Nocturnal, Cumbres, New Mexico (+ new DAP-5)

[Speedster]

Hi all!

Well, I have to say that the dev team has really outdone themselves this time!  Good job!

For beta testing I always choose to do a "nocturnal", or night scene, using a large and complex model, as my regular run-of-the-mill product renderings are a given.  The big stuff gives beta a wring-out!  And it gave me a chance to really play with physical lights.

For the contest (likely my only entry) I chose a huge model that I first did back in KeyShot 5 as a double-truck (two page) book illustration, just published.  It has over 2000 parts, is 238,872,093 polys, and the .bip is 1.66 GB.

Rendered each pass in Interior Mode, baked for one hour on 30 cores, on my BOXX 4.08 Ghz overclocked liquid cooled machine. 

I rendered three beauty passes, each with a different "boiler black", and blended them in post.  The main problem was a lot of fireflies, which only went away when the Specular was at zero, or black.  But I wanted a bit of oily sheen, hence the comp passes.  Clown pass was critical.

HDR from scratch in HDR Editor, used to provide overall toning and fill, as it was set at only 0.305 brightness, letting the physical lights carry the weight.

Eight IES lights, six Emissive, three Area Lights.  Aiming them was like herding cats!

Toys used:
Image Styles.  This will be my most used tool!  Tone Mapping and Curves.  Saved a ton of post!
About 200 materials, but not much Mat Graphing.
Interior Mode
Bloom
Vignette
HDR Editor
Image Pins
Rendered as PNG with alpha, and backplate dropped in during post.

Post in Photoshop CS5.  Lots of layers, but very few adjustment layers, as this was done directly in KeyShot.

Lots of fun!  It's going to be a great year!

Bill G

[Speedster]

Here's a few shots of the clown pass and clay.  Also, on large scenes, I usually create a special clown of only each of the primary models in the scene.  Then it's easy to select a big hunk at once in post for isolation and adjustments.

Also last is a screenshot of the god-awful fireflies I got using physical lights.  Way worse than in KS 7, as I compared them.

Bill G

[DMerz III]

AWESOME!

Loving the scene, the volumetric addition is perfect for this

[Speedster]

the volumetric addition is perfect for this

I agree, if I  could figure out how the heck to use it.  Spent half a day horsing around, following the instructions in the manual and from one of the beta posts. 

I was really looking forward to using it, and it was one of the reasons I chose this model!  Now with the extended deadline, and maybe some more advice, I can get it in!

Bill G

[DMerz III]

I have just barely scratched the surface with it, but I created a smoke sim in Blender. Set the cache directory to something I could easily find, changed the cache file type to OpenVDB.
Ran the simulation, which creates a .vdb file for each frame. Then I found which frame I wanted, let's say 43.

Go to the folder where I told it to save those cache files. Grab the 00043.vdb file, throw it into my Keyshot project folder for later.


In KS8, create a box (or whatever shape) that will be the general area you want the smoke to appear (engulfing the entire area). Imagine it is the domain of the smoke sim.
open up the material graph, add a Volumetric shader and use the .vdb file as the density map. I can't remember, but I think I had trouble getting the smoke to show up at first because I needed to use the transform controls to move the imported vdb around until I could see it. It was probably the trickest part.

[Speedster]

Just for grins, I tested the beauty shot in DAP-5 (Dynamic Auto Painter), which I now use for most of my fine-art giclee gallery prints.  It's a truly amazing post app for the "artists" among us!  And it's reasonable.  Like KeyShot, most of it is on top where you use it the most, but underneath it's very deep with tools and tweaks.  Check it out!  https://www.mediachance.com/dap/
Bill G