Diffuse Only Model Renders

DnS

Does anyone have any suggestions for rendering portfolio quality model renders that are hand painted diffuse textures only? I'm disappointed with my 3DSMax renders so far, so any pointing in a good direction would be helpful.

These are low poly models with small resolution hand painted textures that were in 3DS/Wii games.

I'll be scouring the forum archives for suggestions, but I thought I'd ask here as well.

Thanks!

Michael Knubben

Really I'd just take high resolution screenshots rather than rendering them. Ravenslayer/Leslie Van Den Broeck has a script to grab screenshots at higher resolutions than your screen can handle: http://www.leslievdb.com

That way, when you downscale them you get some nice anti-alliasing, but you're not having to fuck around with rendering.

alvordr

It would be helpful to see what your renders look like now. A lot of model renders suffer from poor lighting, composition, and/or texturing. Marmoset Toolbag is one of many possible solutions to this, and it's relatively cheap, but it's somewhat limited, in my opinion and takes some getting used to.

Heather.Hughes

You could do this kind of thing in Marmoset toolbag in a flat environment or UDK via unlit shader and plugging your diffuse into emissive.

AlexCatMasterSupreme

If I don't use Marmoset I use Maya and I will set up an ambient light with the ambient shade slider set to 0 and adjust the intensity to however I like it. Then you can add AO and MSAA as well as MSAA on your wires, I'd say it works about as well as marmoset for that.
Then you can render it out at any resolution you like with the hardware renderer 2.0.

DnS

Thank you for the suggestions everyone. I went with the flat shaded viewport capture using the grabviewport script.

If anyone has any additional suggestions I'd love to hear them!

This is what I have right now (the pose isn't ideal, but I can work on that later):

Eric Chadwick

What I did using the Max viewport. I'd recommend minimizing empty space, and show your texture at full res. You might even want to show the texture at 400%, no filtering, so people can see your details. Your wireframe is a little hard to read because it's a bit dark. I like seeing it on the textured model, maybe a stronger wireframe would help there.

DnS

Thanks Eric, I appreciate it. It was late last night when I was putting these together, and I didn't think about how when I was lowering the image in resolution for web I was also shrinking the texture.

Agreed on the wireframes as well, I can pump those up.

Regarding empty space, I like to leave some to let the eye move more easily around the composition. That said, increasing the texture to full resolution will fill up some of space and require some moving around of the components.

Eric Chadwick

OK, cool. When I think of diffuse-only low-res texturing, b1ll's site instantly comes to mind. Great painter & modeler. Might help with ideas.
http://benregimbal.com/hurley_howto.jpg