Battling with My First Render

[spardacus]

I want to thank everyone who has extended their generous help to me as I have tinkered with LW over the last two weeks.

toby, CoryC, jimzip, evenflcw, mlinde, Ge4-ce, Matt

I have just rendered my first object in LW, and I have you all to thank for it.


http://www.creativeresource.org/lw/battler.html


I would like to invite feedback on my lighting and surfacing techniques. I really wish to one day achieve the photo realism that I have seen in much of the LW gallery.

I also have a question regarding setting up a "light rig" that I could plug similar scenes into. I would like to control all the elements in the scene or all the lights as one. I have tried parenting the objects and the lights, however, each individual rotation remains independent and will not move as one.

Thanks to the members of this forum again ... this makes owning and using LW worthwhile. For the first time with 3D I can't wait to try something more and more challenging, and I have difficulty pushing myself away from my computer ... my wife may have to start me on an I.V. soon.

:p

i am spardacus

[Beamtracer]

Hey, that's a really good first render. I like the compositing too.

The polygons on the wheels can still be seen... you may want to open the surface editor and select "smoothing" for that surface. I'm not sure if that's the effect you wanted to have.

[Zarathustra]

You might want to eventually look at Overcaster, but you should take some time to learn how to set up lights first before relying on a script.

There are lighting tuts on this site. Very basic setup is 3 point lighting.
1) Create a null
2) Create 3 lights
3) Parent lights to null
4) 3 lights are "key" "fill" and "rim" - key is your strong light source, fill is your medium strength light on the other side of your key, usually, and rim is placed behind your object for that back lighting

It's good to have a scene setup like this to use as a default that you can load your objects in and see how they look and experiment with surfacing. You can always scale the null to adjust for different sized objects.

Also, when modeling ALWAYS MODEL TO REAL LIFE SCALE. It sound like no big deal, but trust me - it'll save you SO much time and headaches in the future.

Welcome aboard.