Museum Exhibit

[Speedster]

Hi all;

The biggest problem with my old Industrial Archeology stuff is showing it in context.  I don't have period figures yet, which is why I'm learning Zbrush, slowly!

So I chose a "Museum Exhibit" to showcase my 1838 Stephenson's Patent Locomotive, one of the most important industrial artifacts there is.

My goal here was also to use only physical lights, and shoot for the moody "museum" lighting.  So there are seven IES spots and two emissive soft boxes. Start-up HDR is set at "0".  All are correctly modeled with hoods and barn doors to direct the light just as in real life.  I have them out of the sight lines, so I don't have to hide them.  Interesting with the IES is that I had to dial down the wattage to crazy numbers like 0.000002!  What was frustrating is that the slider readout would only show "0" when I went back to edit them, so I had to note the numbers on a yellow pad as I worked.  I'm posting an "8 digit readout" request for the next KeyShot release.

Also, all in the scene is geometry, modeled in SolidWorks.

I went for strong color, then desaturated it a bit in post, but used very few level adjustments.

Another trick, new this time, is that I duplicated the locomotive and applied a flat dark grey to it.  Then I could isolate just the locomotive and render a solid mask to grab in post.  That way I could control just the locomotive as a single layer.  Also pulled a clown pass, but did not use it.

3% noise added to soften things up a bit.

Bill G

[Josh3D]

Fabulous, Bill. The flag wrinkles may be a little big though--if it's suppose to be an actual flag hanging on the wall.

[Speedster]

The flag wrinkles may be a little big though

Yep, I was mulling that also.  But the higher quality Union Jack flags I could find that were flat were just too plain and boring.  So I figure the the set painter decided to exercise his or her air brush skills!
Bill G

[Esben Oxholm]

Hi Bill.
Nice experimentation with the lighting.

What are your focal length? The render looks almost orthographic and thus makes the composition look kinda flat, which I think is a shame.

[edwardo]

Overall I like 

I can't decide whether I like the bright, saturated colours or not... I think I do - very upbeat! I think I agree with Esben about the focal length (I like 42 mm as its pretty close to what the human eye sees).

You could try to export your piece of flag geometry from "Marvelous Designer" that might look more natural. How did you model yours?

[Speedster]

What are your focal length? The render looks almost orthographic and thus makes the composition look kinda flat, which I think is a shame.

Good catch, Esben, and thanks!  I used FL70, which is my usual for medical devices and such.  But I agree, this really needs the kick of perspective.  For these new renderings, I used FL45, WAY better!  FL35 distorted the wall panels too much.

Sure would be neat if the KeyShot Wizards could give us swing and tilt, like on my old 4x5 view camera.  I can't even imaging what the code for that would look like!

(I like 42 mm as its pretty close to what the human eye sees).

Interesting- I was not aware of that.  I used FL45 on these new ones, so that's a darned good guess.

For some reason, this locomotive needs strong color, which it actually was.  But I did desaturate it a bit.

The Union Jack is a .jpg label, not geometry.  There's very little geometry from traditional CG apps like Maya, Modo and the like, that I can import into SolidWorks, and I was too lazy to do it in SolidWorks.  And this flag captured my design intent, as a "flat" flag just looks boring.

Thanks for all your input!  Much valued and appreciated!

Bill G

[edwardo]

Bill, what are the dimensions (or rather, what is the ratio) of your flag? when I get a moment I will export you a piece of geometry from Marvelous Designer and fire it over to you. In MD you can essentially 'pin' the top corners of of a piece of 'fabric' and have it 'slump' in the middle in a way that suits (i believe you can control the 'stiffness' of the fabric to get the desired result). It outputs triangle based meshes that aren't so nice, but if I ramp up the density it should look ok.

If your interested, just say the word

ed