lol yeah, actually I went to finalRender between brazil and Vray, but these days, brazil is a chore to work with IMO. Simpler maybe, getting the same results as a VRay render.. a nightmare and soooooooooo time consuming! The last scene I setup in brazil was the
F3 for lo as a promo he asked for.. done sometime before xmas (can't release the scene though as the game meshes are encrypted unfortunately).. but that took ~6-8 hours or so (for 800x600) to render IIRC due to the high sampling used for the shadows (fed up of seeing noisy shadows everywhere). VRay's irradiance settings speeds this up no end (unless I missed that option in brazil
) and can use subdivs of 36 (as per the 1st XRT shot above) and it'll render 1280x1024 in about 45 mins
My last finalRender attempt (ages ago) was the XRT and UFR:
I seem to find I always end up creating a more outdoor type light effect with finalRender, but it seemed to work pretty well in that one I think (harder than both brazil and Vray to configure though.. back to scanline type setup in regards to lighting etc). Uses a single spotlight as the "sun" and that's it IIRC
Building / ground is modeled with LFS flats texture and 3DS default tarmac.
Thanks for correcting me on the name / site.. Aversis was the one I was thinking of
The grass looks very flat, agreed. Atm it's only using a diffuse and spec map. I need to make a map for displacement as the only other ones I have for it atm are additive and multiply maps. Was my first attempt at outdoor lighting with VRay too.. very experimental scene.
The last one is a bitch lol. It's currently using 5 omnis (3 streetlights and 2 orange ones for the XRT indicator glows) and some HDRI (actually more of the cause of the light at the top). I've stripped this scene 3 or 4 times now, tried spots, directional, omnis.. uGH! it's really difficult to try and get everything matching right, but it's a fun scene to work on off and on. My actual aim was to lighten up the near side a little too as I didn't want it in "total darkness" as such, but that part of the HDRI map is making it dark (already rotated and completely bastardised the HDRI settings, heh). I've got about 600 HDRI maps here adn previewing them to try and find one is a slooooow process, even with HDRShop. Most of them have a sky in them making things appear very blue.. no good for a dark scene like this.. but I'm plugging away. My plan is also to add 2 Poser models to the scene. An early poser test yielded her:
The indicators / turn signals were done with both an omni to create a glow that spread to the bumper etc. This has some very low attenuation settings etc to stop it spreading all over the place but are actually situated outside of the car (I'll grab a viewport shot later) and the light textures themselves I remapped separately to the rest of the lights so I could use VRay's self-illumination feature. Think it's the Vray light material. This does actually give off a small amount of glow itself (I used that solely.. no omnis etc to model
this scene for the neon light).
The scene's setup for more stuff.. 80% of it's actually hidden in those renders, heh.. but I think the road's probably about 60metres long and slightly curved. The grass is mapped in 2 sections.. thin strip near the road so I could make a blend texture and the road's a default 3DS material I think but as you say, needs some bumpiness added.
The textures I did for a game for which the building wasn't something to be stared at as ya zoom around the track so it's not detailed (only 256x256 IIRC and the game building's much smaller in phsical size) and I just stuck some boxes in there as building placeholders and UV unwraped 'em to fit to the existing textures but the plan is to lose them completely and model some real buildings.. proper doors and windows etc and a view through them to the inside. It did look worse with subdivs turned up, lol.. so they're noisy deliberately as it gave _some_ kinda texture to them but ideally I'd like to lose that noise as it affects the lighting on the car's rear bumper in particular too.
The streetlight heads could do with being better too. Bit too boxy atm and again use a Vray light material and omnis to do the job, but the colouring isn't great and I need to create some semi-transparent textures to use as very small glows (give a light in very minimal "fog" effect without using volumetrics.. maybe they'll come later
). The Poser models will help bring it to live too. I plan to have these leaning against one of the building walls but will hopefully make it a little less "still-life" looking.
Regards,
Ian