Have a look at this nice tutorial, how to make a bag in MarvelousDesigner software.

Sit comfortably back to your armchairs and have a look at this “Making of” article by Lukasz Gradzki from Renderare.com

Hi There,

Few shots we produced for 3LHD Architects, most of them are purely CGI apart from one photomontage.

The client provided the site photography for their chosen location.

At the beginning we used Lightroom to rectify and straighten and initially adjust the photo. This of course could have been done in Photoshop also, it was just personal preference as we very often work with whole sets of photos and Lightroom is much better tailored for handling dozens of photos simultaneously.

The 3D Model was constructed by the architects and they had very clear ideas about the viewpoints and light setups required. Our additions to the model obviously included sun/daylight system matching the situation in the photo, additional VRay lights to illuminate the facades slightly, cars, foliage and lots of people populated across the scene using MultiScatter.

We’ve also put a bit of simple geometry with VRayLight material and self illuminating texture applied – this is not visible to camera, reflections and shadows but helps to illuminate the interiors.

Nothing special here in terms of global illumination, just VRay Sun, VRay Sky with irradiance map and light cache on default settings.

Apart from the final RGB render we always calculate a few more passes, usually MaterialID and Render ID – it never hurts and often saves a lot of time while making selections in PS.

The original photo was taken during a hazy winter day in Zagreb with the sun in front of the camera – a not very favorable setup, but I believe we took a few steps in turning this to our advantage and create a moody image.

The trees in front had to be retained and masking here was achieved by a mixture of color range selection and some painting on an additional layer to get rid of the bright outlines around the small branches and leaves.

The raw render result was apparently very far from the photo, in terms of color balances, contrast etc., but after a few adjustments of both the proposed building and background, they were brought much more closer together.

Layer mask applied to the render.

Background plate was lacking some contrast and was washed out because of the sun glaring through mist so we’ve adjusted it with combination of levels adjustment, medium contrast in curves and delicate color balance towards warmth in midtones.

Car and people looked too artificial with their vibrant colors, hence the ground floor area was replaced with another quick render with darker lighting.

Increasing contrast of the building using mix of levels and curves, similarly as we did with the photo.

Decreasing saturation of the building and slight color balance correction again towards warm tones.

Left side of the building adjusted with color balance to make it a bit blueish to blend it better with the cold sky above.

At the end just a few touches like glow, lens flare from the sun and some film grain was applied to the building to blend it in. In the end we cropped the image from the bottom to give it a better composition.

That’s all – If you have any questions feel free to drop me a line at lukasz@renderare.com

If You liked tis article – Share with your friends! :)

Dear Rhinoceros fans!

This is the moment where we, Rhino users are having the great opportunity to get PRO.
This book “3D Car Modeling with Rhinoceros” contains complete step-by-step tutorial on how to model Audi R8 in Rhinoceros NURBS!
Watch these screenshots to see the geometry and full render:

Visit : AK3D.DE website for more information on this PDF and hard cover book tutorial.

POST UPDATE

A few days ago I obtained a download link for this awesome product. Of course I was pretty excited about it, mainly because I am really big Rhinoceros fan and this is absolutely high detailed 3D model in NURBS. As this is the very first super detailed 3D model for Rhino available online for sale (as far as I know), I decided to show You some pictures of this Audi R8 3D model, so if You are unsure about buying this tutorial, or 3D model, You will find your final decision.

