David sent me a document entitled, The Science for CG v2, which I starting reading right off. I only made it to page seven because something within those first seven pages related to the pull toy I’m working on. The subject was diffuse brightness and diffuse saturation, and several colored tea pots were displayed as examples. But the two black tea pot examples are the ones that caught my eye because it reminded me of the tires on my pull toy.
So I went back in and tweaked the color for the tires, first adding a bit of red, then green, then blue. Red and green didn’t work, each gave the tire a red or greenish tent. But just a touch of blue and the tire suddenly looked like a real tire. The tires have more definition, they’re no longer black holes, reference to too much diffuse brightness, and the overall scene looks better. I think.
Dwsel sent me a link to this document found in this thead http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=21&t=650761 - ‘Science of CG’ . It makes for very interesting reading. Well worth devoting a little bit of your time to while you render something in the background I reckon.
Ah… I can see I’ve fallen behind again, nice to see this thread so active, but also disconcerting when I think of what I might be missing as the forum is good at burring interesting things.
Rashad, thank you for your kind remarks. Yes it is true also for Light Domes and 3D Fills. Though, I am embarrassed to report, I’ve still yet to get around to testing those properly. I got to the point of radial lights - what I thought would be a simple project - has turned into an almost bottomless pit. The more I discover, the more I come to understand how little I really know.
Shaykall, the godrays I think should all point to a single point in space, as things stand they seem a bit higgledy-piggledy. The caustics look good, but I think the pattern itself is covering too much area, it needs to be scaled down so it gives a better impression of scale perhaps?
IceScribe, if you have a computer powerful enough to take the strain, you might experiment with switching on True Ambience (and TA scatter correction) in the premium effects and see what it can do for your low level lighting environments. I can’t make any promises that it will offer an easy solution, but your indoor render in particular would tempt me into testing this option.
Dave, nice work, I wasn’t sure the Collada importer was working properly. I will have to have a look at this!
Pam, do your really have a render for every occasion? I begin to suspect so…
Michael, your seahorse scene looks wonderful. The material on the seahorse is stealing the scene. It reminds me almost of one of the aliens out of the Abyss, with that electric blue. Everything sits nicely in frame and the level of complexity and mixture of DOF nicely balanced one another. On my monitor, it looks almost as if the nose of the creature is sticking half an inch out of the screen. Most disconcertingly! Do seahorses bite?
