Looking for help/pointers on achieving a certain style via rendering...

adam

I have a couple of pictures I want to mimic in rendering. These images were originally photographs that were altered to get this look, and I'm hoping to achieve this look when I do renders of highpoly artwork.

The art will be textured, so thats covered.

But I am wondering if others might have insight in to what I could do, or try, to achieve this look. Whether its in Max, Vray, or what.

The heavy lifting of this look is in the texturing. But if you look there's some edge highlighting thats very subtle and effective to my needs (wants).

Thanks

R3D

I would do it in nuke with a series of passes.

Basically you'll have a Diffuse/Ambient pass, keylight pass, Rim-light pass, ambient occlusion pass, then a series of masks for the different parts of the car (ie, the metal, the glass, the wheels)

Then set up a render tree with various trickery and colour corrects, much like photoshop, except it will apply to all of your rendered frames.

adam

Ryswick would you mind telling me more about Nuke? I have never heard of it before nor do I know what its used for (just rendering?)

pior

Yeah, compositing might really help on those. Now of course some post processing could be done on a plain, fully rendered image in photoshop - but you would get much more control by compositing the passes after the fact. I tried it recently using a free After Effects plugin called Normality. Here is some info :

http://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/scene_re-lighting/

It can really help when it comes to achieving a strong, bold look. Being able to add extra easily tweak-able light sources and reflections is great too!

Something else you can do is to render the light/shading passes (or even, the final image) using a 16bit image format. It's hard to describe without an example, but you will get much, much more control and range over areas to brighten that way. You can basically increase exposure after the fact, without the image breaking up. Very cool stuff, and the "contrasted AO" look of these trucks actually make me think it's might actually have been used there.

R3D

adam wrote: »

Ryswick would you mind telling me more about Nuke? I have never heard of it before nor do I know what its used for (just rendering?)

It's a node based compositing software used in production made by The Foundry.

Basically After-effects but with more control using nodes instead of layers.

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivREd2xX3qo"]Nuke breakdowns - YouTube[/ame]

pinkbox

the images you posted adam look like they have photoshop filters applied to them

Stromberg90

^^
Agreed

I got pretty close with duplicating the layer applying a highpass filter doing an auto contrast and setting the blend mode to overlay, it's kinda like doing a sharpen.
You have to tweak the highpass settings to get what you want.

Xoliul

Curious to what this looks like, i might have some tips, but i can't see dropbox image links at work here, mind putting it on some other site quickly ?

Neox

its pretty much some normal renderings, maybe with a bit flatter shading and image based edge detection overlayed as some sort of outline. I guess the outline is partially masked, as it doesn#t appear the same over the whole rendering.

for the edge detection, if you want to understand what most filters do, duplicate your rendering, blur it by the thickness of you outline and set the layer to difference, thats your outline.

cupsster

[sharpen or unsharp mask] + edge detect or crease

adam

They are filtered in PS. I was hoping this could be done via rendering as well.

Xol - http://i.imgur.com/8UZx2.jpg

Neox

well you possibly could do something similar, vray has a toon shader, so maybe you can combine that with your normal shading, but i'm not sure how complex the toon shader works.

maze

Hello Adam,

Thants a nice technique. I would also say that the best way to accomplish this is with a compositing package, but that will imply that you are familiar with correct linear workflow and compositing packages. If you plan to achieve a turntable animation.

If for stills, you can get away in photoshop.

First I can notice the saturation is higher than real objects will be, sort of what tilt shift photography will do in some manner (without the blur added) also to reinforce the cartoon look black edges have been added. There is an easy way to do this in Ps.

Select image, go to filter, find edges, convert those edges to gray scale then simply multiply or curve match them over your render. You might also take a look at cutout filter.

Its not hard to achieve as technique I think but does look nice.

You might also want to take a look at a couple of tutorials for 3d illustration (archviz) and apply some tips to what you want to accomplish:

http://www.ronenbekerman.com/photoshop-postwork-the-shipyard-breakdown/

http://www.ronenbekerman.com/architectural-illustration-digital-2d-3d-watercolor-technique/

hope this helps man.

edit: as reference here is a concept I did more less trying something stylish with what I mentioned:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4138955/drop3d/side_generator_Manuel_Huertas.jpg

Ace-Angel

Half Lambert + Sobel Edge + Bleach Process + Vignette = that picture.

cupsster

adam wrote: »

They are filtered in PS. I was hoping this could be done via rendering as well.

Xol - http://i.imgur.com/8UZx2.jpg

In unity doable with mentioned techniques.. other than that toon shader can help

R3D

I suppose if you REALLY wanted to, you could make your own custom crazy vray materials.

http://www.vray-materials.de/

lloyd

How cool was that light painting bit in the fx video, a guy kayaking down a river with a bright light to illuminate the scene. DVD's need more of this stuff! amazing.

malcolm

Can't you just do this in the Unreal engine. This stuff looks like models, lighting, textures in the classic sense with a black outline like Borderlands. Borderlands is Unreal no? Or if you want to do this in a render in Max/Maya there are shaders for that, ink and paint in Max, toon in Maya software or mental ray.

It kind of looks like you've done a median filter or paint daubs in Photoshop, if so you can either paint the textures that way like Borderlands or you can use a compositing package like Nuke as suggested. After Effects should be able to do it as well. For the famous Mac and Cheese animated short to get the painterly look they used a median filter in the compositing package to get the painterly look.

AlecMoody

Looks like the digital anarchy plugin toonit. You should be able to get the same result on still renders.

Xoliul

I sort of get the impression those pictures were HDR tonemapped? Or they might have been taken on an overcast day, then it's the added saturation that's fooling me.
Anything you can do with a picture, you can do with a render as well (for still, PS is fine), but it becomes a bit harder when it depends on HDR techniques.
Anyway, I do think the specific nature of these pictures to begin with, contributed a lot to the final look.