Rendering and postprocessing tutorials

INTRODUCTION In this tutorial I will show you how to create simple interior scene basing on reference photo.

I wanted to make it basic and simple for beginers without any complicated advanced settings.

MATCHING REFERENCE PHOTOGRAPHY IN VIEWPORT First of all have to create help lines in Adobe Photoshop (using line tool) to set the perspective of the image.

These lines should meet in one point.

Open 3d Studio Max Now open Views -> Background view (shortcut ALT+B), it will allow You to select Viewport Background.

Choose the reference file from hard disk and press ok.

Now You have to change render output in rendering menu to match the resolution of reference file (in our case 1025 x 819 ). N ow in your

selected viewport rightclick in top-left corner and select show safe frame. (shortcut SHIFT+F), Safe frame will appear and image should be perfectly placed. In next step we will change units to centimeters.

This isn't that crucial, but may be helpful setting proper scale for the objects. Customize -> Units setup... change display units scale to Centimeters. Now right-click on the snap button, select Home Grid and change grid spacing to 1,0 CM.

Next let's create a simple box in scene.

Set height of the box to 300 cm.

Convert it to editable poly, Select all faces and flip them. Now right click mouse on our box and In object properties check "backface cull", because we want to see what is inside room without seeing walls from the outside.

This box will be a modeling base for our room.

Create Vray Physical Camera in the left corner of the box.

In the same viewport where you set background, change view to VRay camera. Adjust its position, and focal length, so the box line will match the red lines in background reference.

Select box and righclick on it. select object properties and in options check "see-trought" (shortcut: ALT + X ) Now your object will become transparent so you can see the viewport behind it. It will be easier to manipulate with connects and verticles this way.

Matching camera isn't easy task. So don't worry if lines aren't perfect. It would be much more easier if we had exact measurements of the room and camera specification.

MODELING If correct camera position is set we can start creating some details.

Now you may load reference photo without lines into your background (ALT+B). Delete faces on the walls to prepare holes for placing windows.

Create central columns. Select faces on the floor and ceiling and in editable poly menu choose 'bridge'.

We need to extrude a little bottom part of the columns.

All the time you may control your connects and extrudes from the camera view.

Let's create central desk. This is very simple object. We create it using box modeling.

1. Create base box and extrude basic shape. Use isolate selection to work only on that object (ALT+Q)

2. Add connects and chamfer them to create spaces

3. Extrude selected faces to 1 cm

4. Select 'grow' and detach faces. Now we have two separate objects, base and the doors.

5. Cap all holes in both objects. Select Borders in each of them and use CAP (ALT+P).

6. Now add double chamfer - select all edges, chamfer them and then again press ctrl+a and chamfer again

7. Select all faces and under smoothing groups parameters select "Auto Smooth" As we can obser ve shading isn't correct after auto smooth. If we want to use auto smooth we have to add some more connects.

8. Select these edges, and connect them. With this connects shading is back to normal. It should look flat, without any strange gradients.

9. Add more chamfers to the rest of the desk where necessary and repeat process on the other parts of the desk.

10. Here is the finished model with simple cylinders added.

The rest of the kitchen furniture were done in the exact same way. First create boxes, connect edges and control positioning with camera view.

MODELING CURTAINS First of all prepare holes in the ceiling.

Now create plane so it matches the hole. Plane has 240 width segments.

Over our plane create 28 boxes. They will hold our curtain.

Select plane and add Cloth modifier from modifier list. Unroll Cloth, select 'group', now select first vertex under first box , select 'Make group', Now click on 'Node' and select first box. Our first vertex is assigned to first box. You have to assign each vertex to box that lays over it.

In the end you should have 28 groups consisting 1 vertex each, assigned to 28 nodes. Use this settings for the curtain cloth:

Now we have to prepare animation for the nodes. First open the time configuration window and set animation time to 200

Now open CUSTOMIZE -> PREFERENCES ->ANIMATION and uncheck 'local center during animation' Jump to frame 150 and hit 'Auto Key' button.

Select all boxes and scale them,then move to the side. Make sure pivot center is set to "Use selection center".

Uncheck 'Auto key'. Select Curtain and in cloth options hit 'Simulate'.

CURTAIN IS READY

Modeling window frames 1. Create box touching outside corners of window holes using 3d snap.

2. Create connects

3. Select opposing faces and use Bridge option to create holes.

4. In bridge options select 3 segments.

5. Now select those edges and choose 'ring'

6. Convert edge selection to faces by rightclicking and selecting 'convert to face' or hit CTRL + polygon selection

7. Extrude selected faces, remember to check Local Normal.

8. As you can see these lines aren't straight after extrude. Select 8 verticles laying on these lines and click on "Z" in the edit geometry tab. They will automatically become planar to z axis.

9. Now create new connects in the middle and select these edges:

10. Extrude edges inside the model.

11. Now select all edges (CTRL+A) and add slight chamfer.

12. Another window frame is done in the same way:

13. In the end create boxes and place them inside frames as glass

MODELING CARPET 1. Create box and add chamfers.

2. Add uvw map modifier and select planar mapping. Set length and width to the same value. If you scaled this box before you have to use "reset Xform" utility in Utilities window before adding uvw map modifier.

3. Add unwrap uvw modifier, Click Edit... setect Tools and 'render uvw template' Now you can open this template in Photoshop and create carped diffuse and bump.

4. Add connects so the wireframe of carpet is dense. After it add noise modifier.

5. Now you can use FFD modifier to scale corners of the carpet.

CREATING AND MAPPING FLOOR

1. First we will detach floor from the main building. Select polygon, use 'ignore backfacing' and 'select by angle functions' to select floor. When you select any polygon that lays on the floor, whole surface will be selected automatically.

2. Now select 'detach' function to create separate object. Select floor and right click Isolate Selection (shortcut: ALT+Q)

3. Add UVW map modifier to the floor and set width and height to the resolution of the diffuse image. Now when you will apply diffuse, it won't be streched. You can also use 'Bitmap Fit' button to do so.

4. Create new VRay material, apply floor diffuse (HD_1_diffuse.jpg) and display map in vieport. Now select gizmo and scale it to achi eve desired effect.

5. Here is complete shader of the floor.

MAPPING WINDOWFRAMES Apply material with wood in diffuse map to window frame, and display this texture in viewport. Now add UVW map modifier and select box mapping. As you can observe frame isn't correctly mapped in some areas. This problem is easy to solve.

1. Add 'unwrap UVW' modifier.

Select all faces that have incorrect wood direction.

2 Select 'Edit...' button.

Rightclick and choose 'Break' Now you can move selected faces in Edit UVWs separatly. Remember to use 'constant update' optio n. Now just rotate these parts 90 degress ( Rot. +90 )

Always avoid to much streching in textures, you may put checker map to check amount of stretch

Other models in scene like seats, can be found on Evermotion models collections.

ADDING ENVIRONMENT

Create plane under building and select bright diffuse color. This plane will reflect skylight GI. Now create cylinder around scene and delete faces that we don't need. Next Invert faces so normals are directing inwards.

