3D Post No. 44 - Once Upon a Time

Damn.

2007 has marked my 10th year of doing 3D - as an old man rewinding memories in my mind with tears in his eyes, I am blogging my ancient 3D history :p. Read on..

So I started doing what I love doing in 1997, aka the Jurassic Period of 3D rendering. PCs were only running at 60Mhz and RAM was way too expensive (P1,000 / megabyte!). Despite the limitations they were the best and worst of times. (sniff) It was exciting to do 3D stuff and we were pretty amazed at any CG that comes out of our monitors. Windows was still causing a stir and the first edition of 3D Studio Max was an exponential improvement from the DOS version. The downside was things really rendered slowly and production was a pain, but we didn't mind..


.. yeah.. was also a victim of that lens flare craze.. and those (ugh) tasteless RPCs :p


1999 up until 2000, just did scanline, scanline, and more scanlines.. computers became faster, software was getting more and more complex..


.. and one day I got bored and made my first attempt at "fakiosity".. (but I never got to repeat it until I arrived in Singapore, where fakiosity is still a norm side by side with the G.I. renderers.)


In 2001 it wasn't all gloom and doom with the 9/11 attacks and the economic recession, it was also the advent of radiosity, which was introduced in VIZ 4. It really made renders much more photorealistic than scanline outputs.. below is my first radiosity try, based on an Arquitectonica sketch..

..and more practice renders:


somewhere along the way I desired to learn Lightscape (which I think is still unbeatable in terms of G.I. solutions). Too bad they discontinued this software in favor of enhancing Max and it's Mental Ray plugin.


..the dilemma was that radiosity and/or lightscape renders took far long to prepare and render compared to scanline, and the time difference to achieve that effect only makes one think of reverting back to standard lighting. Which I did, in 2003, but with more complex lighting placements.

Then along came (drum roll) the G.I. renderers..! With G.I. (Global Illumination), any renderer is bound to be a great artist with only a few clicks.. Now photorealism is much more convincing and more intuitive to use. Except that we are fed with voodoo words like "min-max" and "regathering" and tons more of G.I. related jargon enough to create its own language. The motto then was "because it is not the artist's fault". Nope, it's the software developers'. :p Take the first G.I. engine I ever tried, as an example - Splutterfish's Brazil. It was too long and complex to set up back then:


..and I also became familiar with Cebas' Final Render, but didn't have a chance to use it in an actual output -

- because after a while came the star G.I. renderer, Chaos Group's Vray:


and everything really changed.. which is now my renderer of choice. It was the easiest and fastest G.I. engine that one could ever come across. I suppose I have no need to expound on the capabilities of the plugin as this blog is sprawling with Vray renders everywhere..

..and now, I'm thinking of learning Mental Ray, because it is slowly rivalling Vray's speed.. but who really knows what the next trend will be? I have yet to see the next quantum leap in rendering.. which doesn't seem to be happening yet.. Nuninuninu..

Rock and Shoot - Sepia

hybrid kamote (formerly mesh p)

mr. brosnan?

quiverpool

Rock and Shoot at the Arena, Clark Quay

It was a good venue for Pinoy bands who rocked.. :) and for the Pinoy CSers (clubsnappers, a photography enthusiast group in Singapore) to fire away their shots, who incidentally also organized the event. Some of the bands who played:

mesh p (among the other bands, they have got the most awesome stage presence)

quiverpool (their bassist was a good subject.. he had the blues look, definitely got charisma on stage)

mesh p (did i say they were vibrant all over the stage?)

quiverpool (rattle and hum look)

tone def (not sure about their name, but they belted out hard rock tunes.. yeah!)

mesh p (loved the two musicians' silhouettes)

quiverpool (he could pass for buddy guy)

mr. brosnan (the band that played the most originals)

tone def (rock star effect)

mr. brosnan (pure pinoy music)

M.C. Escher's Waterfall - Part 2

updated - but not yet completed - the background (a slight deviation from the original m.c. escher print). first post was here

the addtion of human figures will be quite a challenge..

MM 3D Playroom

Opening Soon.. :)

3D Post No. 43 - Exterior Minimalist

on a roll today.. dug these from my old files.. :)

3D Post No. 42 - Vray (Again)

..of course we did win some projects too.. using Vray renders:

Vray settings to follow..

3D Post No. 41 - Scanline

For animation purposes, I did this proposal in scanline aside from Vray - I thought it was a cool concept.. :

..too bad we didn't win the project due to the client's budget and design preference. (Heck they were a bunch of bored 50-yr old chaps anyway..)

..It Sucks

M.C. Escher's Waterfall

M.C. Escher is one of my favorite painters - he is not only a gifted artist but he also made a substantial contribution to mathematics and architecture, despite his apparently inadequate training in these fields.. he pursued graphic arts extensively, and has produced a lot of great lithographs and drawings.. mostly illustrating impossible structures. And like most great artists (Michelangelo, Da Vinci, etc), Escher was left-handed.

As a tribute, I tried reproducing one of his works, Waterfall.

This one is still in progress.. will post the finished product one of these days.

Art Kuning No. 1

After overkilling photography, now it's painting. :D Here's my first attempt, can't remember the last time I used acrylic.. Got inspired because one of our colleagues' cousin just had a successful art exhibit here in Singapore.. I'm putting in some sections of the piece first.. a.l.a. master strokes (:p) nuninuninuninu..

.. and for the whole piece..

:D

3D Post No. 40-something - Render Settings

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As you may have noticed, I have nothing much to do re 3D interiors lately - just playing around with those libraries (both 3D and materials) that I have built, collected, begged for, over the past months.

To make this entry useful, perhaps I will share my Vray settings here: (can't read the text? click the image to blow em up :p)


image sampler is set to -1, 2 for an acceptable antialiasing quality. indirect illumination is set to light cache (much faster than the old but reliable QMC), set to .8 to avoid overbleeding of colors. color mapping is set to exponential at .8, 3 to give that sharp hi-contrast look to the image.



irradiance map is set to low. you don't really need to render a still image using a high setting for this. almost like rendering at 50% radiosity, which is really all you need. there is always neatimage to fill in the cleaning part for the noisy results anyway.


light cache settings here only work for stills. for animation, you need to increase the subdivisions and reduce sample sizes. environment is set to dark blue to create that subtle bluish tone. QMC sampler controls the noise quality and global subdivisions. increase the multiplier and you automatically increase all subdivision values by that multiplier.. for example if a vray light has 8 subdivisions, a multiplier of 2 will override it at 16 value. 8x2=16.

when i've got the time i always try to jack up all the settings to give me a more solid GI solution and cleaner renders. the trouble is, there is never enough time.

I just needed blog about something I guess.. goodnight folks.