Preserved Topic: Big black pills and the contents of...

Well I was surprised that nobody had ever rendered some black pills before so I burned some time in lightwave making this...



I have to confess that its a polymonster of a render. Everything in the scene has interior and exterior surfaces, the glass balls have inside and outside surfaces, also inside the glass there is a nuclear mushroom cloud mapped around a mushroom cloud shaped model. I was going for the look of the ball on Doc's front page, didnt ever get satisfied with that ball but I tossed it in. I made the pills and after I built the models I realized that had not been paying attention to the size of the model...turns out that the pills are 35 meters long. This may explain a bit of the drama around here....I figured some people around here may have tried to take them as suppositories... Ahem, I got a little texture map happy, you can see the bump map that makes the asylum letters raised off the pill, I also made a few masks other than the bump for proper appearance. I started to get excessive on the masks and never got happy enough with the surface under the pills but I got sick of messing with it. I should have just gone and found a premade surface or a nice shader for the metal but who knows, mabye when I have some more time to kill.

I got bold and decided to test out my new ram, (went from 256-512meg) by rendering it at 2560x1920 with enhanced high antialias...whats all that mean to those of you who dont use lightwave...means 19 hours render time. I have a 1600x1200 px version for those who are not bandwidth impaired. http://www.moaiz.com/laboratory/pill_render.jpg

I really like the little orbs. The inside of them is wicked. The only thing I don't really care for is the Asylum logo. It looks really stretched. I know you probably did the best with what you had and it really is cool, just not liking the type much.

yeah because I made the models so huge I had issues when mapping the text on. The logo was an afterthought and I encountered probs because of it.

Good stuff man, looks nice. I'm sure Doc could find you a high res Asylum logo to map on there if you asked nicely...

chris


KAIROSinteractive

I corrected the 'asylum' text on the pill and got a tighter render on the globes to allay the concerns that they were jawbreakers.

Mighty fine work there moaiz...

Magik pill for sure....great concept and lots to jar the imagination with all that's
going on in those tiny spheres.

19 hr. render? ouch!

cheers
kromaZ

Nice image.

The only thing that bugs me is the fact that all the scattered globes are perfectly vertical. I'd expect them to be at random angles as they scattered, unless there's some reason for them to be bottom-heavy.

I really need to learn LW ...

they have nuclear explosions in them of course they are bottom heavy....hahah, yeah I made them all with 'rest on ground' so the centerpoint is at the bottom of the globe, roating them is not something I considered when I created them that way.

I made some additional changes and re-rendered it, I am much happier with it now.



[This message has been edited by moaiz (edited 08-29-2001).]

Ooooh much better. I like that a lot. Is the metal different? It looks like a more realistic metal, kind of brushed. Really sweet stuff there.

That is some great stuff. Is making an excellent background image for me.

followed the thread from big sig till I got here, again vey nice work! hey post the newest one over here as well

Ohhh! using this as a background image for a deskyop would be sweet, hope you don't mind moaiz


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The more I look at it the more I feel the lighting from your secondary source is off a bit...

I can't believe that the light is that close to the ground...

I am not 100% on this, but it does appear a bit funny.

*Dark tilts his head side to side, hmmmmm *

ah! I see what you mean! it isn't noticeable enough to make a diffrence though

Top notch, Moaiz, but...

This brings up something about 3D progs that really bugs me from time to time. Look at the insided reflection on the pill on the left. The stretching makes those little objects all pixelated. Nasty. It really sticks out like a sore thumb sometimes.

This time around it's gotten me really thinking on a decent way to fake it. Damn it. I'm tonque tied. I'll have to do some playing around to see what I can come up with.

its actually I think most of the problem may be the surface applied to the pill. On the outside you can see that its kind of a bumpy matte surface well inside the reflection shows those bumps a bit more, ideally I would have made the inside surface of the pill seperate from the outside, smoother and less reflective. than the exterior. For some reason it seems almost more reflective. I got the look I wanted on the outside but the inside didnt work right. It might also be because under the globes on the inside there is a light source, they appeared too dark without it.

The orb looks exactly liek Doc Ozones Orb?? Did you just replicate it, did he give you the model. Is it a common model? What 3D program you use?

For something like that, could you do a straight view render, toss it into PS, stretch it there, clean it up, then map to just that inside side?

Know what I mean?

I'm just speculating here because I don't really like the way 3D progs magnify/stretch sometimes as oppossed to PS (plus you can also smooth out the bumps while you are at it).

A popular way to make complex renders these days is 'rendering in passes'. Basically, you'd render just the ground, just the reflection on the outside of the pills, just the reflection on the inside of the pills, just the specular highlight on the pills, etc, etc. Then you'd composite the whole thing together in your compositing program. Photoshop works well for this with still images. You'd use something like After Effects for animations.

