Dilberts, work on getting rid of the CGI look. Quality will be the deciding factor of the contest as a whole I believe. I have seen alot of really cool detailed entries that have a REALLY good chance at winning but drop the ball on the effort to make it look real. That could be due to the lack of processing power, but some of it's due to lack of skill.

THX you are very right. I was thinking about getting back into this competition, but soon realized that my rendering skills are not up to par for a realistic contest. Texturing, Lighting and Rendering skills are of the utmost importance in a contest such as this.

Skills such as dilberts are of high quality and consist of a high knowledge of aforementioned items.

Thanx for the comments. The areas I'm going to work on are the seats, tires, brakedisc, and shadows. I'm only just beginning the refining stage, so it might take a few trials and errors to get it right. Anyway, here's the blue paint setup. The shadows are a little darker, but everything else is the same but for the paint color.

https://usera.imagecave.com/dilberts/finalredrender2.jpg

Here's the modified seat leather. I'm happy with this so I'm going to stick with it. You can see a little more of the pinstripe detailing on the tank here also.

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Looks a bit more like Vinyl than leather in my opinion, but thats not a bad thing at all. It's a good contrast to the reflactive sufaces from the bike itself. By the way, on that last render, there is a strange contour thats tracing around the bottom area of the bike and it's cutting the shadow away from the bike.

Yeah, it's because I was lazy and turned off the displacement map for the tires when I rendered the shadow map (shadows in the treads really slow things down), and so the shadows were calculated for a perfectly round tire. It'll be correceted in the final render.

Pretty happy with this render. I'm gonna stick with these textures and render multiple angles at the highest render settings I can get away with, then pick the best.

https://usera.imagecave.com/dilberts/finalredrender3.jpg

nice work dilberts

a different angle will probably help show the final piece off better

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did you use layered shader to create some of your shader.

No, layered shaders don't render too well with Mental Ray, however I did use layered textures for the paint trim parts. Other than that, I always use the sampler info node extensively, plus I ramp just about everything for extra control.

Messed up the post. Sorry.

Merry Christmas everybody

I think I've got it narrowed down to one of these 4, so opinions are welcome. Just can't decide between a studio or composite shot. :angery:

Here's the first:

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And the second (composite of first)

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And the third.

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And mt least favorite, number 4 (this one needs more work on the compositing).

By the way, I thought about compositing in my Porsche Carerra GT into the background to try to blend the bike in a little more. Any comments on that idea?

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