Pump station at night

[mattjgerard]

Kitbashed mostly from Grabcad (structure and pump unit) external piping in C4D with the Pipe Builder plugin, and the fence using the Fence Generator rig. I'm not much of a modeler, so 90% of my geo comes from CAD and prebuilt models.

Our product is the LED light tubes lighting the scene. They are Hazard Location certified sealed and spark free. Oil & Gas industry is a huge market for this sort of thing.

Scene Assembly 4 hours
Texturing 4 hours (including some *what the hell* moments with the displacement textures from poliigon on the ground
Photoshop 30 min.

This sums up most of my work, short turnaround, rendering at less than desired samples due to time, even with NR. Big meeting next week, sell sheet needs to get to print TODAY!!!! I really wanted time to play with some vdb ground fog, and was starting to do that at the end of the day when KS kept crashing when I was moving the cloud around. I'll try again next week for the fog, just want to try it to see how it works. Let me know your thoughts on stuff I could do to make quick and efficient improvements. I usually know what I would want to do, but its a matter of what I can do quickly.

[Josip_ZG]

This looks good to me. But my knowledge is not top-tier.
I do have one thing to share with you. It's about ground displacements from poliigon. On the ground it seems you're getting pyramids. I just encountered the same problem with poliigon textures yesterday when I tried to make a realistic grass for the first time. Texture scales looked more than fine, but the displacement generated these pyramids instead of thin grass, and in close-up they really poke your eye. So I watched the whole KS tutorial on displacement, the 1 hour long one. But the issue wasn't with the number or size of triangles... So I scaled down all the grass textures to 1/4 of the default size of what I had first and pyramids didn't show, so I finally got some proper grass. I also found you can use unrelated textures for displacement (like KS textures in Textures tab) as they might turn out good.

Cheers

[Will Gibbons]

That's a cool image Matt! I like that it's an outdoor scene (if I'm not mistaken) and more of an environment. I think like you said, some atmosphere could be fun with some scattering medium. Maybe a bit darker and moodier (the pipes closest to the camera seem a bit bright). That said, it's tough with such a short turnaround.

[mattjgerard]

Appreciate the feedback. This is the first time I've tried to use displacement in a production image, and yes, it didn't turn out the way I thought it would.  I did move the camera to minimize it, but I will certainly be playing with it more. It absolutely helps in images like this where the ground needs to ride up the edge of the concrete pad in various heights. It helps a lot.

Will- good point on the light on the pipes. I can see and imagine now that the falloff would be darker towards the left side of the image farther away. Much to play with on the lighting setup, but this is one of those images that I will try to keep tweaking to get it to where I like it, even though it is already out there and in the print piece.

Cheers!