Archives for the 'Theater Renders' Category
Theater Render: Experimenting with HDR & Tone Mapping
Friday, February 1st, 2008
Update: I wasn’t too happy with the sampling in the previous image (anti-aliasing and FG blotchyness) so I cranked up the settings and let it render overnight.
The render time was about 3 hours, compared to the earlier image which came in at only 10 min. -A huge amount of time for only a little gain, imo. There are still some artifacts that are bugging me too: The glossy reflections still have some grain even though the sampling on the material reflections was set to 64 (versus 8 in the previous image), and the anti-aliasing is still jagged (pixel sampling set at 256/16 versus 64/1 in the latter image). Am I missing something here?
Below is the older image I’m referring to with the 10 minute render time and lower samplings. I tone-mapped this one by hand, whereas, the above image was tone-mapped using Photoshop CS2’s “Automate | Merge to HDR…” from the File menu (with a little hand-tweaking to bring out the chairs a bit more). I found it interesting how the ‘Merge to HDR’ gave the image a little more warmth.
A little bit of info on the project: This theater was designed around Senator Palpatine’s Office from Star Wars. The room is small as well as the budget (relatively speaking) for a full blown themed Star Wars theater, but I did what I could to make it all work.
The faux windows are looking out into Coruscant. The image is printed onto fabric and framed with a custom profile. -These images wrap around the back of the room (most of it isn’t shown). I modeled and rendered the entire city from scratch with 3ds max and Mental Ray. The biggest issue was rendering out the image at a decent resolution without crashing max. The final size is going to be roughly 22,000 x 3000 px. This was accomplished with plenty of blood, sweat, and tears but I finally cracked the code. I went through about 4 or 5 different plugins and scrips that render out the image in segments, but the only thing that cranked out the segments without crashing was doing it by hand using the ‘Blow-up Region’ and ‘Sub Region’ controls under ‘Viewport Configuration’.
So… If anyone ever needs help rendering huge images, let me know -I’ve been to hell and back on that topic.
Theater Render: Express
Wednesday, January 9th, 2008
Fabrics! The room is all fabric. Its so much more fun to render rooms with glossy wood or paint to get a lot of play with the reflects, but not this time.
I’ve always had a hard time to get a real realistic fabric look. Looking at the close up shot, you can see the texture of the black diamond panel, but to me it looks more like cork board than anything else. The bump map is a ‘cellular’ procedural map, rather than the usual ‘noise’ that I use. I gets the look a I’m going for a bit better, but its still not where I want to be. The black fabric is called “Sensa” and it has a nice sheen to it in real life. I tried to recreate this here, but I think it looks more like a painted surface in some areas (see the front view by the base board).
If anyone has any tips on getting a good fabric look, please let me know!
The alabaster sconces were working with me this time. Sometimes alabaster can be a real bitch. I don’t know how many times I’ve searched google for help on rendering alabaster (to no avail). I’m thinking this will be one of the first tutorials I put up here. These do not use Sub Surface Scattering, btw, however I’ve been wanting to learn about SSS for some time now.
This was a very awkward room from a design standpoint. It has a vaulted ceiling, and there is no real “back” of the theater. I will post the existing room photos to explain it better. Lots of windows too; I believe HTS will be installing motorized black-out shades. The renders only show the very front of the room, none of the windows or stairs.
Originally designed for Chris Lam of Home Theater Solutions. The room is roughly 20′ x 19′ x 8′5″h. The screen is measured at 110″ diagonal.
Theater Render: Tearoom
Tuesday, January 8th, 2008
This one took about 8 hours from breaking down the AutoCAD .dwg to being able to render the final scene. The renderings themselves took about 15 min each.Everything was modeled from scratch except the theater chairs and the sconce -These were already in my library.
One of the things I love about tackling architectural scenes is that the modeling is a piece of cake. -Just straight lines, no organic objects to create.
This is a pretty small room to build a full-blown dedicated theater, but it still works with just one row of seating. The only real odd thing about it is that the floor is wood. This may make the room sound a bit too “live” with it reflecting the sound so much, but it was important to the client to keep it in -and thats really all that matters at the end of the day.
Originally designed for Zack Deily of Definitive Electronics. The room measures about 14′ x 14′ x 10′h, screen is 95″ x 56″.
- Existing Room Photo - front
- Existing Room Photo - left
- Existing Room Photo - right
- Existing Room Photo - back
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