i-pod model and Final Gather query

# 1 30-03-2005 , 08:24 AM

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Morning all.

Thought I'd model my i-pod to try out some texturing and lighting with Final Gather, to see if I could make it realistic, as I need some practice in these areas. Here are my efforts so far:

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# 2 30-03-2005 , 08:25 AM

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Another pic:

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# 3 30-03-2005 , 08:27 AM

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In wireframe:

The mesh isn't great, as I did a lot of boolean operations that I haven't cleaned up, but its not going to be animated or anything.

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# 4 30-03-2005 , 08:32 AM

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Final Gather help!

I need a bit of help with Final Gather, which I haven't really used before. I've cracked the basics of how it works, but no matter what I try I cannot seem to get nice highlights on the objects, and it is really lacking depth or something, as the render looks quite flat. I'm not sure where to go from here to get it looking more realistic- do I need to start playing with GI??

My scene settings are as follows:

I have 2 lights in the scene, both casting shadows - a point light above the object and a spotlight directed at it (was a directional light, but I changed it). They both have very low intensitys.

My camera environment colour is set to a dark red/brown, and all materials (not the proper ones yet, I'm just using these for testing) are blinns. I've messed around with the specular roll off and eccentricity to see if I can improve the highlights, to no avail.

I'm using 700 FG rays.

Any advice anyone can give me would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance

LisaG user added image

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# 5 30-03-2005 , 08:51 AM

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you can always try adding a light that just affects specularity, then you could play with its intensity.

good luck

I prefer the lime coloured mini I-pod

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# 6 30-03-2005 , 11:27 AM

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I've also tried rendering a scene for some days now with FG, and had the same problems as you. I didn't get any highlights, so I did as dae mentioned added a spotlight which only affected the specularity. The scene looked better but I wasn't quite satisfied with it, too small highlights compared to with no FG.

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# 7 30-03-2005 , 12:02 PM

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Hmmm, this one is a bit better I think, but still lots to learn. There must be someone out there with vast amounts of knowledge on FG...........????????? A tutorial on Mental Ray on this site would be great too, wink wink!! user added image

LisaG

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# 8 30-03-2005 , 12:21 PM

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The highlites are better in that one, but I dont think that looks like it is using FG at all actually..

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# 9 30-03-2005 , 01:53 PM

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using final gather alone will not give you good results.
final gather is great for indirect light calculations and adding ambience to a scene.
u need to get a light set up without final gather turned on, after you get nice results, then create an indirect light source [anything but your environment camera color] creat a plane place it above and at an angle , or where a window might be, then assign it a lambert shader and up the ambient color or incadescence.
instead of having a completely open scene, i would enclose the i-pod some way for lights to bounce etc...
an alternative is to use image base lighting technique to get quickly nice results.
good luck.

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# 10 30-03-2005 , 03:20 PM

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Hmm, thanks for the info and comments guys. I should really just concentrate on a basic light rig for now, seeing as I have hardly any experience in lighting. Maybe I should start at the bottom and get a really good 3-point light rig working.

Image based lighting - is that HDRI?? Yes, I think I might give that a go , I found some info about it on the web (I thought that this site was good : https://www.ict.usc.edu/publications/...al-cga2002.pdf ).

Anyways, back to the drawing board user added image

When in doubt......smile!

https://www.x-menthelaststand.com/

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