As I spoke with André Kutscherauer (Author of this R8 beauty), he told me some details on the background of modeling this super car:

“It began with a knowledge gap on my side. As I´m a 3D artist, I did created a lot of models with polygon techniques. Some years ago I create an Audi with polygons. That was a lot of work but the final model looked not so cool. In this time I saw a lot of Nurbs car models, that impressed me a lot. Especially Thomas Suurland was a real mentor. Since that time I “felt” a knowledge gap of me, when it comes to Nurbs modeling and I always wanted to “close” that. So I started to use Rhinoceros for creating the main models of my free artworks. I could do some basic shapes and Booleans, but that was it. In 2009 I decided to take the next step of Nurbs modeling and aimed for the R8 model. While I modeled it, I ran into countless problems and I spend a lot of time in solving these issues. I searched the internet for help but it was quite difficult to find complete solutions for specific problems. Also I did buy some books, but it was not what I searched for. After finding own ways of modeling techniques, the idea of a complete Nurbs modeling book was born. So I did select my nearly finished R8 Nurbs model file and pressed “delete” to start from scratch again.

With the experience from the first model, I was able to describe every correct working step of the second model in detail. Nevertheless, I had to do every working step at least for three times, to find the optimal solution. This last solution I did write down. So I worked nearly 12 month until the model and the manuscript of the book was finished. Then I started to create some test renders and decided to make a promo video for the book. For this animation I challenged myself with a complete natural environment with 80 Millions trees, but that’s another story. After the animation was finished, it was clear that the frames will render about 4 months on my two 12-core machines. This was just perfect, as I could layout and fine-tune the manuscript and also make the translation.

All in all, the whole process did take nearly two years. I worked every day from 7 pm to 11 pm on this project as my main fulltime job costs my whole daytime. Finally I re-created my website and included an online shop to be able to offer those products.

Currently I´m just happy that I get it finished and that my girlfriend is still here. ;- ) At the moment I have no plans for creating another tutorial like that, but if the interest of the people stays like in the last days, I could get weak….”

Thanks to André for these words!

This is screenshot from my filesystem in my computer :) Finally, R8 in da haus!
3dm file available at ak3d.de. :)

Let’s have a look at the book first:

I ordered the PDF version, because I find it much more practical, better for storing, etc. but I have to say that the magic of the real book must be much better. (For those of you who buy this book, let me know!) and what’s better with my PDF, is that I can use Ctrl+F command to find exact text :)

The book contains 624 pages of step-by step tutorial, you can find every single command used, every single click made by André, so it’s very easy to make this car model even for absolute beginners in Rhinoceros! Awesome, isn’t it?
Here you can find some screenshots from the book:

The book cover. Sexy, isn’t it?

Audi R8 blueprints are included.

You will see entire process, every single click and mouse movement. In this picture you can see absolute precise curves adjustment.

Learn how to make surfaces pretty and smooth. Make your model perfect!

Every single surface is explained in a few steps to obtain the best result.

Sometimes it’s not complicated to make a model… the art is in making it really professionally.

This part shows you how to make the front mask of the car.

Modeling of the back part

Side mirror is as detailed as the rest of the model.

Extracting the R8 sign out of the photo.

One of the last objects is the wheel…

… pretty detailed as well!

So this is it. If you are still considering buying this book and 3D model, have a look at how it looks like in Rhinoceros 5 live viewport:

What do you think now, are you going to give a chance to NURBS? If so, start right HERE. :)

Have you ever wondered how to make a DOF (Depth of field) effect in V-Ray and then, later in Photoshop? Watch this tutorial published by CHAOS Group!

Here you can see some videos containing information on Arnold render engine.

More fun with Softimage Lagoa and coffee cup!
2.8 Million Particles – Created with the Softimage 2011, Rendered with Arnold for Softimage. Motion blur and depth of field on third shot.
Hardware used:
Dell Precision T5500 Dual Quad Core Workstation 12 gigs RAM
Nvidia Quadro 5000 Firmi based
Sim time: Thanksgiving weekend, Render time: ~6 hours for all 1000 frames.

Mark Schoennagel of Autodesk shows off a sneak peek of a beta version of Arnold, rendering insanely fast inside of Softimage. 3,200,000 spheres rendered with an ambient occlusion shader in mere seconds.

This is a small clip from a long webinar recently hosted on the Autodesk website.