Now apply VRay light material on it. In color slot put environment map "land 08.jpg" Use unWrap modifier to addjust the position of trees. Now rightclick annd select VRay properties. Choose this settings:

Now when you set strenght of VRay light it's exposure will rise, but it will not affect final GI inside room. In this scene p ower of the VRay light is set to 7.

Press 8 to open environment settings.

Add VRaySky map into environment slot. Now the scene enviroment lighting will be produced by a skylight. We don't add any dir ect lights since all shadows in scene are soft.

Next add VRay plane lights to lit up room.

Light setup in scene:

RENDERING 1. Camera settings Turn vignetting off. Vignetting creates dark areas in corners of image and usually it isn't desired effect. If you want you can always add it later

easily in Photoshop.

To control overall scene brigtness set different ISO or shutter speed.

2.Render settings Turn GI reflevtive caustics on. This allows indirect light to be reflected from specular objects. It will help to lit up scen e a bit. Open VRay object properties of the VRay lights, increase caustics subdivs to 8000.

We will choose irradiance map for first bounce and light cache for secondary bounces.

If you don't care about rendering time and want best quality, choose brute force as first engine and set its subdives to 30. Quality of GI in small details will be better, but brute force can produce more noise and rendertime will rise significantly. In Irradiance settings increase HSph. subdivs to 100.

In post-processing (VRay: Indirect illumination rollout), change GI saturation to 0,8. It will desaturate GI a little and colors will not 'bleed' that much.

Increase GI contrast to 1,1.

In Settings rollout when you will Set Global subdivs multiplier to 2 it means that all subdives in lights and materials will be mulitplied by 2. In materials reflection and refraction subdives are set to 8 by default so the result will be 16. This is fast way to change quality of all materials in scene.

You can of course set all subdives in materials by your hand, decreasing and increasing them di rectly in materials.

Color mapping is set to exponential. It will help to avoid having 'burned out' areas. (RGB = 255,255,255).

Here are all render settings:

Here is final render using this settings without post-production in Photoshop:

Ok, now open Photoshop, we will ad some bloom. Select this area:

When you press CTRL+J it will create layer from selection. Now just add gausian blurr and select blending mode to screen. Cop y this layer few times to enchance effect.

Desaturate scene a little and play with levels to achieve final effect.

You may add slight vignetting using 'FILTER' -> 'DISTORT' -> 'LENS CORRECTION' Also you can sharpen image if its too blury. 'FILTER'-> 'SHARPEN' -> 'UNSHARP MASK' Final render after Photoshop:

SCENE OVERVIEW The scene consists of a round patch of grass, the house in the center and trees surrounding it. They had to be close to each other so you couldn't see through them, creating the impression of a forest. For every camera view, I added, removed or moved trees and fo liage to shape the composition.

The whole scene GRASS

Grass cut in patches

The grass is actually very simple and similar to the grass most people produce with displacement. The key is having a lot of displacement subdivisions and a good noise map. I used VrayDisplacement modifier, set to 2D mapping. The amount, controlling the length of the blades was different for every camera - shorter for close-ups and longer for broader views. The very detailed look is mainly provided by the resolution set to 3500. This also varied thru the different scenes, but generally I kept it to a very high level of above 2000.

Grass displacement settings Of course, as you would imagine, this generates a huge amount of polygons which had to be rendered and I shortly ran out of m emory even on a 6GB RAM machine. The problem was solved by cutting the whole grass field in patches. Then I would turn on the displacement only for those seen in the view. I also added some bumps to the surface which was displaced to make it more random. I did this by subdividin g the grass surface and then applying a standard displacement modifier, with a smoke map in it. Just next to the building or the trees I added some extra, untrimmed grass blades. Each one is a VrayProxy, because I had to save every polygon I could.

The map for the displacement is a plain noise map. You just have to set it up properly, so there aren't any bright white dots which make the grass look like a carpet. You need just the right balance between the high and low settings and the right size, which in my case was the smallest possible.

Grass bumps

Displacement noise map TREES Most of the trees were modeled in Onyx Tree and two were made with the Bionatics plugin, because it provides very detailed le aves. Making trees in Onyx Tree is quite simple, furthermore simplified by the pre-saved parameters that come with it. The hard part part involved the leaves.

Since I used SSS material (More on that topic in the Materials section), I couldn't use opacity maps, so I had to have leaves made by geometry only. Onyx Tree does not support complex leaves, which is OK in most cases, but not in this one. I needed the leaves to be well shaped and to have volume.

Tree bark displacement This meant I couldn't use the original leaves, imported from Onyx. In the scene I had trees for background and some better detailed for foreground and close-ups. The leaves on the background trees I left almost as they came from Onyx Tree. The only thing I did was to add a shell modifier to add volume instead of having just a surface (Why, you'll find out in the Materials section). Sounds easy, but it isn't. With the thousands of leaves these trees had, that operation turned out to be quite heavy and it had to be done in pieces. All the leaves were in a single object, which I split to several parts. This let 3dsmax apply a shell modifier to each part without freezing. Then I attached them back together.

Things got even harder with making the detailed trees. They had a replacement of leaves. I imported those models with square leaves from Onyx and then scattered a highpoly leaf model over the entire low-poly square leaves object, deleting the distribution object.

High poly leaves

Low poly leaves Onyx tree and Bionatics produce pretty good trunks and branches. As far as geometry goes they give you all the subdivisions you could need.

There was, however, some tweaking and model enhancement I did to one of the trees, mostly because I needed it to be thicker and more detailed since it was taking a central part in the composition.

Tree bark The fine detail of the bark was added with VrayDisplacement. I tried to have displacement on all of the trees, but it didn't turn out to be a good idea, because the amount of memory this took was too much. I had to restrict it to the closest trees to the camera, or even to some of the boughs and branches. The thinnest branches didn't need any displacement and disabling it freed a lot of memory. You should al ways be very careful with VrayDisplacement. It's best if you make sure that only objects or parts of objects, that are in the render frame have displacement applied to them.

One of the best thing with these parametric tree generators is that they give you UV coordinates both for the leaves and the trunk/boughs/branches. You can then easily map your selected texture by adjusting its size and position.

After I've modeled the trees I had to convert them to proxies, so I can copy every type multiple times and shape a forest. Wh at I did was, instead of making a single proxy, I made a group of two proxies for every type of tree. One proxy for the leaves and one for the trunk and

branches. The purpose of this was to let me replace the trunk proxy with its mesh equivalent, so I could apply a VrayDispl mo difier to it when needed. This way I could choose the close trees and add displacement only to them. You can't use VrayDispl with proxies.

Tree proxies Every large tree had over a 1,000,000 polygons and there were a total of around 5 large trees and 5 more smaller trees or bus hes. I don't have an accurate number for the total polycount of the scene, with almost everything being a proxy, but as the scene is the counter shows 1 3.6 million polygons. It isn't much at all, but the most of the final polygons come from the displacement of the grass and the tr ee bark.

MATERIALS For grass material, I used a Vray2SidedMtl. As Front material, in the 2Sided, a simple VrayMtl was used, and the translucency color is a 140 140 140 gray. In the VrayMtl I had only a diffuse texture and some opacity added with VrayColor with a grey at 140 140 140. The use of 2 sided material and the lowered opacity gave the grass a bit softer look. To the grass patches that had no displacement, I gave the same material, but darker and opaque because they get reflected and take part in the GI calculations. Displaced grass gets darker than just textured, so I had to even them.

