Best way to get this effect

Mr. Bean

What's the best, quickest (yet good quality) way to get this effect, where floor and sky become one:

http://www.3drt.com/3dm/characters/bikers-gang/bikes-pack-3d-honda-cbr-harley-davidson-08.jpg

http://www.3drt.com/3dm/sf-forces/jeep-armored-03_02.jpg

My model has a nice shadow like that, but the "floor" object's edges are very visible; it doesn't have a nice blend from floor to the horizon.

Any ideas? I use 3ds Max.

Thanks!

kdm3d

a curved plane will do it...

carlo_c

1. side view, draw a spline like so: |_

2. In edit vertex mode for the spline just select the middle one and fillet it, you'll get a nice curved transition.

3. Slap an extrude modifier on it, make it as long as you want. There you go, a quick infinity curve

Mr. Bean

Man you guys are fast!!

Thanks a ton, the curved plane worked like a charm

luke, interesting alternate method; I will have to give that a try later and see what it looks like.

Thanks for the help!

PhattyEwok

You can also make a cylinder with a good amount of height segments and sides and then use a bend modifier to get a nice bent Frisbee look to it.

Then just slap a turbo-smooth on that puppy and Either clay render or do some nice V-ray stuff depending on what you're rendering and what you want the spec's to be like.

r_fletch_r

There is another way of doing this that gives you a few more options. Create a matte shadow reflection shader and apply it to your ground plane. This will render the plane as alpha 0 with the shadows and reflections(if you enable them) rendered on top. You can then layer the render over anything you want and the shadows will be cleanly overlayed

for example: (this is comping straight onto the Polycount grey)


heres what the alpha looks like:

Mr. Bean

Thank you both for the extra ways to get that effect, I really appreciate it and will have to give those a try.

New effect question:

I really like how this model looks, referring to that gray-white color: http://www.turbosquid.com/FullPreview/Index.cfm/ID/449819

What's the best way to get that look?

It may be really simple, but I'm not sure the best way to go about it...

Any help would as always be great

kdm3d

from the page:

Description
High definition model.
Max versions are rendered with Vray 1.47
Palm tree opacity texture is included.


I t looks liek a really basic white shader, but the cool thing your seeing is the lighting. Vray is a great renderer for this stuf, but similar results can be set up in mental ray. Look for some tutorials on outdoor lighting with mental ray.

yiannisk

This result can be achieved with pretty much anything standard grey and any kind of indirect illumination.
set your skylight over 1 to as much as you need. A quick test here i set it around 2 actually.

With mR and latest versions of 3dsmax add an Arch & Design Material reduce reflection and enable AO in the Special Effects.


Image precision High
FG Precicion Medium+
Go to Renderer Set your filter to Mitchell or Lanczos for sharper results and fiddle with the settings.
(usually default are fine)

If you are using standard max renderer i strongly suggest Mitchell-Netravali AA filter with default blur and about .6 Ringing.

Don't forget to enable shadows on the skylight for the Scanline renderer.

Mr. Bean

yiannisk wrote: »

This result can be achieved with pretty much anything standard grey and any kind of indirect illumination.
use two skylights for best results

Interesting, I never thought to use two...thanks, I'll give that a try

And kdm3d I'll check out some Mray outdoor lighting tutorials.

yiannisk

I said two because of the value usually around 2 is enough so quickly 2 skylights so we don't bother changing value

r_fletch_r

To do this in mental ray there are 3 pretty important elements
1: The material
Create a standard material and put an 'ambient reflective occlusion' shader in the diffuse slot.

2: the lighting
In the create panel go to systems and select Daylight system. drag out a compass and light.
in the lights modifier panel set the Sun to 'MR Sun' and the sky to 'MR Sky' When it asks you about exposure control say yes. and when it asks you about mr physical sky say yes.
make sure final gather is on. if your not doing an animation then draft quality is fine.

You should render now and have a look.

3: Exposure control.
press 8 to bring up the environment tab and scroll down to the mr photographic exposure that the light system added. hit render preview to get an idea of the lighting.

Now increase the 'highlights' parameter until you get the level of white in the image you like.

this took 11 seconds to render.. obviously it took hours to model

Mr. Bean

yiannisk wrote: »

I said two because of the value usually around 2 is enough so quickly 2 skylights so we don't bother changing value

Lazy, but I like it

Thanks so much r_fletch_r for the step-by-step, that looks exactly like what I was hoping for.