Topic awaiting preservation: A chessboard in Max (Page 1 of 1)

Playing around with Max/finalRender:

(original small image removed to keep the thread light. See later post for updated version. The link here still points to the full-sized original)

Here is the full image (120k).



[This message has been edited by Das (edited 08-19-2002).]

[This message has been edited by Das (edited 08-21-2002).]

Interesting Das:

I like the DoF Effect, but we're pulling a bit away from the traditional chess piece shapes. But that's fine,m it's your image. A good piece of work from a fine artist, no less, but more than I expected from one so talented as you.

Koan 63, written on the wall of cell number 250:
Those who Believe
Can
Those who Try
Do
Those who Love
Live

Forgot to mention it's a WIP (I also posted it to the WIP forum on CGTalk).

The shapes are pretty much final, and they are intentionally a bit stylized. The textures are garbage (especially that dreadful pink granite); I slapped some Max library materials on there to play with it.

I think the dof is a bit strong, and should probably be centered on the king pawn (as the center of the 'action'). What do you think?

Mmmm, very nice Das.

The objects in the foreground look extreme;y realistic.

I would say that the blur (is that what you mean by DoF?) is a bit stronger than it should be, but aside from that, excellent work.

The poster has demanded we remove all his contributions, less he takes legal action.
We have done so.
Now Tyberius Prime expects him to start complaining that we removed his 'free speech' since this message will replace all of his posts, past and future.
Don't follow his example - seek real life help first.

Thanks

I'll work on the texturing next. The only texture I made is the ground. It's part of the parking lot outside my local Barnes & Noble

Oh, and the wood is a procedural, but I don't like it.

Yes...you're right. That red granite is revolting. Some nice milk/pearl marble would be good, although creating that texture would be 10 times harder.

Koan 63, written on the wall of cell number 250:
Those who Believe
Can
Those who Try
Do
Those who Love
Live

It looks more like soapstone - too smooth and not reflective enough (there would be glints from the quartz crystals and micas).

[edit: although I do like what you've done ]

___________________
Emps

FAQs: Emperor

Yes, I know that DoF = Depth of Field. Just not completely sure that the blurring is what was being referred to as depth of field - seeing as '3D' realism tends to be quite different from 'real' realism, and 3D artists tend to look at 3D program rules as 'real world' rules.

so...had to ask.

3D folks use the photographic definition (The amount of distance between the nearest and farthest objects that appear in acceptably sharp focus in a photograph (or image)).

Most photographs do not have infinite apparent dof, and so exibit some degree of blurring. 3D artists trying for photo-realism often try to generate the effect in thier compositions to make them more photo-real.

I over-did it in this one, and the final will have less of the effect (it will have a wider depth-of-field, in other words).

Thank you for the clarification.

It is an odd subject when discussed among '3D' artists and non '3D' artists.

Yes, it is a bit overdone, but again - very nice work in the big picture.



[This message has been edited by DL-44 (edited 08-20-2002).]

(Image removed to keep thread light. See later post for update. Link in this post still points to the same image)

Updated. Probably final. I went for the basics.

I bought a Photoshop dof filter online. Not quite the same quality as the renderer's version, but it does it in like 2 minutes vs 2+ hours to render

Full image is here

[This message has been edited by Das (edited 08-22-2002).]

Wow very nice....I don't venture in here that often but I really like this.....I like the chess pieces that you made up. Really sweet work

Peace

The shadow blurring looks faked... shouldn't the shadows be sharper near the bases of the pieces?

Only with a light that spreads. If it were a lamp or something, the shadow would blur more as it extended from the piece. Since the rays of light from the sun are pretty much parallel by the time they get here, you don't see the effect much on sun shadows.

One of finalRender's selling points is being able to do the type of shadows you're describing, but I turned off the feature for this image because the manual said the effect is virtually non-existant for sunlight.

Technically, I think the shadows should be much sharper all around. A test (I put my camera on the ground where I took the picture for the concrete texture) gave shadows that were pretty much razor sharp all around. When I rendered with razor shadows, though, it didn't look so good. I gave them a minor blur for aesthetic reasons.

They are grainy, though. I should up the samples.

[This message has been edited by Das (edited 08-21-2002).]

Hmm? A shadow should *always* approach perfect sharpness as the surface that it's on approaches the object casting the shadow. Whether it blurs when it gets further from the object depends on how large the light source is.

So, i mean, it's fine if it's blurry, but not if it's blurry right up near the base of the object.

You do see the effect on sun shadows (look at the shadow of a tree for instance; very blurry, you can't make out the leaves). If the sun were a point light, then its rays would be parallel. But since it has physical size (and is quite large), rays from the right hand side of the sun can fall where rays from the left hand side may be in shadow. While we say its rays are parallel, they're really crisscrossing over each other.

