This is my first scene. I’ve been working with Blender for roughly three months. Although it doesn’t compare with most of the work I’ve seen here, I’m posting it in hopes that you all will provide me with suggestions for improving my work. I have much to learn.
Rendered and composited in Blender 2.55: No post production. Render time 1 min 48sec
Photo textures for the marble and the carpet. All others created in Photoshop.
EDIT: Kicked up the brightness. Fro some reason the render looks a bit darker here.
The shader on the pitcher and bowl is quite believable and looks good. The handles on the drawers are probably nice, but they’re hard to see, at least for me. The complex flocked antique wallpaper adds a great time-period touch. Great job!
Thanks, zavigny. CAD was a part of my working life for a couple of decades so I became a fair modeler. Proper lighting, shaders, and textures weren’t required for that sort of work so I am a complete noob where they’re concerned.
Well, you know I’m certainly no expert at this either, but we’re all learning here, so here goes: The scene looks a tad dark on my monitor, (maybe yours looks brighter…dunno). Just as a quick test, try throwing in a Hemi light, off to the side to see if the dresser shows more of it’s character. Also, maybe pull the carpet back from the wall coving to allow us to see the wood flooring underneath?
Overall it’s really quite good. I think the biggest simple adjustment you could make to get it “there” is get your ambient occlusion on or kick it to an unbiased renderer. I’ll assume you want to stay in Blender then just hit these settings under the World tab (for 2.55).
A step beyond that, is understanding your key, fill and rims lights. Don’t kill the darkness necessarily by turning up intensity, do it by adding some fill. A fill light will be a spot on low intensity (about half the intensity of your key/main light) with the shadows disabled.
Scene modeling is good, your textures on the dresser are great, get the lighting nailed out and show off the great work you did!
Quandtum, thank you very much for your insights. I am working in 2.55 so they’re all the more helpful. I’ll get busy on the lighting and tweak the ambient occlusion settings in accordance with your suggestions.
Also to overlook the obvious. Light should come from someplace. Although you can find situations where light is more or less even in the real world it is far more interesting if you have a sense of where the light is coming from even if a hint. A well placed window or lamp; anything to give the light a direction and give a sense of life to a still image.
I can see that you have a shadow from a direction, but there is a lack of contrast to really give it a sense of direction overall.
Well, it’s a ->LOT<- easier to see the scene now, but maybe now it’s a bit too much. (The mob is never satisfied, eh?). The light seems to come from everywhere at once, rather then from directional interior lighting or a window or whatever… kinda like a flash photograph where the flash is right next to the camera lens. Shadows disappear and the image goes sort of flat. There are some real good tutorials on setting up lighting on the web that could help you out far more then I can, so take anything I say as babble… unless it helps of course
Yeah, definitely it need better lighting and more shadows like zavigny said. Try using one intense light simulating natural light (like it’s coming from a window) and 1 or 2 more lights to simulate the reflected light from objects around, probably at least one of those not casting shadows.
Also, for this kind of scenes I like to use bot Add and Sub when activating ambient occlusion, try that and see how it works for your scene.
Great modeling, good textures. I love the carpet! Looks extremly photorealistic to me.
A little more work with lights and everything will be perfect.
I think you can always try to render this scene with LuxRender (easy setup in blender 2.55 and you don’t have many materials) and results can be beyond Your imagination (not sure if it’s necessary to mention it but since nobody sad anything…)
sftd, thanks for the kind words! I have been working on the lighting and I set up Luxrender and I am rendering the latest version of the piece in it.
Side note; I had no idea of the difference in rendering times between Luxrender and Blender Internal. I built a fairly robust PC (AMD 1060T Black 3.2GHz, ATI Radeon 5870, 8MB RAM, ASUS Crosshair IV MB) specifically to work in 3D modeling. As I mentioned in my OP, using BI it rendered the scene in under two minutes. You can imagine my surprise when I put the latest version of the scene into Luxrender at the default settings and found that, after an hour, it looked like a clay render in BI. A bit of Googling revealed that I’m looking at 5 or more hours for a finished render so Lux is churning away as I write.