Since the main material is see-through I had to put an opaque plane under the displaced grass. It had the darker, opaque material.

The grass texture I used Nothing special here. Bark texture for diffuse and the same but greyscale for Reflect and Reflect Glossiness. The Fresnel IOR is 2.0. Also, interpolation was used on some trees with reflections to speed things up. For every tree the scheme is similar but with different textures.

Bark material Leaves This was the biggest challenge. After several days of testing I decided that I should use VrayMtl with translucency enabled to achieve that special look of the greenery. The other option was to use Vray2SidedMtl, but my tests with it didn't give the results I could achieve with SSS. The main problem that came up was that in order to use SSS, I had to use fog, and fog works with geometry only. This means yo u can't use opacity maps to shape your leaves. You can't make an object transparent with a texture if it has fog enabled. You also have to have a solid object to use fog with it, that's why the leaves can't be flat. I applied a shell modifier to give them width and thus was ab le to enable fog (Be careful with the amount of the shell. Don't make it too thin, or the fog won't work. If you get black leaves, check whether it's not because of this). I have the following way of setting up a SSS shader: First I set the refract level to 100%. Then depending on the thickness of the object I set a color and value for the fog to make it have the right density and color (note that the value here may very greatly, dep ending on the thickness). If I want to have some diffuse texture in the shader, I lower the refraction level, m aking a mix. Then I put a value lower than 1 in the Glossiness slot, 0.8 or 0.6 is great. This is very important, otherwise the translucency won't work properly. You should increase the subdivisions to at least 20 to get a smoother light distribution. The hybrid translucency model worked fine for me. With the light multiplier I control the brightness of the shader. To simulate the "skeleton" of the leave I put a black/white texture for translucent. Th e other settings are a matter of testing. Of course there's some reflectiveness and bump in the material as well, as you can see in the screenshot.

Leaf material

TEXTURING My main source of textures was www.cgtextures.com. They have great textures there, and even sets of photos for a specific use. I took a set of several bark photos and mixed them to make a tall texture for the trunks. For leaves I used mainly photos, but also did some corrections by hand to make the translucency and bump maps. The texture on the building is a mix of many dirtmaps placed according to the positions of the openings and the edges of the volume. All of the UVW mappings are simple plane or box. Only on the trees I used the coordinates that came from OnyxTree or Bionatics.

LIGHTING The light setup is pretty simple. Direct light for sun, VraySky for GI, and a VrayColor with a boosted RGB multiplier for an environment to be reflected. This makes the reflections brighter. The color mapping is Exponential. The sun light has area shadows turned on to smooth the shadow edges. On some frames I placed planes around the camera to stop the light coming from behind.

VraySky settings RENDER SETTINGS I rendered the scenes with irradiance map and brute force engines. Image sampler was DMC with catmull-rom for antialiasing filter. I used the 1-100 technique to get better blurred reflections. You may be unfamiliar with this method, but it's very simple actually. You h ave to set max subdivisions of the DMC sampler to 100 and uncheck "Use DMC sampler thresh". This way you can control quality and render time with the Clr. thresh setting. It does get slower, but you get much better reflections. The reflection subdivisions in the materials you can leave at 8, everything is controlled with the Clr. thresh setting.

Render settings

Render settings In this scene it was very important to set properly the dynamic memory limit. Since most of the geometry was either displacem ent or proxies I had to increase the limit as much as possible. The system I was rendering on had 6GB RAM, so I set the dynamic memory limit to 4000MB, leaving some memory for the mesh geometry. After I optimized the displacement and the rendering settings I was able to render a frame in a single pass, however for one of the frames I had to render the grass in a separate pass, because there were too many displacement polygons to be handled.

To help the postprocessing I rendered multimatte elements for the different trees and materials. I also added a Zdepth channel for the depth of field effect to be applied later in PhotoShop.

POSTPRODUCTION All of the postproduction for this project was done in Adobe Photoshop using various plug -ins: DFT-55mm, Nik Software Color Efex Pro 3.0,Digital Anarchy-Knoll Light Factory and Richard Rosenman DOF-pro 3.0.This is a step by step tutorial of making the post for one of the five

frames but a similar method was used for the other four.

This is the pure render right from the render machine, there are no corrections.

There are two additional passes with the foreground trees and the grass that will be introduced later in the post production. First thi ng of all, here is to take all of the color channels from the multimatte elements and literally brake the render into layers for easier color correction. This is a method that we use in every project. There is a color channel for every material in the scene from the leaves of the trees to the various materials of the house. There are total of 84 layers of fine adjustments, color correction, curves, "re-paints" and blurs in the final frame.

The first thing that I did was to generally "light up" the picture a little bit because the original render was too dark. I w ork the same way every

time. First I make a level correction for all the layers, then I start color correcting layer by layer. When I'm happy with the general result, I collapse all the layers and start up some plugins and play around.

The house on this picture has 3 layers on top of the original. I used levels and curves to give it more contrast, also there is a little bit of painting with the dodge and burn tool to enhance the light from the sun and the bounced light at the bottom. That is all, there is not hing more done to the house.

Now the really tricky part.

I put in and color correcte the pass with the displacement grass to match with the rest of the green in the picture, also there is a subtle gradient from dark to white with blending mode set to screen, this will give more depth to the grass. The two foregroun d trees on the left and right have layers with levels and curves to enhance the contrast. The light was then manually enhanced with the dodge tool. All of the l eaves had the

dodge treatment. In the original render the leaves are made with sub-surface scattering, so I wanted to enhance that and add an extra simulation of the light scattering effect. In the left upper corner are added some additional branches with leaves. The bark of the big tree on the right is "over-painted" and I placed somewhat cool photo filter in its layer. Some of the leafs in this stage are intentionally over exposed or burned, in the next stage I will reintroduce the original render with opacity set to 20 to dial down the burned area. There i s also a warm filter applied to all of the leaves in the scene. The background trees have more pronounced dark areas and a little more light from the sky to simulate real world light reflection, they are also desaturated and cooled a little bit to get the effect of depth. A little bit of vi gnette effect and level adjustments finish this stage.

Leaves with bokeh effect are added in the foreground, to achieve a similar effect in PS you must find a good Depth Of Field g enerator, I use Richard Rosenman's DOF-pro it's a wonderful plug-in with a lot of capabilities. In one of the other final pictures there is a branch on focus and the house is fully blurred, there DOF-pro played a big part in achieving the final look. The blur in that frame is made with Z-Depth channel that is loaded as a depth map in DOF-pro, then in the aperture tab the aberration is altered to make the aperture shape. At this stage there is also a curves adjustment layer that affects everything in the scene, the sky is cooled down and a little glow is added to simulate l ight passing through the leaves. I regularly copy all the layers into a new one on top of them. I do this to preserve layers and previous correcti ons in case I need to undo. I used DFT 55mm and Nik Software Color Efex Pro for additional color correction.

Here additional layers are added using the plug-ins.

A foreground plant is added also, and blurred with motion blur. A little bit of chromatic aberration is added, the vignette i s strengthened to frame the house better. And this is all, this is the final look and feel of this frame.

