FROM THE COMMUNITY COLLECTION
GT40 in the treppenhalle
Initially I was noodling around with wings3D. Made some little something and decided to then see how it was going to look when it was lit. So far so simple. I decided to use Horo's bluegreymoon, which lit what I had nicely. But then I decided that I wanted to make it look reflective, modified the mat and then swapped over to treppenhalle.hdr, another of Horo's fine hdr's. This is more or less the point I got bogged down for a few hours. What I wanted was hdr background, but the thing to seem to be casting shadows on the hdr, background floor. Which is of course impossible. Put in an infinite plane and half the hdr is lost. Which is a pity and also looks a bit odd. So then I started to experiment standing my object on a platform. Eventually settling on a squashed fuzzy sphere with a slightly relective top. All this to blend the ground with the hdr. However, with my FOV, which suited my object, very little of the hdr background was getting shown, or at least not the right bits as far as I was concerned. So I placed the object, camera and "ground" (fuzzy sphere) inside another sphere, of not very refactive glass, and squashed it. When this was done, I swapped my wings object for the GT40 model to see how that looked, and finally rendered on premium effects, soft shadows 36rpp, hdr quality 16. Which took a couple of hours. Finally increasing the contrast of the scene in PSP8. The light I feel is very nice, the background not too obstrusive and the pose, pure car magazine. Hopefully everything looks as a piece, which incidentally was the aim of all these choices and adjustments. For too often I've found myself unable to use the hdr as a background option because the background just looks too "dislocated" from the rest of the scene. Which is a pity because the hdr background option really does seem to provide the best results for reflective/refractive materials.
Comments 7
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@David - harmonious. And I agree, the colours are superbly balanced.
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cool the colors of he car were ' harmonieuses ' (i don't know which word translates ' harmonieuses ' in english. Very good and cool job. :)
Clever, clever. Distorting the hdri background by using a squashed fuzzy transparent sphere with a low refraction index. Got to keep that in mind. You got all you need for this picture: light, reflection, shadows, a backdrop and the impression of movement. Yes, I also got the feeling this is a model, not a car. I don't know why, there are no clues which might support my feeling - or perhaps that's exactly the reason, no size clues at all. Nevertheless, artwork is mostly lighting what you want to show and you did a 5/5 job here.
Almost motion blur, yes that was somewhat luck. A perpetual issue for me is that the models of the cars never seem to be anything other than model sized in my eyes - there is always that scale issue for me. The model incidentally, is one from DAZ, Adrian, I'm not so clever with wings! Just minor noodling for me. The hdr - stuff, as you put it, is like working with a light dome, with coloured lights, and a background to match. A bit faster possibly than a like dome... but still pretty fiddly to get to grips with and difficult to find good hdr's to use or the right one. So far I've found fitting the scene to the hdr is far easier than trying to find the right hdr for an already made scene!
I understand you had some trouble with the lightning? I'm still using Bryce5 so am a bit lost with all of that hdr -stuff. Picture is awesome by the way. Yes, magazine stuff and beyond that. Modelled the car in Wings? Movement seems very real. Great piece of art.
It looks fantastic. Best of all the background looks like a motion blur. Nice!!!