Robot render using Image Based Lighting

Work continues on my robot model, Gizmo. I've added a bit more detail and created UV maps. The next step will involve Lightwave's Surface Bake Camera to render out the maps I'll need inside Quixel. I'm new to Quixel but my initial tests show some promise. The goal is surface textures that are a bit more complex and interesting. We'll see how it goes.

In the meantime, I thought I'd set up a test render in an HDR environment just to see how things were progressing. This sIBL set (Smart Image Based Lighting) named "Chiricahua NarrowPath" comes courtesy of HDRLabs. Check out the site if you have the chance. There's lots of great information and tools. I have nothing but praise for Christian Bloch's book "The HDRI Handbook 2.0" and his Smart_IBL plugin for Lightwave 3D. Christian's writing style is entertaining as well as informative, not an easy feat when covering technical subjects.

Gizmo takes a pass

WIP - Robot idea

I'm working on a robot concept. Lots more work to do, but I thought I'd do a test render to see how things were going. At this point, I'm using close to default materials: car paint and conductor.

Modeled and rendered in Lightwave 2015.

Blackmagic Design - Fusion for free! Wow!!!

Blackmagic Design - Fusion

Received an awesome text from a good friend today. Blackmagic Design has released Fusion 7 and Fusion 7 Studio on their site. And believe it or not, Fusion 7 is free! Heck Fusion 7 Studio is only $995. I have to say, I've wanted this program for a long time but haven't been able to swing it. Time to play!

Thanks Blackmagic Design! Happy Compositing!

Detail Work - Crazy Times

I'm still plugging away at Lewis's Chevy tutorial, that and refreshing my C++ skills (another tale for another day). At this stage of the car, I'm working on details. Detail work is actually quite fun, but the effort and time spent on a particular piece of detail once placed in the scope of the full model can seem a bit crazy. I'll give you an example.

Lewis had just gone through one of the many detail sections, this one to create a rear light fixture. The good news, this light fixture is placed 6 times. That sort of detail work ends up making a noticeable difference on the finished car. The not so good news, during a review of the model, Lewis noticed a tiny detail was missing, two phillips head screws per light fixture. The screws were nothing too difficult, no real reason to recreate the threads of the screw. What was required was a screw head and post that looked good placed on the light fixture. Now considering the final size of the screw with reference to the car, I probably used too many polygons to model the screw, but here's what I came up with.

Textured wire-frame view before Sub-dividing

Texture view after sub-dividing

I actually enjoyed the process of modeling the screw. I took a slightly different path than the one provided by Lewis, but that's the beauty of his tutorials. At this stage of the model, he still gives you wonderful ideas and tricks of the trade, but he has shown you enough of the tools that you can strike out on your own if you feel so inclined. That's what I did with the screw. For the most part, I liked the results I achieved. I still struggle with cutting holes in curved Sub-D surfaces, maybe one day I'll find a good set of rules to follow. 

These screen shots are not full renders, just the texture views from Lightwave's Modeler.

Phillips Screws placed on the Rear Light Fixtures

Lightwave Modeler Navigation - Respect for Shift+A

Hi, this is a simple navigation tutorial. So, if you already know your way around Lightwave3D's Modeler, I'll warn you ahead of time you probably know this and will blame me for wasting your time;0) That said, I had missed the boat on this one and as a result was spending way too much time rotating, zooming and panning this way and that trying to get my model in an orientation that helped me either tweak something or just view my poly flow for issues. So, for the one or two people who like me haven't yet discovered the magic of "Fit Selected, shortcut key Shift+A," this video is for you.

I created this model based on a tutorial by Lewis.
You can pick up the tutorial from Foundation 3D here.

Hypervoxel Blend Scale experiment

I've been experimenting with Lightwave 3D's Blend Mode for Hypervoxels. The basic concept being if two particles get close enough, the Hypervoxel surfaces will merge. The blend is similar to two water droplets combining or maybe two pools of mercury. I watched two tutorials discussing Blend Scale and I noticed that you could animate or add a texture to the Blend Scale. The result being a non-uniform Blend Scale depending on the texture type used. For my experiment, I used a Procedural Texture - Turbulence and I animated the Scale, Position and Rotation over time. To add to the effect, I also added a Ripples Procedural Texture to the Particle Size. I didn't animate the Ripples but that could be interesting as well.

Hypervoxel Blending videos:
from kevman3d - Understanding Hypervoxel Blending Scales
from dwburman - LightWave 11 Test - Animated Blend Scale

More instanced grass...

So, I went back and added some geometry to my single blade of grass. I then created a total of 4 different blades of grass on separate layers: 2 with a cut top and 2 without. I bent the 4 blades in different ways and made some more or less concave than the others. Then I added these new blades as instances on the ground plane in Layout. I tweaked the surfaces a bit and actually used two different grass blade surfaces with only slight differences between the two: one for the cut blades, the other for the non-cut blades. I added a bit more randomization especially with rotation and scaling.

Finally, on the Render Global settings for the camera using Adaptive Sampling, I changed the Threshold to 0.005 and upped the Maximum Samples to 48. The Max Samples seemed to reduce the Depth of Field noise.

Here's what I got. I think it's improved over my first attempts.

Instanced grass in the morning sun.

Modeled and Rendered with Lightwave 3D.