A two minutes long video with a few ICE simulations that were made in order to test version 1.1 of emFlock as well as the new SItoA beta from “solid angle” (the guys who made Arnold) together with SI 2011.5.
Sorry for the lame bib-bib-bib music, there wasn’t enough time to do something nicer.

Note(I):
Arnold was used for the main renderings for two reasons.
1) it is fast, uses not much RAM and is really easy to setup (you get good results in no time). All those things are really good when you only have a single render machine and lack self-motivation when it comes to tweak shaders.
2) the current Arnold and SItoA versions were also tested for certain things.

Note(II):
The titles were rendered with emRPC v.3.05, because of the small particle size (smaller than a pixel).
emRPC is well suited and fast with that kind of particles (the titles render in less than a second per frame in 1280×720) and produces flicker free sequences, no matter how small the particles get.

Note(III):
The particles in this video are animated with emFlock v.1.1. Latter has had a severe “heart transplantation”:
The octree algorithm was entirely re-programmed and the multithreading was improved.
The simulation time for the big orange point cloud with 1 million particles was about 4-5 seconds per frame (approx. two and a half hours for the 2000 frames).

Natural Tools For 3ds max and Vray video tutorial by Karim Cheikh Djavadi.

Have a look at this nice tutorial. You can learn how to create a collapsing building animation, how to destroy walls, windows and all building construction using Pflow in 3Ds Max.
Here’s the tutorial from Vimeo.

First part:

Second part:

You can find free source .max file HERE.

This 3-part series shows you how to model architectural metallic components. You’ll be shown different techniques that will take you through trough simple yet efficient spline modeling, and the use of renderable splines to model wrought-iron designs in the first movie. Later, you will experiment with other techniques to build more complex components, such as beams, trusses and curtain walls.

1st part:

2nd part:

3rd part:

Subdivision surfaces
What if I told you, that the items from the the picture above are one and the same object, with only very small changes? They were actually cubes in the beginning, the only difference is, that Item 2 is a subdivision surface and Item 3 is a subdivided mesh. What subdividing a mesh means, is adding segments to the existing geometry and at the same time making the whole surface smoother. Every level of subdivision divides an existing quad (4-sided polygon) into 4 new polygons, therefore if our cube consisted of 6 polygons to begin with, the first subdivision will turn it into a mesh with 24 polygons, the second subdivision will multiply the polycount by 4, that gives us 96 polygons, and after 3 subdivisions, our object will consist of 384 polygons and look a lot more spherical then in the begining. The subdivision process can be seen in the picture below:

Now is the right time to ask, what is so special about this subdivision surfaces (item 2 in the first picture). Items 2 and 3 look the same, and have the same polygon count. Wouldn`t it be more effective to just use heavily segmented objects, or freeze the object after it has been subdivided? Well, no… it wouldn`t.
You see, the basic part of every mesh is a vertex, a point in space. It is vertexes, that define edges and polygons, and therefore every vertex has to carry a lot of data, starting with its position in space, through UV coordinates, which can include data for several UV maps, to special data like vertex maps, morph maps or tags. Once a mesh is segmented, it consists of lots and lots of vertexes, and every single vertex has to carry all of this information. To show, how much data is added with every subdivision, I prepared another picture. As you can see below, the square was subdivided one time, adding 5 new vertexes (black dots) to the already existing 4 (orange dots), this means a massive increase in data.

