of using material glow on the little red lens instead of actually lighting them.

[alexinfla]

I'm really impressed!

 

I will definitely be taking advantage of the alpha channel because there will be a need to not have any background.  I'm not sure how you tag the ground plane to be an alpha channel.  I thought you could only take advantage when you simply save the file but that typically includes the ground plane.

 

It seems as though the rear side image is a bit crisper than the front?  The edges seem to be a little bit more defined on the rear image. Perhaps some adjustments were made?

 

I think the stainless really looks good.  How the stainless looks is very important to my boss.  Is it the same material that was already assigned in the model?

 

 

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

1. Select the ground plane
2. On the Object Properties Tab select Alpha.

 

[Chas / Aug Posekany]

As Roy replied, you just select the ground plane then go to the "object properties" window in Nxt, one of the radio buttons is alpha.

One thing I've done in the past that your boss might really like is to use a tile material on the floor with a bump applied to the grout lines. Then tag the floor as an alpha. The results are really nice. You get the slight shadowing around the perimeter of the cart with slight grout lines extending just slightly from there in grayscale. It's kind of a cross between a paresi sketch look background with a overlayed photorealistic rendering. I'll see if I can find one I did like this from back in the old Ar3 days and post it as an example of the technique.

The rear image is better because it ran twice as many passes. The reflective and refractive bounces may have been set a touch higher on the rear image as well.

Note: I did not use the path tracer engine, I used the standard Nxt engine.

[Chas / Aug Posekany]

This is an example of the tilebump and an alpha I was refering to in the last post. It is the first time I have tried this with nXt and found although it does work it does not fade the shadowing back to the same degree I could achieve in AR3. I'll have to try some tweeking to the setting to try to get it to fade out more.

I may need to add some lights on a seperate channel to use to fade the shadowing back using the editor to adjust the degree.

[Chas / Aug Posekany]

If you would like I can send you back the model with all the set-up as I rendered the rear view. I got it saved that way.

[akinlolu olugboji]

Would love it.