Vehicle Lighting and rendering

this week we where going to light and render our vehicles, with different render passes. Lighting, specular,reflection, refraction, multi matte, alpha, Z depth, ambient occlusion and sample rate. also we where to make render layers, Ambient occlusion, foreground and background.

schedule

-Mon, 14:00-16:00, finding back ground and planing

-Tue, 14:00-16:00, background and passes

-Wed, 14:00-16:00, lighting

-Thu, 14:00-16:00, finishing

-Fri, 14:00-16:00, report

this weeks daily drawings was to draw a statue with what we learned last week, relation ships with straights and curves and tones. quick drawing, everyone came with things we could draw: dagger, telescope, lamp, basket, table and a strange looking teapot. the last was to draw a picture with simple shapes.

we learned more about how the render passes worked, render layers and how to add a vray environment. i set up the image i wanted to use for background and light reference.

i placed the bike in the picture where i wanted it and added a plain so the shadow would show. i added the bike on foreground layer. i also added the lights inn so it would look natural with the background i choose. i added everything to the background layer and made it invisible, so it would cast a shadow but not show up in the renders. the AO, i made a new render layer and made a vray dirt and a surface shader overwrite to the layer to get the AO.

i had some problems with the Z-depth render pass. i couldn’t get the locators results to work with the Z-depth, but it all got fixed when i realized i had to add the result in centimeter and not in meter.

thanks to Renata that showed me how to do the Multi-Matte passes. adding a material ID to the material and number them. to then take the numbers in the multi-matte passes.

the materials to the bike was normal vray materials, i added some reflections and set the fresnel IOR to 5.983. this added a nice glossy, but not too glossy, metal look to the bike.

after i got the light, materials, layers and the passes it was time to batch render all to exr files.

(a quick mash-up of all the different passes)

and a quick final render with everything and a quick paste in photoshop i made a preview on how it would look:

summary of challenges, the z-depth meter to centimeters and the multi-matte witch i got help from Renata.

i’m really pleased with how the passes, layers and materials turned out. i think i got the shadow right. and i was really pleased with how i got the metal, not to rugged and not too glossy, and the scratches are not as glossy as the rest and you can still see the different colors nicely. like its been through some races, scratched and crashed.  one down side its the really noticeable line on the front, with came clearer when i added the material.