Protip: heres a trick to getting a good DOF effect with no cost to render time

 :) Here's a great trick that some of you might find useful if you ever get into 3d rendering. Personally its one of my favourite cheats in 3d and if you ever find yourself in a tight deadline it could really lighten the situation for you.
Its how to fake a depth of field effect with no cost to rendering times. Usually if you were to do a DOF effect directly in the render  you would set up your camera to  work as a physical camera, add a lens shader like a bookeh effect which would simulate the depth of field you get using a real camera, but this can drastically increase you render time because the render engine has to compute the blur in real time across a 3d space. However you can just render your scene with no blur and also render out a Zdepth pass ... which looks a little like this.

 

What it is is a greyscale representation of the whats found in the z-axis. So the closer something is the blacker it is. Now you take this image into photoshop and paste it into the alpha layer of the original rendered image, load up lens blur from the effects list and just click on the part you want to focus on. This is what you get as a final result.

:) Check out the preview. Its as simple as that and faster than anything around and looks great. Also this is crucial if you really want to get a photo realistic image because this is one of those small details that make a good image great.

Getting quality renders with vray

Okay so I'm going to take some time to explain Anti Aliasing, its one of the core elements you need to set up before you start any render you plan on doing. The render engine i use is vray so I'm going to talk about some of different methods you can use and some of the  pro's and con's that come with using them.
First a little explanation about AA.
AA is a technique in computer technology that  minimizes the distortion artifacts known as aliasing.

 As you can see in the image above, the jagged form in the top pic  is a consequence of  no AA being computed onto the line, the image being pixelated  gives of a sharp look and most of the quality is lost when zoomed in or scaled up.
Onto the bottom pic AA is applied , in 3d software the render engine fires out samples to determine how to color the pixels around the line, effectively faking a smooth look.
When viewed from a distance i think all would agree that the bottom example looks more attractive.

Now about setting up your render with vray. I myself use vray for maya and am presented with 3 different types of AA, but this may vary for different apps.These are the 3 methods you can use.
-Fixed
-Adaptive DMC
-Adaptive subdivision
What i will state now are some guidelines i like to abide to, but they are not a strict set of rules, and rearly apply to every scene your working on. More or less they should be a starting point from which you should start tweaking to get the best quality vs speed results.

The fixed sampler rate should be used for scenes that have over 75% of the image in high detailed areas. Because the fixed sampler always takes the same number of samples per region it renders.
I prefer to start of with a 1 subd  sample rate for test renders and 3-6 for production renders.

the Adaptive DMC takes a variable number of samples per pixel depending on the difference in the intensity of the pixels. So it should be used for scenes that have less than 75% of high details in the image.
Some values i like to use are 1/4 for test renders and 3/6 for productions renders

And finally the Adaptive subdivision method. This sampler divides the image into an adaptive grid-like structure and refines depending on the difference in pixel intensity. So this method should be used for images with a large amount of flat surfaces. Values i use here range from -1/2 for test renders and 2/5 for production renders.

Here is a small preview. Its a hand i did some time ago, the left side is rendered with an Adaptive DMC method with a sample setting of -3/0 and the right side with the fixed method and a total of 3 subdivs per render region. The left side rendered relatively quickly whilst the right side took a descent amount of time.

Again these values are not a strict guide line and most of the time you will have to play around to get good render times but they really are a good starting point. If  anyone does any renders i hope this help you out if you were having any trouble before. Thanks for reading :)

Sorry for the wait, im back.

So after a lengthy break from blogging I'm back. A lot of things have come up in the past couple of days, most of my time was  spent at setting up the render for the coke and other certain non work related things :) Some of the work related stuff I'm going to talk about these days.
Here is the coke render i spent 3 days tuning to get a descent render time,

it takes around 12 min. per frame which is not that bad considering that it was rendering one frame at around an hour and 30 Minuit's. And on top of that for ten seconds it takes 250 frames, so all together i was looking at a couple of days of my processor being drilled from all sides just to get the render completed.
Also the next thing I'm going to get finished is a armchair for the reel. Here's just a reference image i plan on using.

 

see you tomorrow :)

Test render

Another test render, its of a enterior im making foor the reel. Still a lot to add but im a  bit out of ideas, if any one knows of something else to add id be glad to hear it :).

Need sleep.

Sorry nothing today. Spent all day runing around Belgrade just got home O.O
Gona leave this here and try to get some sleep, loads to do as well tomorow. So good night and see you all later.

more cola

Liquids done :) and im pretty happy with how it turned out. Now i need to simulate the particles for the foam of the coke, so its back to realflow for more simulation.This one should be finished soon i hope, so i can finally get around to doing some new stuff.

started the fluid simulation.

