Post Apocolypse Scene - rezdoggy

[Rezdoggy]

Heres a scene ive been working on lately. this is also one the few renders that DIDNT crash mental ray. :) still needs some work done and textures and post production :) the trees, grass and some rubble were made using 3DYK paint plugin, a brilliant tool for creating trees and grass and buildings and stuff really quickly. Its free aswell :P
http://www.3dyk.net/
the ivy was made using guruwares ivy generator plugin for max, based on Thomas Luft's ivy generator. which is also free
http://www.guruware.at/main/
however, because of the procedural nature of the ivy you will be dealing with alot of polys very quickly so careful. I think its the ivy that mental ray doesnt seem to like :(. Anyway here is the render

forgot to mention i used 3ds max to make the scene

[Freeloader]

The main problem in your scene has to do with the low contrast. The colours are too plain, and make the image dark and dull; I think due to the render settings you are using. The scene illumination is not credible in relation to the sky, and the cars give me the impression of plastic rather than iron.
The thing is, it's a really nice scene and idea but in my opinion you need to make some corrections rendering it. First of all, find a good HDRI map, use that for both the lightning and the background, that way, the light and amount of occlusion in the scene will match perfectly with the background atmospheric and the time of day. Include some post-processing, tweak the Brightness and Contrast first of all to make a more dramatic and dynamic difference between the colour ranges, and maybe even add a specular bloom and some light fog in the background. Work a little more on your shaders, particularly on your metal (hint: your specularity should be bigger and harder/noisier - phong won't do it).

Hope this helps.

[Rezdoggy]

thanks for the feedback. Indeed, the render isnt very good. Im not that good at rendering, and this is the first attempt at lighting a whole scene :) yea ill have to change the shaders aswell. Do you have any useful tutorial links? cheers :)

[exigaen]

i'd integrate a physical sun + sky system into that scene. it would improve it no end, if you can tune it right.

[Freeloader]

I think this (http://www.hdrlabs.com/sibl/index.html) is a very nice site explaining image-based lightning. As for shading, I'm not too familiar with Mental Ray, but in my opinion to fully understand how shading works you have to roughly understand how light behaves in the real world. That's how you get really good at it. Start looking up words you find in the settings (like diffuse, specular, refraction) on google and read about it a bit, then experiment with values until you get the closest result possible. I always change one value at the time with big differences to clearly see the imapct that setting has. That's the long time approach (and my approach - I could talk hours about the Duality of Light Theory :lame:)

For now, look on the web for some rendering tutorials, there's tons of them around, you're bound to get it right eventually. There is nothing wrong following tutorials, people that wrote them were looking for their share when they were starting. Doesn't matter which path you take, the important thing is to get there ;)

Best of luck!

[Rezdoggy]

thanks very much for that link, it looks very helpful :) ill look into it a bit more tomorow.
and as for tutorials, ive taught myself everything i know about max using online tutorials :P theyre brilliant!