The trade off is setup vs versatility. It takes a long time to render all these components, but once you're done, you can completely change the look of the image in Photoshop without re-rendering. It also allows you to do things like you're suggesting: replacing one of the rendered components (the inside reflection) with a 'faked' equivilent done purely in Photoshop. This is especially cool with shadows, since most 3D apps don't do shadows well without significant overhead (area lights are very compute-intensive).

I did an experiment with the technique a while ago and posted it here, but I imagine it's been deleted by now. I rendered several spheres and had the ability to change their colors/reflectiveness/highlights in Photoshop. It worked quite well. One layer for each ball had the reflection very high, almost chromelike. By adjusting layer opacity, I could dial up how polished the ball looked. Changing the color and highlight strength worked similarly.

Nev, its supposed to be doc's orb, I replictaed it. Assuming you know lightwave the explanation is pretty straightforward....

I just counted the horizontal & vertical segments then made a sphere with x vert and y horiz, selected the faces and beveled them inward, copied to another layer, flipped polygons, pasted back into the orig image, merged, and named surfaces, to make it look more spherical, I ran spherize to make it more circular and changed the size to match the inside sphere. The cage is a bit sketchy, It wouldnt stand up to very close inspection. The 'glass' is a sphere but its tesselated at 2 instead of segmented and sized to fit inside the cage, its got a flipped sphere inside it too to make the glass a bit more realistic, I used a color filter on the outside transparency otherwise the glass wouldnt look colored, both surfaces set to 95% transparent. Inside the globe I actually did a halfass model of a nuclear explosion because it looks like there is a nuke in doc's image. I also wrapped it in a texture of an explosion and made it rather luminous. I realized that I went so far overboard on surfacing that its not even funny anymore. I am fond of some of the textures I made so I did end up with some new surfaces that I like so I guess there is an upside.

Here is the sphere a bit closer

I just put this as the desktop on both my machines here at home, I love this image! (I had to fix the background on the top, the textured black/grey just kinda stopped for the last 80-90 pixels and went full black. Easy fix in PS, though.) We really need to get around to designing a companion site for the asylum, more of a "corporate presentation" of our hygenic facility, our lovely grounds, and peaceful atmosphere. (Kind of like Bill Gate's "demo" tour of hell, heh.) Occasionally we could let the edges of the presentation slip, and a glimpse would be offered of the choas within. Included in this would also be useful FAQs on what goes here, and of course, a download page! Gotta have one of those. The forum doesn't really start until you get to "cgi-bin/" anyway, it'd be easy to add a real index page and directories for the presentation, I'll have to think about this, could be fun!

Your pal, -doc-

Could we even do a FAQ page? Oh that would be so fun and solve so many issues.

It is a lot easier to link to a section of a FAQ than it is to search out something in the archieves.

That sounds like a great idea Doc. I'll do whatever I can to help

Oooh, really cool idea Doc, I'm totally in for that.

Moaiz, cool stuff on the image explanation, I need to get to playing with LW more again. Just moved into my new place and don't have my box set up yet, need to do that....

Chris


KAIROSinteractive

WHAT PROGRAM YOU USING???? :P

Program? I did all that in photoshop.

And my name is Spiffy Monkeyfart

Good to meet ya Mr. Monkeyfart, or can I call you Spiffy? Welcome to the asylum.




In the beginning, there was the word...and the word was 'God', although by the time it reached the other end of the phone line... the word was 'Gznd'

Yeah ok mabye I used Lightwave 5.6 a little...

Yeah I know 6.0 and even 7.0 are out for Lightwave allready but dammit its an expensive toy. Its like the equivilent of using photoshop 3.0 almost anymore....sigh...Hey mabye I can get a client to pay for a full version of lightwave 7....that would be neato-keen.

On the other stuff...I like the idea of a corporate 'face' for ozoneasylum.com with a FAQ, and some links to gurus network, asylumite sites, etc. Because how else are we going to get Apple, Wacom, and Adobe and many others to line up to sponsor the Ozone Asylum convention and fly us all out to Tahiti?

P.S. Still beaming with pride that MY pills are on Doc's desktop

So what's your lighting set-up, may I ask? One idea might be to use a backlight to kind of make the image pop a bit more, give everything a bit of a highlight. There's a great 3 point lighting tute illustrating this on 3Drender.com.

chris


KAIROSinteractive

lighting is....



They are of varying colors and brightnesses from yellow-orange-brown. Different types too, some are distant, some are spotlights, the two in the end of the pills are point lights. I had the scene backlight more but the pills took on so much reflections that hey no longer looked 'black'. The solo one I have in my sig is signifigantly backlit, in addition it has the reflection of this nuke in it.



I will play with it more of course. Thank you for the link too.

Cool stuff man, thanks for the info. I need to get back into playing with 3d...

Chris


KAIROSinteractive

What would be really cool is if we *did* get some sponsors somehow, would to be have an occasional competition. We could get a panel of respected asylumites to judge the entries, and the winner would get some sort of prize. Of course, this is never going to happen, but you know how those black pills are