Honki's helpful thread of uselessness.

[Honki]

Beloved artists, forum members, freeloaders and seat sniffers.

I have started a thread, which you have mistakenly found your way to. Perhaps by accident, but most likely because you're a bit of a thicky and want to learn some stuff.

It will basically be a dump of all the crap I have rendered, and hopefully a bit of an insight of the methods I used to do it. Mostly successful test renders, techniques and discoveries of my own. Expect nothing special.

Please note: I use 3ds Max 8, and VRay 1.5 mostly. Don't ask me dumb stuff like 'how do i doit in maya plz thx'
That will make me cross. You won't like me when I'm cross.
And those of you who already THINK you don't like me? Just make me cross and find out if your feelings are correct...

As this is a thread started by myself, please feel free to comment, speak your mind, fart, or just talk sh*t.
Ask questions and you will probably get a good reply.
Ask a dumb question, and I'll call you a knob.

Feel free to post any WIPs related to the discussions here.
Feel free to request any advice related to such discussions.
Feel free to critique, bash or flame others in such discussions.
Feel free to cash in your coupons for neolith's sister here. Then start a discussion about it.

You get the picture.

This is also a thread for me to become more proficient in various things.
If you know a better way of doing something, then SAY SO!

List of tutorials
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Basic VRay Studio Lighting Setup
(Tutorial Below!)




The Brown Teapot




Volumetric Lighting - Scanline Render Effects



Noodles




Post Production - By Request



Happy Pills (Coming Soon)

[Honki]

Draw as spline with 3 points in the front viewport (Along the X Axis)
Start the spline a few units to the right of the World Z axis.

I always find it helpful to have 3d Snap enabled when doing this, to keep the line regular and to stop it being wonky.

Make sure the middle point is a bezier curved point, and move the handles to create an appropriate shape.

Make sure that the line segments are at a fairly low interpolation rate, as it will just add un-needed geometry later on.

[Honki]

With the spline selected (make sure you leave vertice sub-object mode), go to the hierarchy tab.
- Click PIVOT,
- Affect Pivot Only.

Then RIGHT click on the move command button.
This will bring up a dialogue.

Set the pivot to the world's center. (0x, 0y, 0z)

Hit OK.

[Honki]

So now you should have something like what I've got, with the pivot of the spline where the 2 black axis lines meet. That is the world's '0' point.

[Honki]

Now add a lathe modifier.
What you want to create is half of a concave 'bowl' shape.
Adjust your settings as required to achieve a result similar to mine...

[Honki]

Now add a 'SHELL' modifier.

Change the outer amount to 0, as we want the 'floor' of the studio to maintain it's spot in world space, that way when we add primitives to the scene, it will be easy to 'sit' them on the ground!

Add a couple to the Inner amount. Just keep the segments at 1. That will be fine.

[Honki]

Why did we do all of this how we just did it?
Take a seat, and let Honki explain....

Creating the spline off-center ie: the leftmost vertice to the right of the z axis and the pivot at world space 0, will allow us to maintain all quads when we apply the turbosmooth modifier.
Although creating the line exactly on the z axis won't always do any harm later, I have learned from personal experience this;

• You have done the test renders.
• You crank up the settings & resolution.
• You hit render, and go to bed.
• You get up 9 hours later, and check the computer.
• The render's almost finished, only an hour left to go.
• There are GI artifacts all over the place due to badly smoothed geometry, or for whatever reason. It's just got something to do with the core of the lathe operation.
• You punch a wall, and fracture the knuckle of your ring finger on your right hand.

The shell modifier is to give the geometry another dimension. It will make the smoothing less problematic.

[Honki]

Next step, add a turbosmooth modifer, with viewport iterations at 0 or 1, and render iterations at 3.

[Honki]

Now we have our basic studio scene.
Add a white material to the studio floor.

If you are going to render with VRay, then I advise using a VRay material. It's just safer.

Next, we add a camera.

[Honki]

Create a standard target camera.
A standard 24mm lens is good for this kind of rendering, so if it's not already the default, set it to that.

Adjust the position of the camera so that none of the background is showing past your studio floor. You may wish to enable safe frames in the camera's viewport.

[Honki]

Now just add an object.
A teapot or torus knot or both, are great for test renders.
Make sure that it is sitting at 0 world-space on the z axis.
Then move the object, and scale it to fit in the camera's viewfinder.

[Honki]

Assign a simple yet cool material to the object.

[Honki]

Now we add a couple of VRay lights.

I use VRay lights almost exclusively in studio-style renders, as they work like a light card in a real studio, giving good reflections and spreading the diffuse lighting around a bit.

Add one to the upper left of your camera, and one to the upper right.

Make the leftmost light slightly larger and with a greater output than the one on the right. Make sure you rotate and orient them to face your object in the scene.

I like to vary the tints of the lights.

I generally use a subtle warm colour for the key light (the powerful left one), and a subtle cool colour for the fill light (the pissy right one).

See the pics...

[Honki]

Here are the settings that I use for the lights.

Please make sure that you set the lights to INVISIBLE!
There is nothing worse than finding out after hours of rendering, a corner of one of your lights somehow made it into your shot.

Don't worry, this won't affect anything!

[Honki]

**** it.

Let's try a test render just for the hell of it.

Make sure you are rendering with VRay.

I like to set the dimensions for my test renders to 490 x 270.

Keep your render settings as standard for now. Hit the render button and see what you get.

You should get something similar to this;