August 31, 2011 : U-S-B! U-S-B! U-S-B!
Some time to kill in Maya, along with the desire to try some different modeling techniques, resulted in a USB cable. Throw in a few Mental Ray materials, and the result is below:
The model has a good amount of detail – much more than the render lets on, and I attribute the lack of definition to my light setup (although I’m sure some of this could have been better highlighted via the modeling). After spending way too much time tweaking the lighting, I finally settled on the result above.
I then decided to render without any lights, and instead just use an HDR Image. The render is below:
I definitely like the feel of this render better. Besides the better specularity on the metal and black plastic, there is a lot less uniformity in general to the image. Why such a drastic difference between the two images when the only change was with and without lights/ an HDR Image? I don’t know. But that is something I would like to get a better handle on.
posted by Pi Visuals at 9:37 pm
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August 5, 2011 : A Need To Tighten My Shading Skills
I had some more time to kill with Maya, so I modeled a new object and rendered it with Mental Ray. I even topped it off by rendering with an HDR Image (Final Gather was also used in the final image).
I really liked how the handle of the screwdriver came out – particularly with the Final Gather. It was a basic Dielectric material with a few tweaks here and there. Sadly, the metal portion of the model looks really boring. It’s no mystery that my node based surfacing skills could use some attention, and this render reminded me of that. If I had more time, my intent would have been to have a brushed metal surface look. I hope to spend more time improving these skills in the future.
posted by Pi Visuals at 11:40 am
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September 19, 2008 : Caustics…
Trying to turn-a-phrase with the word ‘caustic’ is pretty difficult – hence the boring post title. Anyway, the previous Teapot Render lacked caustics, which is another powerful aspect of Mental Ray.
It is not as souped up as the Teapot Render, but it was a good exercise to show off the caustic capabilities of Mental Ray. Plus, it looks kinda cool and was fun to model.
posted by Pi Visuals at 12:52 pm
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September 5, 2008 : Would You Like Some Mental Ray, Polly Prissy Pants?
Mental Ray is a powerful rendering application, capable of creating some really impressive images.
As with most powerful applications, it is quite complicated and definitely not easy to master. The image above was testing out some of the strengths of Mental Ray. It has several different types of objects – semi-reflective surfaces, specular highlights, and a liquid. There’s even some teabag action going on (get your mind out of the gutter, you pervert).
A little post-processing work was also done in order to fake a depth of field (via Photoshop) . As expected, the render times were pretty large with Mental Ray. The final image, at 640×480 resolution, took about 25 minutes. Not horrendous but still rather large for a relatively simple scene.
posted by Pi Visuals at 8:45 pm
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