So I don't know what that manual is talking about saying sunlight doesn't blur shadows. =)

Sorry, I wasn't clear.

I was saying it shouldn't blur as it leaves the contact point. As I saw with my camera, the blur (on small objects, at least - I'll look at some trees on the way home ) is virtually non-existant with sunlight. The shadows should be razor sharp all the way around. I just couldn't make them look good razor sharp (they looked too 'CG' to me), so I blurred them a tad.

Edit: Looking outside right now, all the shadows look razor sharp on everything. I can see the shadows of the individual leaves and branches of trees. I am 15 floors up, so I'm not seeing all the detail, but the shadow of the trunk near the ground and the shadow of the leaves several feet up don't look different from here. So the blurring isn't huge, anyway

[This message has been edited by Das (edited 08-21-2002).]

*looks out window*

Hmm, when the leaves are within about 6 feet of the ground, I can see individual leaf shadows, but the shadows of really tall trees on the other side of my yard are very blurred.

But, true, the shadow blurring on *small* objects should be virtually invisible from the sun, since the shadow doesn't have a chance to get far away from the object - unless the object is on the edge of a table and its shadow is hitting the floor a few feet away.

Is it windy out? Motion blur!! (j/k)

I'll try a re-render with the high-end shadow type. Maybe with a very very slight blurring at the tops of the shadows it will look less CG than razor sharp all the way around. I was avoiding the high-end shadows because the DoF was sucking up so many cycles, but now that I'm doing the DoF in PS, that's not a concern

I do appreciate the input, of course. Hard to improve without criticism.

Good call, I think, Slime.



Took an hour for the enhanced shadows (I can probably optimize that), but I think it does look a lot better.

Full image is here

An hour? Funny... I wonder if POV-Ray could do that faster =)

I'm sure I've got a setting way off

The soft-shadows tool is basically a fancy generator of blended ray-traced shadows. Pure ray-traced shadows would be hard-edged all around, of course. The tool has settings for the size and shape of the light, and it renders ray-traced shadows from lots and lots of points in that volume, then blends them all smoothly together. You get proper shadows that are sharp near the surface and blurred as the shadow moves away from the object.

I was getting aliasing, so I just kept cranking up the samples till they went away. Brute force

Yup, that's exactly how povray does it. However, as a speedup, it first checks the shadow rays from the four corners of the light source (which is a 2-D grid of points that eminate light), and if they're all in shadow or none are in shadow, then it assumes all the other points in the light source are also in shadow or not, and doesn't bother checking them. If some of the corner points are in shadow and some aren't, it will check all the points. Occasionally this causes artifacts, in which case you can set it to check more points before making any assumptions.

I often set my area light source to 17x17 points for a final render, and the only place it slows down is where the shadow is soft.

Hmm. I wonder if I stopped finalRender from doing that by choosing a circle as a light shape? These guys are pretty sharp, they might have put in the four corners check whenever the shape chosen is a rectangle.

Have to try it when I get a chance. At a much lower resolution, of course - 2048x1536 is not a good resolution to tinker with

Well, POV-Ray also supports circular light sources, and it's basically just taking the rectangular one and stretching the sides into a circle shape.

The speedup is called "adaptive" in POV-Ray, if that helps you find it =)

Ah. I found it in the manual when I got home. It does that.

I put a sphere on a plane and rendered (640x480):
No shadows: 1 second
Shadows with sampling at 4 minimum, 256 maximum, .3 accuracy: 11 seconds (looks grainy)
Shadows with sampling at 16 minimum, 256 maximum, .3 accuracy: 42 seconds (looks pretty good)

It sounds like the same kind of thing you're talking about. It shoots out the minimum samples, and if two are the same it doesn't shoot any between them. If they're different (one in shadow and the other not), it shoots more samples to find the edge, up to the maximum. Very similar to sampling for image anti-aliasing.

I probably just had the settings messed up, or it scales badly (I have to render the scene at double size to use the Photoshop DoF filter). I just got the renderer a week or so ago

besides dof.
i was wondering, is the floor just a texture or a real 3d-grainy floor? it looks very realistic!
im trying to achieve something similar in pov atm.

It's a photo applied to a plane. I pointed my digital camera straight down at the parking lot outside my local Barnes & Noble, from about 4' up.

Applied as both color texture and bump map.

cool trick!
bump map? that would be height-field? a grayscaled pic whoes highs and lows determine the height?

Exactly. In Max, you can use the same image (it ignores the color info), and adjust the 'intensity' (so you don't have to tweak the contrast in the image to minimize/maximize the effect).

Naturally, only some textures lend themselves to being used as both color and bump map, but gray concrete is ideal

Grumble: bump map == normal{image_map{...}}

Oops, you're right. Dunno where my mind was. A heightfield would be the equiv of a displacement map in Max, I think. A bump map doesn't modify geometry, just normals.