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Hi John,
I’m sorry you’ve had so much trouble with ray tracing. I’ve tried to answer some
points below.
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First, I would like to agree that there are quite a few nice renders out on
Brickshelf and the various personal sites.
Before I begin I do not want this to come across as criticism, but I have a
few questions/comments to make about some of the renders and tools.
Sometime back I bought the book ‘Virtual LEGO’ in hopes of having a
comprehensive resource for learning how to use the various Lego applications
and creating nice renders as seen on Brickshelf. Before this I had tried
downloading the individual programs and following the tutorials on ldraw.org
to create my own renders. This attempt ended in frustration, because nothing
seemed to work as described on ldraw.org. Anyway I hoped the book ‘Virtual
Lego’ would help, plus having a comprehensive install for all of the
applications. Again I was sorely disappointed because nothing seemed to work
as advertised. I sifted through the various posts on lugnet in order to find
the solution to the software problems I was experiencing. After a
considerable amount of time I was finally able to get everything to work, but
the renders were horrible, nothing like what I have seen posted by Koyan,
Orion, or anyone else. So I looked over the code snippets that would be
posted and found this to be futile because key include files would be missing
so there was no way to study the code. Finally, I gave up and started using
Bryce to do my renders. In many it is not efficient, but it works.
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The thing about rendering is that it is a combination of art and science. There
are so many parameters to deal with and what looks good in one situation may
look terrible in another. I don’t own Virtual Lego so I can’t judge what is in
it but I have heard very good reports about it from people who are very good
renderers.
I think your problem is that you seem to expect someone to say “here is how to
do a good render and here is everything you need to do it”. The latter can’t
happen partially because all the different tools are written by different
people. The former won’t happen because there is no right way to do renders,
only techniques that can help.
As an example here is a list of what I do to get a render I am happy with:
1) make a properly sub-modelled MPD file;
2) run it through l3p with the lgeo library;
3) change the ambience and diffuse parameters and include my own colour
definition include which calls the best colours I’ve found from
lugnet_colors.inc and my own definitions 4) Smooth out some parts using
mesh.exe; 5) Split off the camera and lighting into an include and add my props
like walls, sky_spheres and misc; 6) Fiddle with lighting and radiosity until
it looks vaguely right; 7) Run off my model with different cameras, sometimes
tweaking lighting and radiosity as I go
Now I can tell you in detail what I do for steps 2 and 3 but all other steps
change for every new model. That is the difficulty of using something like
povray, it is so customisable that you want to get the best look.
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Now reading some of the posts I am wondering if I or anyone else would stand a
chance getting started with rendering. On another post someone had posted one
of Orion’s images and was trying to reproduce the image. Orion helpfully
responded with the technique he used to create the image. The list of steps
barely resembled what is posted in the ldraw.org tutorials and nothing like
what is in the ‘Virtual Lego’ book.
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Of course someone can start rendering. I started rendering only one year ago and
I know people who have started even more recently than that. You just have to be
willing to spend some time sitting down and working on it. A tutorial will help
but really, time and energy is what is most required.
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Now that my rant is out of the way onto my questions regarding rendering:
1. Why does everyone strive for Lego renders that look the same? It is pretty
cool to photorealistic results whether it be by using HDRI and/or various
radiosity techniques, but where is the individual styles. When I look at some
of the renders on Brickshelf I have to look at the names to tell if the render
was done by.
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Hmmm. Well not everyone is the same (see the difference between
my and
Adrien Carpenters
renders of the same scene). Of course if you are trying to make realistic
renders then hopefully they will look the same as each other since they should
look like real life.
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2. One of things I enjoy about Lego is the level of creativity that can be
achieved. I have seen some incredibly imaginative uses for parts and really
awesome building techniques especially with some of the mecha. I was
wondering can this be said for Lego rendering. It seems that you build the
model and then drop code to generate the model into a predefined script and
hit the ‘Run’ button and wait for the render to finish? Other than the people
who come up with the various utilties where is the creativity with the
renders?
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This is why your renders don’t turn out well I suspect. Each render should be
treated differently and tweaked and adjusted until it works how you want it. It
is like saying where is the creativity in drawing something from a book. the use
of the tools is the creativity.
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In closing I will probably get flamed for remarks. My intention is not to be
mean just questioning. As a whole I have enjoyed the Lego community and the
software tools. Primarily I use DAT2DXF and LeoCAD to export parts into
something I can use in Bryce. So to the authors of those two programs thank
you very much and keep up the good work.
John.
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I won’t flame you and hope it didn’t sound like I was. I really advise you to
either spend a lot of time reading about POVray, studying it and whatever you
can fine, fiddling around and just generally playing with it.
Make a rule that each new render will have a new trick. There are plenty to
start with. I’ll add a list in a PS to help you get started.
Good luck with it all,
Tim
PS. Some tricks of the trade in a vague order from easiest to hardest: area
lights, focal blur, sky spheres, radiosity, floor textures, internal lighting,
HDRI, props
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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: Lego renders
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| In lugnet.cad, Timothy Gould wrote: snip (...) Hi Tim, That statement is just too true!! I myself feel still as a beginner (first rendering maybe 20 month ago). And I got some really helpful tips from Jeroen (digitalbricks.nl), but first I had to go (...) (18 years ago, 9-Jan-06, to lugnet.cad, lugnet.cad.ray, FTX)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | Re: Lego renders
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| (...) First, I would like to agree that there are quite a few nice renders out on Brickshelf and the various personal sites. Before I begin I do not want this to come across as criticism, but I have a few questions/comments to make about some of the (...) (18 years ago, 9-Jan-06, to lugnet.cad, lugnet.cad.ray)
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