I have to keep number of the surfaces/shaders with raytracing properties to bare minimum. Not simply because more raytracing doubles/triples render time.
It also introduces the all kind of rendering artifacts on the surface of glass.
For instance I can't place a mirror like object behind the trasparent glass. It results too many reflective/refractive calculations. The rendering rays keep bouncing back and forth between the mirror object (bulb reflector) and the glass itself. In order to avoid the artifacts I have to crank the quality settings up...which makes the rendering too long and too unstable....well..
It would be great to know your opinions/comments!
Many thanks!
Why not flag the light lens to "not effect reflection/refraction" ? The lens itself would still reflect your HDRI, but not be seen by your light reflector. I sometimes do that in Max where I have that option. Surely Maya also allows you this otption for am objects properties ?
Dave
DMMultimedia HomePage Old School Fords, Max/MR and Schnorbill Texturing/Rendering Tutorials
Two weeks past since my last post.
I feel like I am done with this rendering.
Please let me know how much you like or dislike it.
Many thanks for your feedback!
Pasha
Thanks for feedback!
I really appreciate it.
I've got rid of the grain noise I used for previous image.
The output now looks sharper and more contrast. I can't decide which one is better.
Oh crap I thought that was real :| Superb job!! :love:
I was wondering if you could share how you made those light surfaces (specificly the back lights) Might help me with the shaders for my S2000
I couldn't find anywhere a hi res HDR image. So I made it by my self.
The resulting image I have now is healty 7748 by 3874 pixels.
With the camera I have (Nikon d1X) I could push the output size to around 10K by 5K. But computer starts to go nuts with such huge file sizes. Maya refuses to accept this file size as well. So I stepped down to more meaningful numbers.
I avoided a chrome ball technique. Since I don't like having some intermediate obejct between the world and the lense. Instead I used several photos to put the 360 panorama together. The trick is to keep panorama images for different exposures exactly the same (pixel location, not the value). So when you put the HDR together the images should match exactlly. Otherwise there will be a lot of color noise there. I noticed that even moving clouds could result to imperfections on final hdr. Here is how my home made environment map looks:
Wow, amazing picture you have there. So is this HDR picture or just standard picture format? Becuase I was told, there is no way any picture format could convert into HDR format. If so, Perhaps I could try same technique for myself.
I have used a good Canon Digital camera but the lens does not have a wide enough angle (need to buy one) so I have to take a lot of pics for each scene.
But I agree with you that is the way to go. I want to program a bracketing function on the Canon to take 3 or 4 different exposures of the same pic at the same spot. I see that Stitcher (which I have) can store a template so it is easy to export a few complete spherical panoramas and use HDRIshop to create a good HDRI.
I have a special bracket already to make the panorama pics here are a few I took while I was working in the Swiss Alps in the Underground Research Laboratory of the company I work for :
Originally Posted by Pasha Inanov
