[H] 3D Rendering

Heen

Korea (South)2178 Posts

April 19 2011 15:27 GMT

I'm doing a school project related to product design.

Took 1 semester of 3D modeling/rendering (although it was 90% modeling/10% rendering) class ages ago so I'm really newb at this shit

I use Rhino 4.0 to model
and import it to Hypershot to render.

Now, the problem I have with rendering apps is that the program assumes I'm not a beginner and uses... non-intuitive terms for all the quality settings.

For example,

ior, roughness, diffuse... wtf? One time when I wish they had some proper tooltips..
I know they have something to do with brightness of the material, reflection light etc. but it's hard to tell what the changes are when I play with them because the preview I get is highly pixelated/rough until I actually press the render button.

To ask a few specific questions...

Certain materials keep turning out too glossy (too much reflection) when I want them to be like hard plastic with near 0 reflection. I thought changing diffuse from white -> black gets rid of that but that doesn't always seem to be the case.

I set my background/environment (just a plain floor, like where Neo and Morpheus go to get guns in Matrix 1) to white but it keeps showing up as a mix of white/grey, like white that needs to go to the laundary. If I tweak the gamma/brightness to make it a cleaner white, it gets too shiny and reflects light on to the model.

Quality settings, ex. shadow quality, are default 1 and it says I can scale between [1-10]. Is 1 best or worst quality... I can't tell because I won't know until I actually render the damn thing and that takes at least 30 minutes on low resolution/settings.

What does varying the number of ray bounces do?

Any recommendations on easy flash (.swf) making apps? Looking for:

- easy to import 3d models and maneuver the camera angle
- lack of high level features to confuse me...
- easy learning curve? >_<

I'm aiming for a 2-3 minute clip if that helps.

I tried Adobe Flash and sucked with it. Should have taken a course on it...

edit: I'm also considering going all out 2D, so something like this:
http://www.visionofhumanity.org/info-center/us-peace-index/
from the which US state is most violent thread would be in the ballpark of what I want to make.

Phant

United States737 Posts

April 19 2011 16:03 GMT

I'm assuming the number of ray bounces is probably how far a ray of light gos through the scene. If you have ray bounces at 2, It would reflect off the first object it hits and stop at the 2nd object. 3 would make it bounce off that object and stop at the third. The higher the better, but also more expensive.

As for wanting to make a material look like plastic, that probably has more to do with the type of shader you are using for the material. Also, try removing specular highlights if you can.

Bigpet

Germany533 Posts

April 19 2011 16:21 GMT

What does varying the number of ray bounces do?

It is the amount of times that light rays bounce

. Imagine 2 mirrors opposing each other. If there's just one bounce then you can only see the opposing mirror once in the mirror (and it's usually black). If you have 2 bounces then you can see the relection of the oposing mirror reflecting in the mirror and so on.

It also affects indirect light. For example you can have a light that bounces off the wall first because there's a lampshade that prevents direct light.

Any recommendations on easy flash (.swf) making apps? Looking for:

I don't actually know any 3D swf tools. Because Shockwave Falsh for 3D is actually pretty much deprecated. There are some other in-browser eingines like Unity around that also have better learning tools and a more active community.

As for the half an hour renders. If you just wanna test small settings then lower the render-quality to just see what that one setting does. I don't know keyShot so well but There should be some way to set the amount of emitted rays and the output resolution.

Heen

Korea (South)2178 Posts

April 20 2011 00:42 GMT

Thanks for the replies.

I guess the nature of the material is most important for getting the effect I want. I had a tendency to pick a similar color to what I wanted and alter it from there.

Material Library Example

Any tips on qualities I can lower to get faster renders while not compromising the overall quality too much? I'm not exactly looking to create photorealistic renderings at all. I feel like there has to be at least a few categories where raising the amount/quality just lengthens the process with no real improvement. I'm going to have to take several shots from different angles and time is not really a luxury I have since rendering makes my computer super slow and I can't multitask since the other things I need to get done also have to be done on the computer

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[H] 3D Rendering

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