Non nXt render

[George Ioannidis]

Not much to be rendered lately. here is one picture done in other software. Just for C&C. Thanks.

[mike makki]

I wish nxt has that feature...Roy won`t do it

 

[mike makki]

I do like the brick texture ..so real

[George Ioannidis]

Well, after the Jelena's advices I got slightly deeper into HDRI lighting testing its possibilities. I have to say it turned quite nice in the attached model. No sun, no sky, just spherical environment map. I used one from this site (available for free). I am processing also to the other aspects Jelena mentioned, all of them really significant.

[George Ioannidis]

And here is adapted render of pergola.

[Jelena]

is this HDRI only, or do you have sun on, for better shadows...?

[George Ioannidis]

Both of them Jelena. HDRI is set to 1.8 strength and sun to 3.5. No other post process was done.

[Jelena]

well, the mirror of the car is telling me this ;)

George, you have two options for using HDRI. either like you made, but in this case you have to put the sun in correct position - which is not always that easy. let me guess: you did not have nice and strong shadows from HDRI, thats why you used sun also?

option two: you need a well calibrated HDRI, (and i can tell you, most of them out there are not calibrated, even they you can by for not that less money) and you fake the sun into the HDRI. but here you need Photoshop.

for better understanding:

on the left side is a typical HDRI, with some sun... you see the "strenght" of sun, its around 1,9. here you will get strange shadows. if you give more light, it will start to tint your render into some blue color cause of sky. at -7 stops, the sun is almost gone.

on the right side is a calibrated HDRI, done in PS. strenght is around 35.000 (!) and i still have sun on -16 stops.

whit this its for me much more easy to render, because i dont have to think if second sun and HDRI will fit in my reflections.

[George Ioannidis]

I am always aware of sunlight direction Jelena as it strikes my eye immediately, if it is not right :) Blender has some nice tools helping with easy orientation, scaling and rotating of background image before the render. The background image was carefully rotated to match the direct sun position that way. Accurender should have such tool, as it is designed mainly for architecture renderings.

In the two renders (chess set and revisited pergola) I didn't actually use HDR image. Both were simple equirectangular panoramas (JPG images of resolution 10.000X5.000 pixels) and were set up with "Background image" to "Environment texture" instead of "Physical sky". They are illuminating my scene giving some nice colour tints on surfaces not lit directly by sun (just for pergola, in chess scene there is no sun light source at all). I really do not want to use background image for lighting (I always need to have accurate sun position at particular month, day and time), but just as background to fill the empty space behind my model, as I do not model space too far from the main object and I really love when it is reflected on glossy and reflective surfaces (glass, metals etc.) as well. Sometimes I use alpha transparency and do the rest in GIMP (especially when time limits are tight).

[Jelena]

if you need the accurate sun position, your workflow makes sense. otherwise you would need a lot of HDRI's...

some hint: to speed up your rendertime significant, you can blur the background for glossy surfaces - and than make them reflective and put the blur background in the environment slot in the material.

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/Textures/Mapping/E...

[George Ioannidis]

I can even bake the whole lighting situation of the scene up and then just map it on my model. Render times are then just fragments of seconds :)

http://www.blenderguru.com/tutorials/introduction-baking-cycles/#.V...

[George Ioannidis]

Besides, are you using Blender too? :)

[Jelena]

long time ago i used Blender, now its 3dsMax. its easier to handle dwg's. but they are close.

for ivys, try double-sided-material with some tiny opacity. its some nerd thing, but i like to watch those details :D