This is our way of working at RED-VERTEX. We make the post production for almost every static picture in the exact same steps. Everything is subjective when it comes to color correction and post-production because everyone perceives colors differently and sees things in his own way.

The main thing is to be critical of your work, and of course learn from the best to become one of them. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Yeah I did some post-work for Colour Balance and Chromatic Aberration. And Knoll Lighting for the lighting flare. But I did the overall lighting mood in 3ds max with vray light by using our forum member technique, MAMS. His thread is http://mams3d.wordpress.com/

For this image I use Nik Color efex ( plugin for photoshop ) and use the bleach prepass and blend it with original image with 30% opac. Then I use 55mm to apply Cross Processing filter and do the Chromatic Aberration. After that I do the colour balance to add lil bit blue at Midtone and Shadow. I use Burn Tool to darken the edge of the image. Finally I adjust the brightness in Level, and use Knoll Light to put the Lens flare effect. Here is the comparison:

This one is a quick lighting test i did last night. Scene was taken from a magazine scan which is quite noisy. **that’s why my image got so many noise**

i use few plane vray light & universal vray setting.

I followed Radic’s tutorial on post-pro, no other plugins. It works beautifully.

I’ll post wires later.

Here's the link for the setting

Universal V-Ray 1.5 settings Home Tutorials

General

Setting the V-Ray renderer

Notes

Search Keywords: settings, universal General

The "universal" settings comprise a set of settings that we have found to work very well for still images in many situations. Please note that these settings are not optimal, in the sense that with enough tweaking, you can probably get similar quality with faster render times. The beauty of these settings though, is that they require almost no tweaking and you are guaranteed to get a good result in the end.

The advantages of these settings are: very little parameters for controlling render quality vs speed (essentially, only the Noise threshold); they work for a very large number of scenes; they typically produce high-quality results.

Of course, there is a disadvantage: the scene may render quite slow. With tweaking, you may get faster results. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

I made a friend for an architect, the images are for future office, it was more for fun, the idea was final.

I subsequently changed the colors of the images in Photoshop, to add an artistic side.

Modeled with 3ds max render, by vray, post prod in photoshop.

For me it easy in Photoshop, I used adjustment layers.

1: Brightness and Contrast

2: curves 3: Levels all parameters are on the attached images.

My name is Viktor Fretyรกn and I work as an architectural visualization artist here in Hungary. I recently had the chance to work on the renders of a house by Satoshi Okada and although the final results were not that amazing (i had about 2 weeks for 9 images) after the deadline i decided to go on with the project and make a series of renders out of it that would appeal to me. this personal project of mine took nearly 3 months but the end result turned out to be quite satisfying.

Post process:

As you can see the original render is a bit far from the final result yet. In my work photoshopping is at least as important as the rendering part.

The first thing to do with the original render is some adjustments: some parts of the image remained dark while some are a bit burnt. To even things out I select a region and press ctrl+J. This will make a copy of that region on which I used exposure adjustments and shadow, highlights. When it looks okay I blend it in the original by using eraser tool on the edges of this region (hardness on 0).

After the image feels balanced (no black nor burnt areas) comes color balancing: first thing to do here is to make the image a bit brighter. I go to exposure control again and set the gamma to around 1-1,5. This will make the image really bright and will spoil the contrast. But believe me it will work! Press ctrl+B now. Color balancing comes up. I used the following settin gs to set the right color tones:

These exact settings can't just be applied to any other image expecting to achieve the same result but the basic idea is to set the darker tones to the warmer colors and the midtones to the blueish color tone.

Here's the final result after I was done with the adjustments:

Next step for me was to give the concrete some dirt. I could have done this in max but I found this method much easier. This is how I made it: first I found a proper texture at cgtextures.com (every texture I use is from that site). I copy p aste it in the psd I was working in and set the layer to overlay instead of normal. By pressing ctrl+T I could adjust it correctly onto the walls. I also used erase tool a lot here and set the opacity to 50 percent. Here is the dirt layer:

And here it is applied on the render:

At this point I flattened the image.

Now comes zdepth: I used this for depth of field effect.

First thing was to use color-select tool to select the black areas on the zdepth layer and then swhitch back to the flattened image and press ctrl+J. Now I turned the lightness a bit higher (press ctrl+u) and set the midtones to cyan-blue. This gave our scene a bit depth already by dividing the background and the forground.

After this I added some gaussian blur to the zdepth map (around 2,0).

Then I selected the whiter tones (color select again) and pressed ctr+J again on the render layer and added some lens blur on

it (only the slightest!). I went to zdepth layer again and used color-select again but now on a smaller value. Ctrl+J (again) on the render layer and some lens blur (again...) on it (this time a bit stronger) and moved this layer to the top. I repeated t his last move some more times but with smaller color-select value and higher lens blur.

This method for lens blur is a bit lame I know but I have tried several and this in the end nothing worked out perfectly.

Last thing to add here is the glowing effect of the sky through the leaves. For this I have used color select tool again on the white color then ctrl+J and then a very small gaussian blur (around 0,5-1,0 or even lower!) and duplicating this layer a lot of times. Then merging these layers and using erase tool on some parts of it and then it is set. Here is the result so far:

In the last part I flattened the image once more and added some effects using different plugins. First one was Knoll Light Factory. It is a great plug-in! I recommend everyone to get it. I used it to create the lights in the sky. The one on the left is pretty obvious. It is a warm light for the sun. But I have another one on the right side of the building that has a magenta color.

Next one is chromatic aberration done by 55mm Film Tool. Now-a-days everyone is familiar with this effect but I find that most people don't seem to get it right. It is an effect that can be really annoying if you abuse it. I say if it is clearly visible it is already wrong! It's a matter of testing and finding the right balance. Here is my attempt:

Next one is vignetting also by 55mm Film Tool. First I duplicate the layer to be able to modify it later like erasing it from some parts wich I did in the top right corner of the image.

Last is the film grain for which I have used NIK color effects film effect tool. It is on a separate layer which the opacity is set a bit lower (around 50-70 percent).

And here we are! We've come a long way! Check it out:

the girl? shes PS of course! here is the wire/render:

i agree there are a lot of shadows indeed! but no AO is here! i usually dont use AO instead i put dirt in all the materials diffuse slot!

about the lights, for morning mood i use vray sun for main light and vraysky for environtment, and for the purple mood, i onl y use purple color (diffuse color) on environment slot and vraysun for orange look that hits the wall on pool view. The grass displacement is just using ordinary black and white dots map. I use photoshop for colorbalance, playing contrast, and knolllight for lights glare/sun glare. Walls are unwrapped texture.

Scatter for old leaves.

Dof made in DOF PRO and Alien skin boken For glow i use After Effects and Saphire plugin. Then paste it in PS

here is grass texture

here is grass texture

firts plane it's evermotion trees, becose they is hi quality models. everything else it's Onyx trees and plants, simple flowers mede by me and copy with scatter. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________-

its Vray sky and sun, nothing else, and Vray light in lamp in night scene its LC+IR, gamma 1.1 in nigt scene i used vray sky fnd vray light in lamp

Used 3dsmax 2008, Vray, Photoshop.

