Spilling

[Couerl]

Ya, Grendel is always pulling out the cool definitions and words, you should read the diamond tut, its got all sorts of words in it that I'm too cheap to know even exist.

[Grendel]

Gotta love scrabble ....for using the spline modeler method you could use the bevel plug-in fromg DCG and set it to round instead of fiddling with the convert and adding a radius to the edge if you have it.

[shaunmckinnon]

horrible, horrible shaders...any idea how to create a good scene to display the ice and water?

[shaunmckinnon]

here's the *.car file

[bwtr]

Do you really need anything more than a good shader on the plane(I presume)

Just play with the HUGE numbers of shaders untill you get one that makes you happy. Use odd shader--you may be surprised at the effectiveness.

It's worth spending LOTS of time on because you really learn a lot about how good the supplied shaders are in Carrara.

PS--You can't make a .car file accesable like that.

[shaunmckinnon]

i zipped it then uploaded it. just has to be decompressed. i'll see what i can come up with for these silly ice cubes

[bwtr]

Trying to open the Zip it is recorded as a not valid file? Don't think the problem is mine.

Brian

[shaunmckinnon]

weird...i used winrar to encode it as a zip. i'll try it again.

[bwtr]

Whats wrong with winzip? It's never failed me!

Many people seem to be against straight forward Windows stuff on principle.
I never have problems! (Touch wood he says)

[markbremmer]

Reflective objects and clear objects are always a challenge to show - whether you are using a camera or a 3D program. Success depends as much on on your shaders as it does on the lighting of the scene.

In fact, even when images like yours are photographed, they need to be retouched to make them look "real". Trust me on this one, I do it every day for a job. ;-)

[shaunmckinnon]

I've seen your work Mark, I trust you. So tricky...this image is just for a stupid stock photo site to see if i can make some extra cash off the image. it's going to take some time, because it really needs to be a pure white background so as not to be too full of stuff. Otherwise the site won't take the image, they'll reject it.

Attached is another version of that zip file. hope this one works.

[markbremmer]

Hi Shaun,

My images may not be what you're trying to acheive so be patient with me. ;-)

Your set up is pretty much there. I rendered the two images below with several changes:

General rules for reflective objects
Less is more. Areas surrounding ice/glass like objects should be simple or it becomes visually confusing quickly. Leave any detail to the reflection map. (also, since your doing this for stock, a clean empty background leaves more opportunity for a buyer to drop in a background)

Lighting
For both of the renders below I turned off Skylight but turned on Indirect with Ambient Occlusion and Light through transparency. Then I inserted a single directional light shining mostly sidways from the right and partly from the top with shadows turned off. (the ambient occlusion darkens the plane near the objects and rendering without shadows and Skylight makes the render super fast)

Shaders
For transparent objects, always put a Value slider in the color channel set to zero. Then control transparency with a color/value slider. When Carrara encounters a color of None, the highlights become too bright. Image 1 below has a transparency value slider. Image 2 has a color slider. I also reduced transparency to 91 instead of 100 (in both images) - if it's too clear, you can't see the objects easily. I did remove the ripple from the bump map so the puddle was smoother.

Reflections
HDRI maps are cool. They're so aggressive that you don't actually need to use them to illuminate reflective objects becuase they reflect so brightly. Image 1) I swapped your HDRI map for the monochrome Snowfield to keep the image neutral but retain low edge detail. Image 2) I dropped in a custom HDRI I've made specifically for reflective objects - it has lines in it to show off reflective surfaces. In both cases the HDRI maps are grayscale to prevent color "contamination" on the ice. I'd rather control the cube with color in the transparency channel.

Ground Plane
It's white with a Value slider glow of about 50%. This is to address your comment about "surrounding with white space".

Ambient Lighting
It's set to 24% to help lighten the ground plane without blowing out the whites on the cubes.

Suggestion
For the largest puddle, you might want to create that as a single shape to prevent the "seams" from showing where the different elements connect. It's kind of disguised in these renders but a couple of other set-ups I tried really made them obvious.

I'm not trying to tell you how to do it, just saying what I did. :-D

Mark

[shaunmckinnon]

My God!!! thank you so much mark. that's great. i'll try all your suggestions and see what I can come up with. I really appreciate your help.

one question for you. as you probably noticed, i inserted a small cube inside each of the ice cubes to give it that hollowed out look that ice cubes have due to the air bubble. is that really necessary?

[markbremmer]

Hi Shaun,

Yes, it's a nice touch. I've done it myself a time or two... :-D

Mark

[shaunmckinnon]

i wonder how you'd do this shader
looks like it would be very complicated.

[Couerl]

With a Nikon. ;)

there's only so much even the Carrara procedurals will do, if you can get it convincing from 2 feet away I'd say you're a master.

[shaunmckinnon]

where did the monochrome snowfield come from? i've tried using a lower grayed out HDR map, and it's still creating too crisp and too much black of an image. I'll show you what i mean:

[shaunmckinnon]

its funny. i'm trying to make ice, when i could just take a picture. more fun this way

[markbremmer]

The grayscale Snowfield was included in the content CD download with C5P in the Sachform folder. (At least it was with mine).

As far as duplicating the photo, you could do it with an object inside and object, each with a different shader. I'd probably texture map it myself v.s. trying to pull it off with proceedurals. Kick in a little transluscency and I thinks you'd have it.

[shaunmckinnon]

here it is. weird phenomenon: it looks like there's little air bubbles in the ice cube. not sure how that happened, and not complaining. i fixed most of it with the snowfield map you recommended. still not completelly white. not sure what mistake i'm making. included is the image and the zip file of this experiment.