Luckily, there is a special kind of mesh (a static mesh in Modo for example), that behaves a little like a proxy object, it gets the data needed for its editability deleted, which makes it uneditable, but much more effective in RAM consumption and other operations, like moving it or rotating the viewport.
When applying a subdivision modifier to your mesh, it takes the basemesh as a source for a new mesh, that is not directly editable, therefore needs much less data to represent it. This new mesh is called a subdivision surface. You are free to edit the subdivision level (the segmentation of the mesh) and at any time, you can return to the basemesh and edit it, which wil instantly affect the subdivision surface.
I did a few test renderings, to see how much data each of the objects in the first picture needs to represent it. Item 2, the subdivision surface, consists of 3072 polygons and consumes 279 kB of RAM during rendertime. Item 3 has a polycount of 3072 polygons as well and is a subdivided mesh, which means, every single vertex has to carry all the necessary information, therefore it consumed 493 kB of Ram at rendertime. You see, these identical meshes consume very different amounts of resources, only due to their surface representation.
Not only are subdivision surfaces more effective in resource consumption, they are even easier to edit. Just think about it, is it easier to move one vertex or edge and get a clean and smooth shape, or play around with selections on a dense mesh and once you finally have the right selection, you have to start playing around with falloffs or soft selection tools? I find the first way much faster, easier and cleaner. Just see for yourself:

The first image is the polygon cage of a lions head (originally part of a hood ornament for a 1936 peugeot 402 i`m modelling at the time). It may not look great in its unsubdivided form, but once it`s changed into a subdivision surface, as shown on the second picture on the left, it starts to shape up a bit. On the right is the dense segmented mesh, which has the exact same number of polygons and will look exactly the same in a render, but takes up approximately twice as much resources, and just imagine the horror of trying to change a detail about the polygon-heavy segmented mesh!

Still not convinced about the advantages of subdivision surfaces? Would an automated subdivision level convince you? Adaptive subdivision is a common tool today. As the name already says, it is able to adapt its subdivision level to the needs of your render. The system behind this is really easy: you choose, how long an edge can be in pixels, after this, the render engine evaluates the edges of every object separately, and if it finds an edge, that takes up more pixels than the value you provided, it increases the objects subdivision level by one until all edges are shorter then your pixel value. This system makes sure, that every object in your render appears to be smooth, but doesn`t take up any more resources then necessary.

As a little bonus, I added the model of the lion`s head with textures, so you can render an image like this one, if you like:

The model may be downloaded as the native .lxo file for modo users, or as an .obj file, both the polygon cage, as a highpoly version for users, whose software doesn`t have the subdivision surface technology implemented yet.

Download Links:

Lion head in .OBJ

Lion head for Modo

Lion head – highpoly – in .OBJ

Lion head textures

Lion head hdri

That is all for today. I hope you liked this little introduction into subdivision surfaces and with luck, we will meet again during another tutorial.

Since some of the renderers out there have tools, which are specifically designed to create the wire frame effect, I won’t address them. You can always look them up in your renderer´s manual (for example the EdgeTex material in Vray).
But there is still a majority of software out there, which do not possess the tools to help you render a wire frame, like Luxology´s Modo for example, which I am going to use during this tutorial.

The first thing, that comes to mind, is to create a mesh, that will render as a wire frame. In 3ds Max, you can use the Lattice modifier, in Modo, there is a special script to do this. You might just be satisfied with this solution, but there are a lot of downsides to this technique.
Firstly, it is not possible to use this with a subdivision surface. Another downside is the increased polycount, which slows down your view port reaction times and consumes a great amount of resources at render time. Furthermore, since you have a whole bunch of extra geometry in your scene, which consists of subtle profiles and cuts into another surface, you need a whole lot more samples for ray tracing, and are still bound to have some artifacts in your rendering after an increased amount of time. I haven’t really experimented with this technique in Modo, so I can’t offer you a picture, but I’m sure you can imagine this. And if you are curious about this plug-in, you can easily look up the script or some examples.

The road I tend to take is an image texture (like the ones in the picture above). It is easily done, consumes an ignorable amount of resources and gives you quite a good control of the outcome. For this approach, you have to have basic knowledge about UV mapping and projection, which I am not going to explain thoroughly in this tutorial, there are a whole bunch of tutorials on this topic, and the steps can differ a bit depending on the software you use.