It is not hdr. Vray sky with switched off vray sun.

I used filter digital Film Tool (lens, graine, vignette et str.), glow effect for sky, fog (for distance shot) by Render Element (Vray ZDepth), for bluring foreground - Render Element (Vray ZDepth - other map) and Depth of field Generator Pro in Photoshop. And color/tone correction.

in the day shoot are 4 vray light include a vray sun and 3 vray light in the window entrance.

In the night shoot are 15 vray light. post whit AO pass in PS and contrast, color correct in after efect.

The DOF is done in PS, a layer whit lens blur filter, and mask layer for details blur zone....

Here a some settings I hope usefull for you

My first attempt at food using Vray (I did something similar in Indigo a while back). It was inspired by the recent progress made by Andrey Izrantsev in his Blender-Vray exporter, including initial support for SSS. As always, everything modelled in Blender, rendered in Vray, using lots of displacement and SSS.

I was limited in this image by the fact that the Blender->Vray exporter I use doesn't support all of Vray's functionalities. Since I did not have access to Multilayered materials, for instance, I had to decide whether to use SSS and no diffuse texture, or a diffuse texture and no SSS (which is why the grapes look so uniform). Otherwise, almost all of the materials have either SSS or displacement, or both.

Here are two viewport screengrabs showing the lighting setup (two rectangle lights and an HDRI map) and wires ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

This is not gamma 2.2 but reinhard collor mapping with smaller burn sampler aDMC 2, 8 Any sky or sun just vray light and one direct

In windows strong blue and inside strong yellow, no collor correct or something normal textures. Render without PS is simmila r becouse in photoshop I add just vignettic and sharpen

Software used: 3dsmax 2009, Vray 1.5 sp2, Eyeon Fusion, Photoshop...

I create some diferent postworks for criticism...

The long render time is why i use Brute force for primary bounce and and high subdivisions for Adaptive DMC, this for more precise GI... If i use Irradiance map the render time are around 1:30 to 2:00 hours...

he pillows and sofa not have displacements all are polygon modeling... Here i post the details of the Mezzo sofa used in my l ast living room here in evermotion... I hope are usefull for yours...

here i post my camera settings... I hope are usefull for yours..

The chromatic aberrations effects can be added with photoshop in menu "Filter/Distort/Lens correction..." i use values for metal and leather up to 24 subdivision... And sorry i cant share the sofa material why this have a commercial maps... studio setup http://www.cg-project.org/files/Studio_setup_01.rar

This is a set of experimental 3D fractals generated with various software applications for the technical and creative exploration of computer generated abstract mesh creation.

All of these beautiful and sophisticated fractals belong to the quaternion, hypercomplex, cubic Mandelbrot, complexified quaternion and octonion renderings of the Mandelbrot and Julia sets. Some others are based on iterative 3x3 matrices where power series are utilized for transcendental and trig functions. The color treatment for each fractal was decided upon by it's shape and form.

For more information, please visit: http://richardrosenman.com/project/?cid=192 To stay up to date with new project notifications, please register for free at: http://richardrosenman.com/earlynotice/

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____________ he floor is some plane witch extruded faces (independents).. One face per wood ruller. Before im use vray edge tex in bump chanel to create this efect!!.. its a cool method... inspiration photo

For the ladies I used Photoshop to cut from the image that I've found from Internet and work with color correct and shadow wi th Wacom tablet that's all .The key is you have enough time to do it carefully (ask Juan [http://juanaltieri.cgsociety.org/ ] he knows better than me :P) Sometime I have some people photo that so small and I want to put to my 4000px render I can re-size to make it more bigger, smooth and paint the detail (eyes; hair cloth) make sure it's enough detail to see almost 4-7 days working time to done 1 image (included modeling, rendering and compositing )

The lighting is basic. No lwf no physical camera. Color mapping is Exponential + vray lights in the windows and direct light for sun.

Render and light settings are very simple and basic Vray light in the windows - Blue Direct light for sunlight - Light Orangish Yellow You need to work on the color and keep testing till you are happy with the look Irmap and LC Environment - 1 and little dark blue Exponential ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ It could be looks familar but It was from my uniq design use 3dmax9 vray 1.5 photoshop

I used color correction with photoshop and I used Vray-sun with defualt setting.

GI setting , primary im -3 , -1, 60, 50, secondary lc default camera , skylight setting default,too color correction expnential dark1, bright 1, and photoshop work..

done with max 2008 vray 1.5 ps3 AE All models is mine.

All furniture B&B and lamp is Artemide tolomeo.

The second render in 3dseventh style Supphire plugin in AE for some glow in lamp

http://rapidshare.com/files/200327635/Tolomeo_Terra.rar the couch made with 3d max and zbrush the curtain u can download from here http://rapidshare.com/files/203197079/3700_2200.rar 1. В работе я использовал мою любимую цветовую гамму коричневый и кремовый. Каждый предмет расставлен так, чтобы создавать контраст. Идея взята с магазина итальянской мебели у нас в городе. Это прямоугольное помещение по периметру которого весят шторы, и очень мягкое освещение. Я не дизайнер, поэтому рассказывать больше нечего )) 2. Первое что надо сделать перед работой это проверить единицы измерения, должны быть миллиметры. Второе это настроить гамму 2.2 (использовать или нет гамму решать вам, я использую. И почти все дальнейшие настройки напрямую зависят от гаммы). Вот как выглядит настроенная гамма.

После применения гаммы, все цвета в материалах становятся светлее. Это нормально. Обратите внимание, что vray frame buffer включен. Так же замете, что выставлено в Color mapping, это Reinhard, для того чтобы картинка не была бледной и бесцветной. Никакие плагины типа collor correct для корректировки цветов не используются.

3. Настройка света. Я использовал VraySun+ VraySky + VrayPhysicalCamera. Как устанавливать эту систему, уроков много. Покажу только как я поставил солнце в сцене.

Как видите, солнце относительно далеко и высоко, примерно 65 градусов над уровнем земли. Это важно, потому что высота солнца влияет на его цвет и на цвет теней от него. В настройках солнца все по умолчанию, кроме shadow sabdivs, я поставил 15. Уточню еще, что vraysky в настройках render в Environment и в отражениях (дальше будут картинки с настройками рэндэра в которых это будет видно). Сама студия очень проста, это коробка без одной боковой стены.

На виде сверху видно, что с права нет стены, и стоит vray light plane который будет пропускать вирэй солнце, а поскольку солнце не светит прямо в нашу комнату, этот план будет пропускать красивый рассеянный голубой свет, или говоря простыми словами тень. Слева стоит другой vray light plane который должен давать теплый рассеянный свет, как бы от искусственного света. Таким образом картинка будет иметь красивый контраст холодного и теплого рассеянного света. Вот настройки источников света.

Vray light 02 - это план который пропускает солнечный свет. Обратите внимание, что включены галочки Skylight portal и Simple (в этой работе использовался vray 1.5 SP1, в более ранних версиях этих галочек может не быть). Покажу еще настройки света из лампы, это обычный точечный photometric. Силу света из него я подбирал на глаз.

For this work, I´ve used a photo reference form a very good book called "Casas Pequenas", the project´s from Rob Dubois, and it is located at Spain.

