3D modeling

Chair

Goodyear

Cubegirl

Jean claude van Damme and Arnold Schwarzenegger have been replaced by computer graphics for several years now. The Hulk, Transformers and Iron man are the new superheroes. Tobey Maguire only gets paid to play the nerdy alterego of spiderman, Peter Parker, when Spidey enters the picture: it's CGI again. We're bored with the steroid induced muscles of Schwarzenegger and Stallone and we want more!! Human physiology can't satisfy us no longer. We want bigger and better!
Also in advertisement the Real has already been replaced by the Computermodel. When you look at your Blackberry in the brochure it looks shiny and metallic and chrome and sparkly only to dissapoint you when you finally unbox this piece of plastic with a lousy chrome coating..
Cars were always really expensive to photograph in real-life. Getting rid of the unwanted refelections used to drive photographers to a special studio somewhere in the Nevada desert. Which meant that cars had to be flown there too. Not today. They just shoot the location and put the 3dmodel of the car on the road and it looks better than it ever did before at more than half the cost.

So Kate Moss... get a proper education for yor children 'cause the same will happen to the fashion industry. Screw the fainting models. No more child labour. We'll put our Gucci bags, Prada sunglasses and Balenciaga dresses on computermodels who are beyond anorexic. Life will be more beautiful then we ever dreamt of!
And i'm ready for it...

HDR Lightprobe

Buckybling

Nintendo HDR

Browsing through some old CD's I stumbled across this Nintendo Game & Watch model I made in Autocad NINE years ago! I rerendered it with Mental Ray using a HDR-lighting setup.. The highlights on the edges of the plastic caused by the high dynamic range lighting are really nice. Very easy setup using the Environment Probe/Chrome Ball (mi) shader which is new in 3ds Max 2009. Back in the old days you had to bevel every edge to make your model look sligtly convincing. Nowadays you just turn on the round corners option on the material. How easy! I actually own this Mickey & donald Game & Watch as well as some others (including THE original Donkey Kong) but if anyone still has one of these lying around in the attic.. GIMME GIMME!!

Cheeseblock

The Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) and Dutch development company, Multi Vastgoed presented the concept design for a mixed-use building situated in the heart of Rotterdam’s shopping district, the Coolsingel. The images that were used by OMA led to a bet between me and my colleague Haakon Brouwer that these kind of images can me made in 2 hours from scratch... I'm ashamed to say I was wrong: it took me 4 hours to model and render this block of cheese.

Shady Lace

What do you do when your partner has doubts about a parasol for the balcony and your job is to visualize architecture? Ofcourse, you try to ease her mind. You'll show her that Chris Kabels's Shady Lace is really not too big for the small balcony attached to your apartment. The whole scene was modeled in a couple of hours in the weekend while it was to hot to sit on the balcony without a parasol anyway. I tried to model everything in 3ds Max for a change but the Jellyfish chairs by dutch architect Wiel Arets as well as the base for the little Kartell table were done in Autocad. Modelling a scene this close to home made me notice that the daylightsystem in 3ds Max isn't really accurate. Anyway off to the stores now to buy the parasol.. I mean.. If you haven't noticed it: it has got a golden bird sitting on top of it!

Parti Volume shader

Getting Mental Ray shaders to work in 3ds Max can be pretty frustrating. This is a scene to test out the Lume Parti Volume shader on a large urban model. The sun is a Photometric targeted spot set at 15000 lx at 4000 m. To fill in the dark area's and bring out the ambient occlusion of the material there is a skylight with its multplier at 0,3. The Parti Volume shader is attached to the camera shaders volume slot of the renderer tab of the Render Setup screen and then instanced to the Material Editor. Get it? The trick here is to fidlle with the Step length settings and the Scatter color. Mininum (spelling error here in max??) Step Length = 0,1m and Maximum step Length is at 0,5m. The scatter color is very dark yellow (a brighter color washes out the scene to much at the horizon). The exposure control is mr Photographic with the physical scale set to Unitless at 8000.
The difficulty with the Lume Beam shader and the Parti Volume shader is to get the ratio of the photographic exposure settings and the brightness of the lights right. Try setting your scene up with simple geometry and fast materials whilst playing with these settings.

Parti volume shader

Why would anyone render a picture of a naked Britney Spears staring out a window? Well... obviously in the rush to try out the parti volume shader there was no time to bother with the hair and fur modifier in 3ds Max. Still I wanted to use the sss fast skin shader now I know how that one works! Finally, thanx to Jeff Patton, I nailed volumetric lighting with Mental Ray. I'ts a bit dissapointing that it really slows down the final gathering though.. So if it can be used to render those nice architectural-urban-morninglight-shots wih them very tight deadlines remains to be seen.. The use of very low final gathering settings give these test renderings that nice quick and dirty oilpainting quality.

Photographic light

It's incredible how CGI has evolved the last couple of years. Back in the old days (like.. yesterday) you needed a network of Sillicon Graphics workstations to render a crappy raytraced image in 36 hours. Now you can just do it in a couple of hours from scratch on your modest HP xw6200 workstation AND have the coolest effects like ambient occlusion, photographic exposure, lensglare and depth of field. Life can be so nice...
This is a detail of a larger render. It was rendered in a couple of layers in Mental Ray using 3ds Max and a bit of postproduction in photoshop.

Holland

Living in a completely flat country has an advantage when modelling complex urban development models. The A2 near maarssen was modelled in a couple of hours from scratch. When I rendered a testshot it came to me that this is a perfect iconic image of the Netherlands.

Stereogram

Stereograms are basically for 8 year old kids. to them it's magic. Some people still like to play with Lego when their older. Some People make stereograms in 3ds max even from their testrenders. This one was to test the photometric lights with the Mental Ray daylight system. Again the strange high values baffle me. Is it just because i'm a european using Metric values??

anyway to view the picture:

1. Pick a spot on the picture (the middle seems to work best) and just stare at it.
2. Allow your eyes to relax, don't just stare AT the image, try to stare THROUGH it. You'll notice your eyes will go slightly out of focus. This is normal.
3. Keep staring, don't give up, let the images slide across each other until they 'lock'. If the images are aligned try to focus.

4. if you don't succeed stop trying... you probably couldn't see those Magic eye pictures as well. Just go outside and beat up the first nerd you see. It's a conspiracy of us geeks to make you feel stupid! There never was a dolphin hidden somewhere between those dots!!

DOF

It took me a while to get some good result with depth of field using Mental Ray but i'm finally getting the hang of it. Still I think it's strange that my camera should have an f-stop value of 0,002 or something small like that to get some result. I think it must have something to do with me  using metric units (mm in my case) instead of inches. The renderings were made for a very good friend of mine named Roderik van der Weijden. I will post some exterior shots as well of this 'city in a building' he designed.

Wraparound (Lume camera shader)

I'm a big fan of the Lume Wraparound camera shader. It allows you to take a 360 degrees panoramic picture from any camera placed in your scene. I will comment on what you can do with this and a nifty litlle photoshop plugin in future posts. For now here is a little testrender I did with a model of the apartment I live in. The 360 degrees rendering was done from a camera placed above the bed. I included a normal render of the scene...