What do you think about these renders?

Ethan.Saaris

I have these 3D renders created in 3DSMax and I'd like to spice them up a bit. What would you suggest, taking into account Photoshop is my only option?

Splinters

Can you not rerender them? You could correct in photoshop but they dont seem overly high res or have much in the way of global illumination, ambient occlusion etc so shouldnt take long to rerender and will most likely give a much better result.

The shadows and lighting jumps out as being wrong. In such a dimly lit room the tv's would produce a much larger atmospheric light. The position of the tv screens should really cast strong shadows of the objects directly in front of them.

Also the ground texture could do with being scaled down and possibly using a higher res texture map, its not obvious in them all but image 12 shows it quite clearly.

Ethan.Saaris

Rerendering is not an option. I don't have the original project anymore, and the client needs the images soon.

I agree with you on the lighting, it was all faked. I tried to replicate the real atmosphere in the cafe, and I'm happy with the result.

I really need ambient occlusion, which I'll try to paint in Photoshop. Or find a way to automate it based on objects in the image. I may have an idea.

Thanks for your suggestions.

InTheTrees

They need ray traced shadows first. then ambient occlusion.

But you have to do it by hand right?

Dirty up the darker edges. Pick a light source and draw in some Hard Edged shadows of varying intensity. The pick and other and do it again.

Kind of like a soccer game at night where there's more than one shadow coming off an player? You'll have multiple shadows. And the hard edge is important not a gentle fade.

...just thoughts.

Ethan.Saaris

That's exactly what I'll do. I only need to do 2 or 3 images, I choose which ones.

Thanks for your suggestions and thanks for the analogy. Painting it is. It's gonna take hours...

InTheTrees

And whats with all the green lights?

You may be able to fix that by making two new layers in pshop and then tinting one red and tinting one blue and then set the three of them at 33% opacity so you get a mix?

I've no idea if that would work.

Or you could cut out the furniture from the walls and hue shift them to a different colour.

InTheTrees

I like the top down birds eye view. You could use that without any fixing?

Ethan.Saaris

InTheTrees wrote: »

And whats with all the green lights?

They have green lights inside the cafe. And the light is pretty faithful to the real one. Your face turns green inside.

InTheTrees

Ethan.Saaris wrote: »

They have green lights inside the cafe. And the light is pretty faithful to the real one. Your face turns green inside.

fair enough, thats something you wont have to fix then!

It must do crazy stuff to your vision when you leave the place after being in there for a few hours.

:eek:

Ethan.Saaris

InTheTrees wrote: »

fair enough, thats something you wont have to fix then!

It must do crazy stuff to your vision when you leave the place after being in there for a few hours.

:eek:

Indeed. Poor teenagers.

I was just like them 10-15 years ago, but there were no neon lights and no coloured lights!!! Only Playstations, PCs Macs and beer.

red_ice

It looks to me like it was all done with scanline rendering. I know you said you dont have the model, but imo the only option is to rerender and use something a bit more powerful like mental ray. it doesnt look like theres any bump in the textures too. Everything just looks plastic as a result. If you spend 10 minutes with mental ray and the arc/design presets you would have a very good starting point for a realistic scene.

The windows should have light behind them, even if its dim, black atmos never really works. Especially if they are blacked out windows. Even black walls reflect light. The lighting in the place looks horrid - i know you are trying to replicate the clients specs, but throw in a couple of omni's with no shadow's to brighten it up and soften the other shadows in the place without sacrificing light. While you are trying to create a mood, the light isnt good enough to get a look around the place with depth, those spot lights will change the color of the room on their own, regardless of the fact that there would be omni's in the set.

I like the illumination on the skirting boards, thats done well. It might not be intentional, but I think it suits the scene.

Overall the model looks good. I mean there are a few creases to clean out, but I like it! If only you had the option to rerender with better texturing etc!!

In photoshop i would try and brighten it up. Maybe turn the images black and white, up the exposure, down the contrast, then see about changing the layer style to softlight and half the opacity on it. erase the parts that dont look good, bring out the color again with more layers. Mess around with those settings imo.

I would also photoshop out creases on things like the arm of this chair. Yeh, its nit picky stuff, but if you want realistic renders you have to pay attention to these details.

Another thing that might really help you out... which should have been done at the rendering stage would be to at depth of focus. You can do this sort of in photoshop by duplicating the layer, deleting everything but the objects in the front of the scene and adding a slight Gaussian blur. Do the same with the stuff at the back of the scene. This can help hide some of the textures, but will really make the scene pop!

This is what you are trying to achieve
and this

Good luck with it!

Ethan.Saaris

I will add some advanced post in Photoshop, and maybe, if time allows me, I'll recreate the entire scene. It's not something overly-complicated, just boxes and cylinders and stuff.