It took me about 6 days of work, mostly at saturdays...

Plants are from VUE, specially modelled and converted to poly, then treated one by one on MAX. A lot of unwraped maps, painted for diffuse, reflect, bump and displacement channels. Like the rocks, the terrain, etc...

Aerial view, those trees in light blue cast shadows and GI:

Lights (Omnis with negative values are used to "suck" light and darken that area on the right).

Settings (nothing special here... Only the values on the primary and secundary bounces).

I used a Vray cam, and changed only the shuter speed to 2.

Yes, the background was comped afterwards, on Photoshop CS2. As I worked with a photorference, there was very little things to do on post-production, but generally some color correction, levels ajustments, and some effects like glow, DOF and cromatic aberrations...

About the plants, I try to give it a shot on Vue, I´m learning it and its a very good software. Evermotion´s vegetations are great but I dont think my PC could handle that much polygons...

Thanks for the comment, those textures from the trees came almost ready from VUE, But in standard materials... You just have to c onvert to Vray and tweek a little bit, the hint is to use 2 Sided Material to achieve a kind of translucency... And take of the fil tering for the bitmaps.

Those glass bricks I´ve modeled with a box subtracted by other box (ProBoolean) with a simple glass material but with noise on the bump channel and very light green Fog multiplier.

And all textures I made myself, I decided to not use any commercial material such textures or models on this scene.

The reason I´ve used a simple color instead of Vraysky material, is that I just could not achieve the results that I wanted f or this particular work with VraySky, and a simple color works fine.

Model & Render by 3dmax -vray-PS

this project was inspired by a house, a picture of which is included in a book of architecture, "Mediterranean Modern" by Dominic Bradbury. This particular house attracted me so much that I was tempted to present it photorealistic. I have just finished it and I wanted to share it with you. I hope you like it.

Grass texture I used the following images to create the grass. The main point is that i used small UVW map for displacement.

Diffuse

Displacement

Reflection on Windows glass

Roof texture I used Unwrap UVW

Trees are from evermotion models with colour corrections on the leaves so that all trees match in colour. For the vray settings and lighting settings I am sending you the following I hope I helped the final render was in resolution 3508x2480 (A4 print size), For each render approximately 5-6 hours were needed.

i dind´t use LWF this time, I never liked it. , I used zbrush to make the sofa... it's pretty fast.

Furniture is all from this company... http://www.florense.com.br in my past works I always used LWF, but like i said I never really like it. This time I used gamma 1,0 and frame buffer with some changes in curves and levels.

gradient in environment slot and phisical camera native phisical camera in max

first one with the DOF looks wierd becouse of unusual aperture Settings of DOF sbdv was very huge - 100 units to obtain smooth result and as you can see on the images description (bottom) I use aperture 1,4 and 2,8 - shutter speed 1/250 and second one -1/60 (darker lens) as I wrote before the main light is a gradient in environment slot - output 15 second (fill light) right of the image - bluish vrayplane.

Color Mapping Reinhard and Phisical camera for proper exposure.

Obviously some touches in Photoshop like color balanse, levels etc.

DOF's one similar In this case I used vray DOF with huge Sbdv settings - 100 (soft, smooth result) Put to render and waited, waited, waited ....

I just used gradient in env slot Sorry for misinformation I forgot about the light inside (above the worktop) but this is not main light just for the effect - as you can see on wireframe

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Here are some renders made for a furniture producer. Hope you'll like them a lot more then my last work.

P.S. Used some details from archmodels. Thank you EV.

Carpets are usually modeled: scatter or, lately, particle.

I always use a standard target camera.

The violet light... it's quite simple. I've placed four simple VRayLight planes around the whole gap in the box, and in front i gave a violet glass. Below you have all the settings.

Thanks very much for comments and stars I use just vray lights and direct as sun. I dont like play with sun and sky becouse for me is hard in control colors.

Color corect I think is good just for LWF but here is without LWF and CC Material of wall is just white Next will be much better Settings nothing special just a lot vray light yellow and blue and collor maping as reinhard The most important is camera settings I use shutter 50 and Iso 150 with color balance neutral becouse I`ve got more control when Idlike more blue I add more lights with blue This is easy technic but need more tests in dark and white pleace Carpet is simply displ map 2d mapping and amout about 5mm

Carpet did so: Hair and Fur---->Convert to mesh----->convert to VRMH (proksi). ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Here I'll post the pure photos, the pure renderings and the Vray render settigs dialog box.

Also here are some answers: The original photos were taken with wrong settings for the camera (Nikon D40X).

They become overburn in some of the areas. That's why we decided to match the new image according the original photos.

This way we hope to have more realistic result at the end of the day.

We had the real situation. We build the rough models of surrounding buildings and papped ther real elevations thus we have the real reflections.

Then the camera matching was 50-50. I mean that we use some of the EXIF info for the camera, but most ot the work was manual.

We used a standart MAX camera.

No HDRI. Please read the previous answer about the reflections

first some wires and lightning setup: the basic lightning setup is one hdri in vrays environment override slot with a multiplier of 4! i have found it on a free site on the net!

as you can see for the sun i have used a vray sphere...no trick here! the grass has a falloff in the diffuse map and some fresnel reflection is added to it with a glossiness of 0,75 but trace reflection was off! just to see nice highlights!!! as for the displacement it was a disp modifier with a very high resolution (8-10 k!!!). most the materials have dirt map on them so i wont need an ambient occlusion in the end and i coul d set their radius individually! for the walls radius was 2-3 meters and for the glass frames radius was 2 cm! reflection maps had vray dirt too! trees were evermotion trees! heres the leaf: i made it myself again from some image i found on the net! could have been better....

ivy was generated by ivy generator plugin! a free tool! as for the post process: i use gamma balancing first then reaaaaal heavy color correction!!! this is i think really important!!! this is what really adds that essence to it! then i add a little background to it (now it remained pure white...) notice the background is much lighter and in a bluish color tone! its not hard to do! cheap trick that helps a lot!!! ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Scene has use many vray proxys. time for finish modeling - 3-4 weeks.

3 rooms. render time 5 hours/1 picture for 4200 pix. dual xeon 16 gb.

sun+sky+ some vray lights inside the light was painted in ps and glass reflection is normal glass with IOR set to crystal

then comes dof: the trick is that i add a little (not THAT little) blurring to the zdepth render so the edges will not be that sharp! for depth of field i use alien skin sofware!

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I always use exponential 1,1,1 Here are some configs.

