effects animation

Most of the primary rigid body animation is now done.

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Finally some progress on that, had to remodel the details in the center. Gotta move quick in the coming days though.

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A whiskey glass I set up to help a friend. I think it turned out quite well, and since I don’t usually do that stuff any more, I think it’s a keeper 🙂

Head over to the nice folks at Eat3D.com to get a new tutorial I made, its about modeling, posing and animating an iron chain.

Here’s the link: http://eat3d.com/animating-chain-3ds-max

If you didn’t know – I am definitely a zealot for the newschool rendering techniques, with photometric lights, HDR renderings, and, maybe most significantly, gamma-linear workflow. So when I was looking at some otherwise great Vue renderings, it was always bugging me that they look like silly old CG instead the real beauties they could be. So to spread the evangelism, I fired up Vue 7.5 XStream PLE, and tried some gamma juggling out.

The scene uses the thick cloud atmosphere from the physical presets, global illumination lighting. I have two objects and two materials from the scene – one is a sphere with a simple bitmap texture on it, and the other is the ground with the gray rock preset material.

And finally, here’s the tests:

Default VUE output:

Output with gamma set to 1.8:

Output gamma 1.8 AND materials’ color gamma 1.8:

The images should be pretty self explanatory. The default output looks quite old-school CG. The shadows, light falloff and shadow-midtone contrasts look unrealistic. Boosting the output gamma to 1.8 helps in bringing out the realistic GI look, but also washes out the color maps. At the end, putting a gamma 1.8 on the textures too, remedies the problem, so we have a more realistic render. Have in mind that even if you want to go for a different look, like the filmic low-gamma one I love, this is the better startpoint for post-processing. Take the torch, experiment and preach! Amen and enjoy your new renderings 😉