Is this any good?

[arnoldawson]

Hi! I am a Technical Illustrator and I am currently trying to learn Lightwave in order to broaden my abillities. Been at it since February and am just starting to feel confident with modelling and surfacing.

What do you think, carry on, or give up now?

http://www.illustrations.freeserve.co.uk/temporary/render-setup.jpg

[iluvatar]

What do you think, carry on, or give up now?

hmmm.... I would say: give up! :p just kidding, looks awesome to me! (although I've never seen the original thing, I guess this looks pretty much like it :D)

[js33]

Don't give up now the funs just starting.
Looks good to me.

Cheers,
JS

[starbase1]

Looks VERY good to me. A couple of minor suggestions - the lens at the front looks much too reflective to me - this would be a good case to use a gradient or the fresnel shader, (if you are not already doing so).

The black pleasted section looks a little too shard and clean - maybe add a subtle darkening variation in the diffuse?

Cheers,
Nick

[Starlost]

very nice work indeed. I would tone down the diffuse levels a bit more on the accordian section to give it a more realistic look..

[Kuzey]

Wonderful!!!

Keep them coming:p

Kuzey

[arnoldawson]

Thanks for the comments and advice.

Starbase, I think you are right about the lense being too reflective. :cool:

[Rei]

no. umm wait a min, thats some damm good modeling! definatly keep it up, how many polys are on that baby, and do you want to post a wire too? how long did it take to render?

[Zarathustra]

Is this any good?

No, it stinks. C'mon, of course it's good.

Your lighting, however, is flattening the shot.

[thekho]

Excellent modeling but i agree with Zarathustra about your lighting. Your lighting needs work. May be add HDRI which will help your work looks better cos of this reflection.

Keep it good work :)

[lasco]

Hey Arnie good job !

(eeer you don't recognize me but I know you,
(Nikita from CA forum :)

So at the end you learned LW !
Congrats and welcome in the community :)

(true you could improve the light of your scene,
I don't know about HDRI but think with a bit of radiosity
(2x6 backdrop only) could give you a great result with
a raisonnable rendering time (few hours……?)

[arnoldawson]

Good Heavens!!
I had forgotten all about this thread.
Nice to hear from you Nick. Of course I recognised you. ;)
Truth is, I'm not bothering too much with lighting at the moment as I just want to learn to model and surface properly. Then when I've got a collection of models built up I will concentrate on lighting and environments etc. and with any luck a bit of animation after that.

Rei.
Sorry to be so long replying.
The model is just under 92000 polygons and took two Hours to render.

[lasco]

hey,
I said it would be even more better with things like radiosity
but as it is now it's already very good ;)

2 hours for rendering ??

well it seems a bit long for so few polys but tell
me something : you used some reflexion bluring on the wood
in front of the camera did'nt you ?

this feature is great but multiplies by 5 the rendering time !

PS : I remember the first time i had a look at your 2D images,
I was just beginner on LW at the time but immediately was sure
you would do great things with it, happy to see I was right ;)

[arnoldawson]

No I didn't use reflection blurring, I just used the wood image map also as a bump map.
The long render time is probably due to the fact that I only have 500 Mbytes of memory. Am going to upgrade that soon.

[j0SH]

Everything i was gonna say has been said...anyway, I love the wood texture and the model and stuff...Keep up the good work

[Jimzip]

Yep, lighting needs a little work. If you aren't using GI, try this out:
http://www.newtek.com/products/lightwave/tutorials/animation/3point-light/index.html

Very nice tutorial. Unless you already know how to do it of course!;)

Diffuse on the black part needs adjusting, and the reflection also, but that stuff has been said already by others.
I love the model, and the wood texture also, very very nice stuff.
Welcome to the NT forums too!

Jimzip :D

[lasco]

Just for info Arnie : more RAM won't really influe
on rendering times, this mainly depends on your processor's speed.

Though 500 Mb is few that's true and buying more
will allow you to load heavier scenes in LW, a better comfort
if you use the Modeler and the Layout at the same time,
allow to use bigger sized maps etc.
Oh, apart the fact that with enough RAM you can render in only
one segment a large image (give more RAM to the camera
in it's properties panel) while if you don't have enough the camera
sometimes will have to render in 2 or even 4 segments…

What amount of antialiasing did you use for this image ?

[Skittixch]

looks good so far. the only things I see that need a little improvement are the lighting.......well, and the lighting...but there are 2 different areas you need to focus on. correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks like you have global illumination on....if so, turn it off...next, study some lighting theory, like 3-point light setups, and such. this will give you a much cleaner result, and often times, it can make such an enormous difference, you would swear that it was a different render engine's work altogether...you're doing great, so keep up the good work
~Eric

[iandavis]

Nice work, especially considering how long you have been working with LW...

- Tip: Try creating a rendered room, use a extreme wide angle camera or create a 360 degree view by stitching several renders together... I don't know if LW does pano automatically... errr... anyway, take this rendered image and blur it in photoshop. Use this as the reflection map for the wood, and any other objects you need to add a faux blurred reflection too. (it's not perfect but render time is pretty sweet)

- the wood is very well done. I don't know if you used UV texturing, but if you didn't AMAZING. :)

- the brass needs a bit of tweaking. perhaps lower the amount of ambient colour and increase the reflection a bit, with some blurring (about 5%). those brass fittings become quite matte but even a new one would not be uber reflective.

- the lense could use a real glass treatment. Lenses always look very dark, optical glass has no colour, and I'm assuming this camera would not have a lense with modern multicoating on it... thus it would not produce the greenish/redish opalescent effect of most SLR and medium format lenses. Personally I don't use a fresnel filter, I create that effect manually using a gradient in the reflective channel. Thus avoiding rendering issues and conflict with other plugins... (learned that the hard way) if you have any questions about using gradients in texture channels, feel free to email me. :) I STRONGLY recommend you get a handle on gradients ASAP if texturing is important to you... They are very, very handy.

Wonderful work! I love it.

cheers.

[Hieraco]

Hmmmm I collect old cameras but I don't have one of those. :-) The modeling is exccelent, very nice obversationon teh details. Three suggestions if I may;

1) Use a fill light (50% of your main light) off set about 45 degrees on the left of the picture to soften the shadows on teh bellows.

2) The bellows are paper so a fractal difuse pattern (about 15% of the main difuse) sized so as to get that paper texture look. (play with it)

3) The glowing green dot that is a lens marker (I think) needs to be toned down a touch, it is bright green, not a glowing light.

Very nice work on the wood grain and details on the screws. Keep us posted on the work.

[lasco]

c'mon people have a look at Arnie's website,
guess he did'nt update since he started working with LW
but when you'll see the hell illustrations he can do in 2D
you'll understand the genius ;)

[arnoldawson]

Wow!! I have to say thanks again to for all the observations. I really didn't expect so much response.
You're all quite right of course, I have not studied 3D lighting techniques yet and have set the lights purely to help me see the textures as I apply and adjust them.
Any how I've taken note of all your advice so that I can use it when I get back to that particular model, I have quite a few pots on the boil at the moment. ;)

Lasco. I'm no genius, I've just been around a while. ;)