3d Architectural Interior Visualization Renderings: High Resolution Brick Condo with Advanced Lighting Techniques

A few entries ago I posted some interior renders of a condo/ loft living room with white brick textured walls and hard wood floors featuring some advanced lighting techniques/ effects. I revisited the project this week to make some minor changes to the scene and to create some high resolution renderings to improve the overall image and detail quality. I know that unless specified by a client or instructor your natural instinct would be to just leave the default aspect ratio within the 3d software when creating renders. Don't do it! And if you do make sure you go back later and increase the resolution to at least HD 720 (if you have a day to do 1 render at a time bump it up to 4000). If you don't want to post renders that large on your site it is always better to at least create the image in a higher resolution and shrink it down as needed in Photoshop. You will be amazed at the quality difference of the images. This cuts down on blur, speckles, artifacts, and all those annoying little problems that occur when creating 3d renders. Enjoy!

 

Created with 3ds Max & Menal Ray. All Rights Reserved.

www.kaplandesignlabs.com

3D Pills: A Rendering Adventure

Recently I have been modeling/ rendering medical, health, and fitness related content at work. This week I decided to work on some medication since it has so many uses for different health related content. It has been quite the adventure! First I started off by modeling the capsules, bottle, and cap in 3ds Max. This was not too difficult. Modifiers came in very handy. Next I wanted to make the materials and lighting very photo realistic. For this project I chose to use Vray as my render engine. 

In the first render I was happy with the material and lighting on the pills but the cast shadows were way too strong and the lighting in the rest of the scene was very dark.  Also the pill vile was lacking an authentic plastic appearance.

 Here I was able to get more evenly distributed lighting but there was some quality loss in the realism of the pills due to a change in the highlights. My co-worker and I still felt that the shadows were a little strong as well. I also did some minor tweaking to the texture of the bottle and cap.

 In This Render, I was very happy with the lighting and everything was nice and even. I was relatively pleased with the quality but I knew that it was not achieving the degree of realism that I was attempting.

 Despite the huge spike in render time, I decided to turn on Global Illumination and Caustics. This was a very good decision. Now the shadows were completely realistic. Also there was very lovely color bouncing happening, especially on the cast shadow of the pill bottle itself. It actually began looking like real translucent plastic.

 Next I decided to zoom the camera out to capture the whole composition now that the materials and lighting were dialed in to my liking. I loved the look of it but I decided that it needed a label to push it to the next level.

So here I fabricated a pharmaceutical label in Photoshop which came out very nice and created a sliced tube that wraps around the pill vile to apply the label to. This gave it a feeling that it is actually a sticker rather then just applying the material directly to the vile.

I am very happy with the results of this project. I still want to give the label another treatment to make it more paper like and maybe light the background a little bit more but other than that I feel this is a very professional quality render. If I really feel like getting wild I might add some focal distance to the camera. Sometimes achieving this quality can take a lot of time and energy; however, I suggest that you go for it in everything that you do because seeing the majesty of the end result is a great feeling.  Also, the more you practice Photo Realism the quicker you will get at achieving results like this!

Mental Ray VS. Vray

Howdy!

As I mentioned in my last post, recently at work we did some comparisons between Mental Ray and Vray. It was a bit of a competition. The Super Bowl of Render Engines. This post is to give you some insight on our results:

What we found is that Mental Ray and Vray are VERY competitive. There is little difference in the end result and the aesthetics of the renders come down to personal preference; however, we have a consensus that it is much quicker to just dive into a scene and in a matter of minutes make photo realistic renders using Vray. Mental Ray seemed to take much more time adjusting settings and textures to obtain the desired results. Keep in mind this is with 4 years experience using Mental Ray and only a couple months of experience with Vray. This was a major factor in our decision to use Vray over Mental Ray.

Here are some comparison renders of the same object with similar render preferences, lighting, and textures between the two render engines. The model was purchased from Evermotion

Mental Ray

Vray

We were very impressed by both the renders; however, we felt that the shadows, reflections, and crispness of the Vray render was more realistic. The Render time of both was pretty equal. I am a die hard Mental Ray fan; however, the ease of using Vray and benefits of Distributed Rendering make Vray a great choice.

Things to Consider:

On the other hand, if you are just getting into doing advanced rendering, Mental Ray is a great starting point for a few reasons: 1) It comes free with both 3ds Max and Maya. 2) If you are not experienced with texturing, Mental Ray has a vast amount of preset textures that come with the software (including presets for plastic, metal, car paint, stone, and many other advanced textures) and in a matter of a few clicks you can have a decent relatively professional texture. 3) Mental Ray can be easier to grasp for beginners in the sense that Vray can be a little more complex if you consider having to learn how to use Vray Cameras, Textures, and Lighting to be a challenge; however, once you know your way around basic rendering, texturing, and lighting settings -as I said above, Vray seems to be much faster when the goal is to obtain crisp, noiseless, high quality renders. Vray also comes with several of its own perks as well such as an easy to use Distributed Rendering system.Try doing a comparison for yourself and you be then judge! Share your results in the comments section below :)

www.kaplandesignlabs.com