WIP 3D WORLD CONTEST
makma
Posts: 54
Hi!
Only two weeks left to conclude the contest of 3D WORLD CONTEST. Free Romain Demerville model Minimalist Modern Eco House is available for a render contest.
http://www.sketchuptexture.com/2014/08/ ... house.html
It is a good time to test our new realistic rendering skills - thanks to Phil - and new toy – Octane plug-in.
I tried to discover what was the reason to crash my renderings with Tim Payne's environmental light rigs and I’ve found that my mistake was allowing Sky Light in render settings. Thus the engine counted light both from the rig and a background map together. Perhaps it was to much for it. Disabling it and leaving only indirect lighting works fine. The results are presented below.
I exported the scene from free Sketchup Make 2014 to obj and 3ds formats. Unfortunately only obj works. It is OK and complete. Started with trees I got 2 inches of the picture rendered after an hour with ridiculous info that the estimated rendering time was 180 hours… I deleted the trees and got average render time of 4 hours. I tried to change the shaders a bit because the shaders imported from SU got only texture maps. I gave it additional bump maps but the rendering time increased three times so I abandoned it. I tried to use other bigger maps but the rendering time was huge so I neglected to use them as well.
For lighting I used different Tim’s rigs. They work good providing good scale of the model. I used a red cube of 1 cubic meter as a scale reference. I put it into the door and up scaled whole model 30 times to get it in right dimensions.
These are the results. Raw renders, no PS. C&C welcomed.
All the pictures are rendered in 2000 px of width following good advice of jamie Cardoso, an author of very interesting book on realistic rendering “Crafting 3D Photorealism: Lighting Workflows in 3ds Max, mental ray and vray”. It is written with 3DMAX and Vray in mind but the principles of profesional workflow remain the same. He recommends that the renders should be minimum 3500 px of width to avoid grain but it is too much for my 8GB RAM memory.
So go for it and try your luck in the contest.
Greetings
Marek
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Comments
I won't have time myself, but hopefully someone else will find it interesting.
Just a little tip, if you're using indirect light, make sure the ambient light in your scene is down to zero.
Is this a contest on the DAZ forums?
You're right, a link to the contest would be nice. Also, the link to the file is clearly not a complete link either.
Makma, is it possible to fix the links?
I tried makma's link and it worked for me, it took me to the page where the contest announcement is (about half way down the page). The direct link to the contest page is: http://www.sketchuptexture.com/2014/08/3d-challenge-august-2014-modern-minimalist-eco-house.html#more
The link to the model download is about halfway down the contest page.
Thank you all for your interest!
Dustrider, thank you for your help.
Evilproducer, your are right. I forgot about disabling ambient. Tim writes about that in his manual.
Now I just look for interesting composition of light. Just to train it further I made test renders in Thea Studio via SketchUp plug-in. I limited rendering time to 20 minutes to get every picture test ready - with the trees. Lighting comes from Thea sun but IBL is free HDRI map from Viz-People site. Rendered with GPU cores only though Thea has an option to use CPU and GPU together. For a reference my box has Intel Core2Quad inside, 8 GB RAM and Geoforce GTX 660 OC card for rendering and display and WIN7 64. Raw renders again. Click to enlarge.
I think it would be interesting to compare them against 20 minutes renders in Octane just to have an idea which one is a better investment. Personaly I prefer Thea for shaders system and many different rendering engines available. Last but not least it works with 3D connexion mouse!
Probably it is time for some post production tests and final renders.
Greetings
Marek
How do you do your obj export?
I have the Sketchucation plugin but it fails and crashes a lot on big files with lots of textures
iClone 5 3dxchange pipeline being only thing I really have any consistant luck with on exporting skp files to obj for Carrara
Hi,
Wendy, It wasn't easy to convert it to obj and eventualy I did it with a help of HEXAGON... I wrote here that this app is really underrated. Maybe it helps you to get it from my google drive:
https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B6mfD8JV0-b2ejZ0Ty1uNnZNWTg&usp=sharing
Try! There are files of obj and mtl and a huge file of Carrara with textures saved internally. Both versions are without the trees that for some reason made problems. I will be glad if you could take part in this contest using these files.
Thank you Jonstark for kind words. I think you spotted the issue but putting materials with ready made library in Thea is so easy and fast that it I can live with that, indeed. I've invested in Thea and its plug-in almost 400 euros and it seems to me to be a good purchase. It is hard to me to pay it again for similar apps that can do the same.
I was evaluating Octane before purchasing Thea and I got lost in that node system. Thea's materials lab is excellent, easy and produces perfect output. This is enough for me. Getting back to Carrara shader room from Thea material lab was very easy and I can play it much better now.
Still hope that someone will make a Thea plug-in for Carrara. It has everything I need to make arch-viz and much more I still learn. I cannot imagine that I will ever afford to buy MAX or MAYA just to do the things I can do in Carrara now. Upgrading to C 8.5 or 9 of 64 bit should fulfil all my modelling needs. So let's enjoy it playing with huge free scene that gives us an opportunity to check many hard points of art of rendering including caustics I would like to test. I can't wait for your Octane renders of the scene! Put it here as soon as you can get it!
Greetings,
Marek
I've also been trying to convert this model to something that Carrara could load, but with no success.
I tried to access your Google drive link but was denied access.
I've also been trying to convert this model to something that Carrara could load, but with no success.
I tried to access your Google drive link but was denied access.
From what I can see theses are sketchup models. So if you have or use Sketchup, then you can export to obj, or dae or fbx, etc.
From what I can see theses are sketchup models. So if you have or use Sketchup, then you can export to obj, or dae or fbx, etc.
That's correct, it is a Sketchup file.
I have a free version of Sketchup, but it doesn't have an obj export option. Apparently, according to their website, only the paid Pro version has the larger variety of export options.
I'm using Sketchup version 8, which is the lasts version that will run on my operating system. I can't run the 2014 version, but it looks like it also requires the pro version for obj export.
I tried the dae/collada export option, but it did not produce a usable file for Carrara to import.
I've changed my google drive set up to public for all of you that have an access to the link. It should work now. If not let me know.
My route in converting it was to open in SketchUp Make 2014, delete all the trees in the scene an export to .obj. Additionally I opened it in Hexagon and exported to .car. Unfortunately it exported only one mesh of the whole scene. Materials and textures are complete and shading domains saved well too. OBJ comes with mtl file but Carrara file has textures saved internally so it is huge one.
Fortunately the trees are easy to add from your own collections. According to the rules of the contest we can change materials and shaders as far as they resemble original materials to maintain overall look of the architecture. We can add items to enrich nad light the scene.
It is possible to export from SU to AutoCad dxf and Collada dae files that could be opened in Carrara too but I didn't try. Maybe it is worth to check it out. It is apparently a serious problem exporting from SU to another kind of 3D file I see.
Master your rendering skills and win the contest!!! Good luck!
Marek
I never tried it via iClone 3dx 5 pipeline because my antivirus blocked the site and I err on the side of caution
there is an obj exporter on sketchucation that is free I have for sketchup 8
as said though will choke on huge models most are fine though.
the 400+ texture ones the problem.
Wendy, thank you for a tip. There is a huge library of free SketchUp models and a possibility to render them in Carrara would be valuable help. To be honest I need more architectural scenes to develop my rendering skills and an access to Sketchucation library would be of great help.
Greetings
Marek