Yeah, the difference is BI is a biased renderer, meaning it typically uses algorithms to “fake” the light. Lux is an unbiased render, it means it tries to apply real physics to calculate the light (hence many more calculations, more time, more physically “real”). The yaffa sight has the best write-up I’ve seen.
A good understanding of what renderer you choose is doing will benefit your project immensely. It takes a while for it to all soak in though, so be patient. Your are on the right track, some day it will ring clear like a bell.
This is kind of off the topic of callmeishmaels scene, but:
@Quandtum - Since there isn’t an exporter for Yafaray for Blender 2.5 yet (at least I think there isn’t, right?), I know almost nothing about it. How does the render speed compare to Luxrender?
@Callmeishmael - Is your AMD machine capable of multi-threading? I’ve jumped from a Core 2 Duo to an i7 with 8 threads and difference is phenomenal! Also, with the 8 virtual cores, I can adjust the Blender render tile sizes to suit the requirements of the scene. This is a great help with Blender. I spent some time investigating this, and in some cases cut the rendering time in half!
Say you have 3/4ths of your scene as regular materials but a big chunk of one corner is a transparent and mirrored ball. Blender divides up the rendering chunks according to number of threads and tile size. Now, assuming you are using the default 4 x 4 tile size, most of the tiles are on the regular material part of the scene but only a couple of tiles encompasses the computationally heavy ball. The easy tiles are quickly finished, but then only one or two threads are working on the whole ball and it takes a long time to finish. But if you change the tile size to 16x16 (or whatever), when the easy parts of the scene are finished, those finished threads now jump into helping rendering the remaining ball tiles, which makes it go real fast.
There seems to be a trade-off between ever-smaller tile sizes and computational overhead, (memory swapping or whatever) so that at some point smaller tile sizes begin to increase render time, but it really helped me out when I was rendering my airplane a lot, so a little investigation is definately worth it.
If you change the default Lens value from 35 up to say 50 - 70, you image should become much nicer compositionally. Your texturing and modelling work is spot on, the only area that is really lacking is the lighting, there are various tutorials around the net on blender lighting setups if you google the term, the nice thing about Lux render is that whilst it might seem more complicated in some areas, when it comes to lighting it is actually a lot easier to get nice realistic/natural results. Good luck with it.
What I have done with Yaffa has been pretty limited (and back on 2.49b). I’m like yourself, waiting for the exporter so I can hit it hard and exercise it’s capabilities. They’re also hard to benchmark against each other just due to how they render. Very vaguely speaking, my gut is, Yaffa seems faster, though in lower levels of global illumination Lux does a bit better. Lux can also be let to run indefinitely to produce whatever quality one would want (so depends on when you stop it). The benchmark would have to be made to equivalent samples/pixel calculations, and I’m not sure how to get that from Yaffa. I think Yaffa gives more of a “real world” feel to it where Lux does better “sci-fi”, “illumination” type things. Those are very much opinions/observations, but I need to do much more with Yaffa yet. I was a major fan of Lux but lately it’s starting to fall out of grace with me, there are two problems I’ve been having with it lately. Although it also has some very nice things in it that I’ve come to rely on even if my final render isn’t with Lux.
Even though there is no exporter for Yaffa, I’ve been contemplating pushing forward more… Export from 2.55 as OBJ and import into 2.49b and do final material setups there. I haven’t tried yet but ought work and I’m eager to see what I can push it to do.
zavigny, yes the AMD runs multi-threaded (It is a six core CPU) in both Blender and Luxrender. I downloaded the exporter for 2.5 from Luxrender’s site and it works fine. I’m running a recent 64Bit vanilla build under Win7 64 bit.
senser, I’ll try changing the lens settings to see their effect on the composition. Thank you for the suggestion. That is another aspect of Blender that I haven’t yet played with.