For all images I used:

Color mapping exponential 1,1,1gamma 2,2 Irr map (high) + lightcache (2200) cameras from max Studio lightning I used only HDRI

Sofa model... a little bit heavy

http://rapidshare.de/files/41291898/sofa_corbusier_by_Rafael_Reis.rar.html ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ post in after effects and photoshop 50/50

Texture of drops has made by filters in a photoshop and the misted over part is the same texture of drops smeared by motion blur and is put on refract glosines and subdives less that looks like small drops

curtain made by modificator "cloth" and corect by other modificators for example "edit poly" with soft selection and "FDD BOX" 1) Filter-Render-Clouds 2) Image-Adjustment-Auto Levels 3) Filter-Sketch-Plaster Image Balance Đ°pproximately 39 - 42 and Smoothness- Đ°pproximately 5 - 15 step by step inner glass settings of the lamp Thickness 2 mm

chairs cloth settings

the carpet is hair and fur... that simple.. just play with the settings a little and you will figure it out.. i didnt use any plug in... and i have to say when you pick hair and fur on some plane in the settings you have to check render as geometry... if you r using vray.. well i thinks that it would not be cool for all of us to have the same carpets... so i sugest that you a play with settings of hair and fur and you will get some results... the main thing is to click on render as geometry, the second is hair count ... for carpet of regular size between 150 000 and 200 000 , thickness between 1,5 and 3... size.. from 3 and 6.. and the material is simple vray mtl with combination of two colours with fresnel f allof... the color mapping is reinhard with gamma 2.2 and burn level in the midle... combination of linear and exponential (0,5-0,6)

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Simple weekend personal work. I've been playing around with pflow and cherry blossoming flowers. Yes, i know, trees seem frozen but they're not.

Anyway ideal look for holiday season It's based on another Ando's work and it comes in two flavours...

Which one do you prefer BTW?

C&C are for sure welcome 3dsmax, Vray, AE, PS. Best regards,

Some latests words: "Nature cannot be made by a human being." The definition of nature has been a truth since the ancient Greek philosophy, and e ven in Japan....naturata is represented as a black building itself built up from the ground. The blackness is ascribed to the lava in the memory of the site, which Mt. Fuji used to be an active volcano in the ancient times..."black on black" requires a delicate sense for feeling nature, trivial transformations of shadows on the black screen...

Satoshi Okada

Alex.

Grass is Vraydisplacement.

All in the views are 100% CG. No photo (except, of course textures... :mrgreen: ) There adult, middle and young kind of different tree species plus bushes, flowers, fallen leaves, etc.. and ALL of them are V ray proxies ...there's no other way About the damned brach, yes i know! It's because of onyx self-topology. I'm trying to fix it.... will see And yes, there are a lot of billions polys so i've to render it with x64 system (it took about 5-6GB of memory) Both cloudy and late afternoon were lit by an HDRI enviroment (Hyperfocal) and the clear version it's just VraySun + VraySky. All LWF. And finally AE for color correction, glows, DOF, etc...

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My last personal work. It shows the already built BCN Auditorium second chamber hall and the main courtyard. It's designed by Rafael Moneo.

The work itself it's a bit darker, simplier and "dirty" than the last one and has a little old kodak-polaroid film touch post.

I know it, there are maybe too many pics,sorry Anyway, i really hope you like it. C&C are welcome 3dsMax, Vray, AE, PShop.

Want to share my last personal project! It's a Louis Kahn building designed and built a few decades ago.

I always wanted to reproduce a Kahn's masterwork. I think he's one of the best architects from the 20th century and my favorite by far After study for long his works, then i finally decided that one.

A bit playaround with volumes, materials and lighting -of course-. I also decide to leave it empty from books, it's more like a raw geometrical space purpose. I wanted also to keep it clean from the begining but it became more and more rusty and grunge... _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________No posting for aaaaages! Well, i would like to share my last personal work. It's a Satoshi Okada project called "Forest Refug e". My project (cg) itself has a several of POV showing three different time of a day (or weather).

I liked the idea since long time ago. It shows a truly sense of the art of architecture with the surrounding enviroment. In fact it has been a botanic exercise for me... And now, some tech spec: 3DsMax, Vray (1.5), AE and Onyxtree (i'm in love with it BTW...)

it's AE different combined glows with different colours and sizes I spent around 2 weeks from scratch. Most time drowned into mapping and textures work. Each shot took around 1-2hr.

It's just a personal version of Osho International offices. What do you think?

It is made with Max, Vray 1.5 & PS.

Hope you like it.

People are Lowpolygon people.

The lighting is quite simple: direct light for the sun and Vraylights placed in the windows.

About the setting are simple too. LC + Irrmap (high preset with Detail Enhancement) and linear workflow for the tonemapping.

The frosted glaz is fifty percent greenish grey with fifty grey too refract value and glossy refractions Spotlight R: 255, G: 205, B: 128 Volume lighting was done with a real volumetric layer + a few PS retouches

Reference

it's LWF ( http://www.gijsdezwart.nl/tutorials.php - best explanation so far) and i use standard max virtual frame buffer Want to share my last personal work, a tribute to Tadao Ando. It's a bit more complex and darker than m y previous work posted here...

It's still WIP and i'll probably post new POVs and details as soon as i can Hope you like it!

Max, Vray, LWF, PS... Rendertime was about 5-6h per pic.

Yes, the books are made "all" by me, and yes they all are proxies. VraySun & VraySky Settings-----> VraySun + Sky,IES (from Erco), LC, irrmap (medium preset) and PS for color balancing...

Modelling, texturing, rendering and "finishing" took me around a couple of weeks -free time-

http://www.gijsdezwart.nl/tutorials.php Linear workflow 'reloaded' In March 2004, Rob Nederhorst posted an interesting thread on the support forum of Vray and a couple of other forums about working in linear space. Although the thread answered a couple of questions it also generated a lot of questions and confusion about this workflow. In the following article, I have tried to summarize these as well as take away any doubt people might have after reading the article. I have written it in interview style, which I hope, makes it better readible.

O.K., I calibrated my monitor with a hardware calibrator, selected a gamma of 2.2 and a whitepoint of 6500K. Now the article suggest to do the gamma correction in 3dsmax again, what's happening here?

In fact, you are mixing up two things. First of all, hardware calibration of your monitor is a very good first step. When y ou are working with an LCD screen, calibration is even more essential. If you don't have a calibrator yourself, consider to borrow one, or at least use this guide to do basic calibration. When calibrating your monitor, set your whitepoint to 6500K (most monitors have an option to choose a whitepoint). Calibrating your monitor is important to match your monitor gamma to a certain standard. For Windows based systems, this standard gamma is 2.2. When you have calibrated your monitor with a hardware calibrator, the accompanying software will create an ICC profile. This profile helps to output the right colors on y our screen, when your screen is offered an image from the web or other applications. In fact it transforms the colors to correct for the error in your monitor. Summarizing the story above, after calibrating, you get closest to viewing content as it is meant to be.

Secondly, the virtual camera of your rendering application (in my case Vray but many others as well) has a linear response to light. In other words, its output has a gamma of 1.

If you are working in 3dsmax, the gamma correction is by default off. No gamma correction means basically that you are using a gamma of 1. Thus, by taking no action, 3dsmax assumes that you will view your output on a device which has a linear response behavior and that all material you work with has also a linear gamma! Since you have calibrated your monitor to work in a 2.2 gamma environment, the output of 3dsmax will look far too dark on your monitor. (as a side note, if you don't calibrate it will also look too dark, because you CRT monitor has its own gamma, which is about 2.5*) To illustrate this, look what a gradient and 50% gray in a linear gamma looks like on a 2.2 gamma monitor(left) and compare it with the linearly interpreted image (right). In other words, when you display a linear image on a 2.2 gamma monitor without telling that it is linear, it is interpreted as gamma corrected, and therefore displayed to dark.

