engine room

yeluis

this is my first post on polycount, working on this scene for a few days now. I am lighting with radiosity and photometric lights. problem is those spots you can see on the floor and some other places. I think that its the photons beeen emmited, but I cant figure out how to "blur" it so it doesnt look like a hotspot on the floor. any help is greatly apretiated.

Daz

Looks neat. If you want help with advanced lighting you'd get better responses letting us know what renderer you're using ;-p
Off the top of my head it looks like your final gather rays need upping, but that's assuming this is mental ray. I dunno, I'm guessing you're using mental ray from within 3ds Max, so I'm not best qualified to help you, but you might want to provide a bit more info. Perhaps post your settings.

yeluis

I am using scanline render, radiosity and photometric lights in 3ds max. here is a pic of the settings for the light and the radiosity solution.

cholden

Looks like a great start though, I think you could improve your scene composition by adjusting the positions of some of your details. Since the right side of the room is very busy, I'd move all the upper, pipe details and such to the left side. Increase the size of your engines and pull them back so that the player has to look more up at them instead of looking down upon them like a floor detail. This will become a replacement detail for the back wall while removing the boxy shape of the room.

yeluis

thanks for that input cholden, and I generally I'd make the scene a bit more interesting except this time around. you see I recieved some crits on my portfolio recently and it seemed people agreed on one thing, I didnt have a reference type of piece so i just found this image here and benn modeling from that. I dont like its lighting much on the original and might change a bit of its texturing to make it look cooler but that is my restriction for the composition. still cant fix those hotspots.

Ninjas

Uhg... scanline. Mental Ray is really much better, and lets you cache the shadow and radiosity to files for animation. I would use MR with the photometric lights.
You can still get a 'shotgun' type look, if you don't have enough photons with MR. MR also has area lights that can produce nice results.

I checked ou your webpage. I don't like the existance of the splash screen and the thumbs are hard for me to see. Your work there looks solid.

This scene looks pretty cool, but it is begging for some tight materials. Also, is you are going to pre-render this, MR has MUCH better support for bump and displacement maps in my experience.

Soccerman18

One thing you can try is to increase the number of polys on the areas with bad lighting. For example, you can see the edges around the hole in the door, adding more polys can help smooth that shading there. And it looks like the lighting is following the edges on the cylinder on the left, so increasing the number of sides may help with that. Looks like the same thing is happening on that first engine too.

Mark Dygert

In the bottom right corner of the render options screen, by the render button, change preset to metalray. Then go in and replace your lighting with MR lights. See if making that switch works. Serriously drop the scanline like a hot rock, I wouldn't be suprised if some of the issues you are having disapear.

Lee3dee

Engine room looks good. What are those steps on the left side? Scene reminds me of a company's art test that i did. Hehe

yeluis

fixed those issues. changed to mental ray and messed with the lights a bit, time to finish lighting it so i can texture. those steps are going to another room I believe, at elast thats what i get from the reference picture. thanks for everyones input.

yeluis

Well its been a while since i last posted on this, got a few things in the way but its all done now. here it is. Looking for a job right now. Feel free to look at my site www.yeluis.net thanks for all the input guys

Ninjas

Looks good.

Lee3dee

looks really good. I took a look at your website, interesting variety of environments

Makkon

Fantastic work, sir! Looks convincingly realistic.

yeluis

thank you very much guys. here is a wire just to show the skeleton

carakong

hey nice work, I like the atmosphere of the room, I was thinking maybe you could have fewer polys on the bolts of the tank tho

MoP

Cool environment ... looks like an engine room to me, so you've achieved that goal

Seeing the render, I had assumed this was an environment for a game, but then looking at the wireframe, it seems you have a lot of wasted polys for something of in-game resolution. Something that mainly seems odd to me is that the big cylindrical pillar or pipe on the left seems to be game-resolution, but then the pipes going into the floor from the back of the boiler on the right seem more like a control mesh for a high-poly subdivision surface than an in-game model.

This leads me to think that this is a scene for a pre-rendered animation - however, if this is the case, then why do so many areas have a "low-poly" feel to them? The whole scene is a curious mix of in-game resolution meshes, and high-poly meshes ripe for MeshSmooth or sub-d.

What exactly were you aiming for here? The scene looks good, but it's too high-detail (in certain areas) for games, and too low-detail in other areas to make for a good pre-rendered scene. I'd recommend either optimising the higher-detail meshes to bring it all down to the same overall in-game level of detail, or add polys to the low-res meshes and smooth it all out for a pre-rendered scene.

Keep it up.

yeluis

thank you very much for the reply MoP. I was just aming at working rom a reference picture and tring to make it look more interesting, while yet realistic and game ready. I wasnt to worried about polys for the scene. Tri count in the scene is around the 20000. I totally agreed with you. I think I got carried away puting extra polys were it could have used less. But you bring up an interestig point. Lately I have only been told my stuff, ie. engine room is too low poly. so not really sure about what is considered high poly and whats considered low poly. Anywho. thanks a lot for the crit and I will keep at it. reference