 

And finally i got round to starting the dynamic simulation for the coke itself. It doesn't really look like any liquid for now, but these small dots just represent information particles that will be used to create a mesh that has the shape of a liquid i need. Each dot caries a certain amount of data and they interact dynamically with each other and the enviroment around them to simulate the movement and so on. So if you ever wondered how they make floods in the movies you got your answer, only my current set up is having trouble with emptying a coke can, so now floods for now.

UPDATE:

 

 Just a quick update. Sorted some of the textures out and got my glass shader looking all right. Still loads of work left, but this is just to keep people up to date whit whats going on. Gonna tweak the render , lights and scene a bit more, but i will start simulating the cola liquid tomorrow, when that's done i will have something that actually looks finished up :)

REEL-zbrush_head

So last night didn't get any sleep. Instead just crashed on zbrush and tweaked the poly head to see what i could come up with, here's something that should be nearly done, cant still decide weather to tweak it more or just leave it and set of to rendering. meh will think about it tonight. hope you like it, if anyone has any critics i would be glad to hear them.

Texturing for 3d

Right, here's a short explanation of how to create textures for your 3d app.First off familiarise your self  with any photo editing software you feel suits your needs, most will do the trick, for users with a lower budget try out gimp, but most people prefer to work with photoshop. Now the trick is in understand what you need to create.
There are 3 maps i will be using for the coce can to get realistic effects, the color, reflection and specular  maps. Each map contains some sort of information that will drive certain aspects of the shader.
The color map, as you can guess is the simplest to explain, it stores the color data you want applied to an certain object, with this one really, what you see is what you get. Just place it in the difuse slot of your shader and click render and your object will have this pasted onto it.
The reflection map, is a gray scale map and it stores information from a scale of 0 to 255 in the rgb scale, the darker a section is the more reflective the surface will be on that part of the map. Basically the colour value tells the render engine at render time how light reacts to the surface it hits and what type of information to transmit from there on.
And Finally the specular map. A specular highlight is essentially a bright spot of light that appears on a model when illuminated. now using the specular map you can dictate what colour that specular highlight will emit when illuminated.
All these put when put together will help your model achieve better realism.
There are other types of maps of course but this was just the basics for some really simple but effective stuff.
thanks hope you enjoyed it :).

REEL- coke can dinamyc simulation

Heres just a preview of a piece that should be finished soon, its a coke can that will be used in one of the reel pieces. As you can see its only partialy textured. And when its completed i will use realflow to simulate the coke pouring out into a cup.Later tonight i will give a short explenation on creating textures for 3d apps.

UVmaster-wicked stuff

Right if anyone has ever worked on any 3d projects, you will know about the trouble you can have with unpacking uv's. Sometimes you can go around it quickly and sometimes its a long and hard process of manually unfolding it all out and puzzling it back together to get feasible results.
This process is crucial in the creation of realistic 3d models so you can properly pain textures in photoshop for your model.
New in Zbrush 4 is uv master, its a plug in that generates them automatically and easily. just paint the area red that you want protected and blue for where you want the seams, press unwrap and there you have it , a near perfectly unwrapped uv island. With a small amount of tweaking, and i mean small, you have a production ready
uv island in Minuit's.

getting to know zbrush

One of the things i told my self i would do is to go showcase what i can do when it comes to organic modeling.
The head model was started around a year ago back while i was still at Chiron learning 3d. Back then it was still a simple impression of what i felt looked like a human head :) now some time has passed and i figured i should finish it off. So i tweaked it up a bit and started up zbrush which i haven't used before and allowed myself to mess around a bit.
the power of this app was hard to believe at first, things that would take days could be done in hours,
so I'm going to head off *no pun interned* for now and see what i come up with.
This model is going to be a sculpture of a man, i plan on creating it as if it were carved into stone hence the pedestal below the neck.
Here's the low poly preview for a start.

Finished project- BILLAIN_light_logo

here's a sample of a mnemonic i just finished recently,
its a  animation of the billain logo being illuminated by a moving ligth source  that was completed to be used on new tracks for the citrus label.
if any of you like the sound of some banging neuro you should check out his stuff on
http://www.myspace.com/billain
and
http://www.youtube.com/user/BillainTV

Introduction

Hi all,
just to get you informed on some of the things that will be going on around here, mostly  i will be concentrating on finishing my reel, so in the up and coming weeks will have some posts on my progress on certain projects, i am currently situated in Belgrade and hope to find  a carrier in cg soon, not an easy task in these parts of the world but what the hell, should at least give it a shot. Recently i finished a course in 3d rendering modeling and lighting  in autodesks authorised training center "chiron" in Belgrade, before that i spent the last three years at the
academy of arts studying graphics design but have paused for a short period due to personal reasons.
also i will have reveal some of the ways i use Maya and other programs and hope someone will find useful.
thanks for visiting and i hope you find it interesting :).