In other words, changing gamma influences the midtones of your image. A gamma >1 makes the midtones darker, a gamma <1 makes the midtones lighter.

Now you may think that you don't need gamma correction. That's probably because you have been using all sorts of tricks for years to get the desired result.

(Tricks like adding linear falloff lights, or lights without decay, bright multipliers etc. etc.) All these tricks you have been using were to get a more realistic result, and without knowing, you were actually trying to correct for your monitors gamma!

Great, so far I understand it. I read somewhere that CCD's in digital cameras also have a linear gamma, but I never needed to correct them when viewing them on screen. Why is that then?

This question actually supports the idea why you should use gamma correction. When you take a picture with your digital camera, light is captured with a CCD (well, in most digital cameras it is). This CCD has in itself, a linear response curve, or in other words, a linear gamma. This raw linear data is then mapped to a different gamma (2.2) and colorspace, most likely sRGB or Adobe RGB. Professional image editing software that works with ICC profiles, can read the profile that is attached to your camera's picture, and can interpret it right to display the correct tones and colors on your monitor (if it is calibrated correctly!)

So how about pictures on the internet then?

Although the majority of internet users will never have calibrated their monitor or know anything about color management, cameras (and probably many internet publishing software packages) will do some basic correction without telling the user. As I mentioned earlier, a standard CRT monitor will probably be about gamma 2.5. Therefore it is advisable if you publish pictures which need to look correct for the majority of internet users, you convert your images for publishing to a gamma 2.5 profile (look for Native PC profile on that page).

Right. So to summarize, it's just about setting the display gamma in 3dsmax to 2.2 in order to display the linear rendering data correctly on my monitor?

That's true, but there is a little more to take care of. If you have paid attention and understand all concepts, you will know that there is a last step that has to be taken for making correct renderings: You need to correct your materials and textures. You will need to tell 3dsmax that the textures you use have already been gamma corrected. This can be done either globally or locally. Globally it can be assigned in gamma tab:

Don't worry about the dithered and solid gray squares, because they have nothing to do with accurate calibration.

Locally you can assign the bitmap a 2.2 gamma in the bitmap load dialog. Please take note of the fact that this rule only applies to textures that have been gamma corrected. In case you would make your own textures, it is of course better to keep them in linear space, and tell 3dsm ax in the bitmap loader that it has a 1.0 gamma.

Finally let's look at the following figures. Figure 1 shows the old situation without colormapping. As you can see, you are offering Vray gamma space textures and colors, since you judge them based on what your monitor displays. In the end you are judging the linear rendering again on what your monitor displays and try to correct for it (by using the tricks mentioned earlier)

You can convert these files to work in linear space by turning on gamma correction, as shown in figure 2. Your materials (colors and texures) will look washed out. Therefore you correct the colors manually, or with the color correct plugin by Cuneyt Ozdas. The only thing you need to do is copy the old color to the color correct map, and apply a gamma correction of 2.2. Textures can be handled by turning on gamma correction for bitmaps as shown earlier.

In the most ideal situation (figure 3) you keep all your data linear and only correct the output to your display. The data is not touched, no gamma correction is burned in. Only in the very end, when publishing on internet for example, you will covert (a copy) to a non-linear profile.

O.K., enough theory I'd say. Can you show me some examples?

Sure. The following images were rendered using the described linear workflow.

I think it is about time that I start experimenting myself. Can I email you with questions regarding this technique?

Of course. You can always ask me questions by filling in the form on the contact page. Or post your questions in this thread on the vray support forum

Monitor calibration If you are serious about color, I strongly advise you to calibrate your monitor. It is preferred to do it with hardware calibration (for example iOne from Gretag McBeth). You can abtain a reasonable result doing it manually - at least for CRT screens. If you work with LCD screens, manual callibration is hardly possible, because gamma is changing with the viewing angle. Basically the steps are as following: First, make sure you have proper blackpoint setting and set your monitor to 6500K whitepoint. (for film you might need a different whitepoint setting like 5600K). Second, choose the appropriate gamma chart from AIM-dtp (although it principally sucks, I suggest you take gamma 2.2 as a calibration reference, since many textures, photos and stuff on internet as well as most pictures from consumer grade digital cameras are sRGB. Besides, not all image editors like Photoshop use ICC profiles when displaying images) Display the chart while adjusting the sliders in adobe gamma until the cha rt shows no colors and the gray bars appear to have the same luminance.

the purpose of the project is to recreate that "space balancing the orthogonal and abstract, between full and empty, games where games of reflexes, shines and illusion find their way among marble walls, metallic surfaces, pillars cruciform chrome steel, glass and travertine floors; elements don't confuse but coexist in an asymmetrical space, which never closes in on itself, rising the border between nature and humankind".

I spent several time for texturing: all textures came from a lot of photo references I've found on the net (I thank picLens for this), those images lets me to reproduce the 90% of real marble walls of the original real project.

All scenes take illumination from sun&sky system, density to 1 for exteriors in order to take the darkness for short distances, 0.05 for interior to obtain a good compromise for render times.So final gather for big area and AOcolorbleed with very large distances for little and middle details.

maya lwf, exr format and gamma control in PS.

I used maya and mental ray, vegetation is my own, leaf and branche istances and a lot of patience...

color correction was only used for VRaySky. I always make the concept of a project in Autocad (2d) than i model it in 3ds.

The biggest differences from all those standard renders is that i use a target camera, not vray physical one. And a rainhard color mapping with burn value of 0.05. Saturation set to 0.9 and contrast to 1.4. Rest is, you could say, standard. it's not lwf. I don't like that technic too much.

Autocad only for a 2d concept of the whole project. Than i just import it to 3ds as background and do everything over using 3 ds spline. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________-

colour mapping is linear 1, 1, 1, (with gamma 2.2 in preferences)

i use fresnel reflection in wood materials.....and faoff reflection in almost all about lights, just vray lights in windows, light cache and irr map, i think theres no strange thing on lightness, i work a lot on photoshop on colour correction (with layer masks), burn parts, and unfocus ith z depth... no vray camera, just a common one ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________-

Everything was done in 3ds Max 9 and Vray with post production in Photoshop. Comments and critics are very much appreciated.

Raw render

Grass I made really simple with VrayDispleaceMod (tommorow I`ll show textures).

For Light I used only HDRI map(mult. 15) and phisical camera.

All textures is from: http://www.cgtextures.com/ Postwork is a lot; levels, contrast, color balance and hue.

Sun&sky is good but sometime hard for good set. On the roof is dirt mask HDRI map from: http://www.debevec.org/probes/ name:Eucalyptus Grove, UC Berkeley HDRI map name: Eucalyptus Grove, UC Berkeley from: http://www.debevec.org/probes/ is in environment(8) slot with 15mult. value+ Phisical camera iso 250 and shutter 70.

And Here grass texture Diff and Disp.

Here Vray DispMod seting:

1. Trees and bushes I made from tree generator ornatrix, cuple my old trees and a few planes with opacity maps. Very helpfull for my is particle system for plants and trees.

I use Vray light just in building Mult. 50W, White and Affect diffuse and affect specular.

Metal structure is blend material with dirt mask, and white metal ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________-