The first texture-based technique, I am going to show you (and yes, I am keeping the best for the grand finale), is based on the so-called Barycetric projection. What this basically does, is to take every single polygon and stretch it into the UV space (more specifically: the square between the 0,0 and the 1,1 coordinates). In the end, you get something like this:

As you can see, the projection is not perfect, as it only works correctly with quads, and triangles and n-gons can’t be properly stretched into the quadratic UV space. Now, all that needs to be done is to apply a framed square texture, as the one in the second picture, tagged as a barycentric wire frame texture . As you can see below, although this method has its drawbacks, the final render doesn’t look that bad (picture below).

You can probably see one thing though, the line width is not constant throughout the model (I intentionally made the wire frame thick, so you can get a better view of the differences in width). This is one of the drawbacks of barycentric projection. All the polygons get stretched to the same size in the UV-projection space, but their sizes in the XYZ space differ, which creates a size distortion…

And now, to the method you have all been probably waiting for, the one I consider to be the best workaround, if your software doesn’t have a generic Edge-based texture:

The first step would be to completely unwrap your model (to unwrap a model means to create UV mapping coordinates for every single polygon). This might sound scary at first, if you haven’t done much unwrapping up until now, but a good UV map is a vital part of every good 3d model. You should get used to creating UV coordinates for your models, not only because of the wire frame-workaround, but also because of later export (for example: the .obj file format doesn’t save partial UV-s, only those, which include every single polygon) or texture baking. This is how an unwrap can look like:

As you can see, there is a lot of unused space, which of course is not the optimal solution, but will have to do for the purposes of this tutorial. But be assured, this unused space is not the result of my laziness to scale up some of the parts to get the maximum out the pixels of the map we are going to create. If you draw textures, it is only natural, that the parts of your model, which need a higher detailed texture will take up more UV-space, than those, which aren’t as exposed in the final render. In that case, it would make sense to use as much texture-space for the detail-demanding parts as possible, but our purposes are a little different now. We need to make sure, the overall proportion-ratios of the polygons in UV space to those in the XYZ space are as constant possible (a great tool to help you do this is Modos new distortion view, that gives polygons colors, depending on their surface size ratio between the UV and XZY spaces) . This is to prevent the distortion of the line width, like we had in the barycentric-projection method.
If you feel, that this uneconomic UV layout might waste your resources, or just want to have a good looking texture, you can always add another UV map with a proper layout (as I mentioned in my earlier tutorial about subdivision surfaces, a mesh can have multiple UV maps applied to it at the same time) and bake the texture in it from the one we are going to make.

Once the unwrap is done, we have to export our wire frame from UV space into a 2d editor ( Adobe Photoshop in my case), to do a little tweaking. In modo, the process is fairly easy:

As shown on the picture above: texture export UVs to EPS (with the right UV map selected) and all that is left is to choose a location to save the file to. Now, we have to fire up Photoshop (or any other 2d editor you like to use) and import the EPS file.

If you choose a big enough resolution, your EPS file should look something like the picture above. Do not get scared, if you can’t see anything in the EPS file yet. Now we add a Stroke style to the layer, to make the wire frame visible, you can try a few different stroke widths and colors, to see which one you like the most.

After this, you just save the image as a raster file, a Jpg or a Png. The Png has the advantage of an integrated Alpha channel, so you don’t have to mask the wire frame texture afterwards, if you want to use a more complex material, or you can simply use the the wire frame texture as a layer mask inside your 3d software’s material editor and edit the wire frames color with the layer, that is masked by the wire frame texture.
This is what you get, if you use the image map we created with the UV coordinates it was originally created from:

So… that’s it! Hope you learned something new and enjoyed reading this tutorial.
This time, I won´t add the model I used for download, because it´s the famous Utah Teapot (the first 3d model ever created, that wasn’t a cube, sphere or cylinder). This 3d model is one of the basic primitive objects, that are part of most of today’s software’s object libraries.

Now it´s time to experiment yourself, have fun! If you liked this tutorial, don’t hesitate to leave a comment, that might help me improve my future tutorials or suggest topics, that interest you, but aren’t well covered anywhere.