Playing Field Frame
 

Frame for your viewing pleasure...

Comments?

Excellent work. Missing the grill, but otherwise near perfect. Good job. 3d Max or Inventor?

3ds max 4.3
The grill is there it might be a little hard to see (compression).

Thanks

About 4 minutes rendering on Dual 1GHz P3 w/ 1 Gig RAM.

Oh wow...Excellent looking! Is that the default 4.3 renderer...? I don't remember it being able to do anything that realistic looking...

bump mapping, im guessing... nice work.

Default Scanline-A, baby!

Then all I got's to say is:

PRETTY!!! :ahh:

I thought is was a real field at first ..sweat job !!

That is excellent!

Looks extremely realistic.

Sunny,
Thanks for the constructive criticism. How can I make the metal a bit more realistic? Right now it has a subtle bump and possibly a blinn shader (shiny metal is better off w.out metal shader, right?) with the Abalone.jpg (in Misc maps) map as a reflection map.
Would the carpet be better with an opactiy bitmap overlaid to expose some type of dirt or skid texture? What would you suggest? Any help would be greatly apprecaited as textures are my area of focus for this year. The models are usually pretty straightforward...

-Brandon

Geez, I haven't played with the program for quite a bit, been real busy otherwise, but firstoff I would try rendering it with an anistrophic shader. You could add some more dirtyness to the metal too, I'll discuss that next. Also, try making a pic with more red and blue hues in it for the reflection map, that would make it fit into the scene a lot more. Play around with the reflection map above all else I would say. Anistrophic is nice but usually you only see the difference if you look at it for a bit. With the carpet, I would try making a new pic, all white with some grey spots here and there, not grey grey but like almost offwhite. Use this as your overlay map, having the white being transparent of course, this will give your carpet the non-uniform look you want. If you need more clarification on that, I could make you a quick idea pic.

:ahh: That is how I looked when I first saw this.

How did you make a realistic carpet texture?

The entire picture is more realistic then alot of the past entries. I think the new deadline is motivating everybody to work harder.

The carpet is a targa image of some type of netting/mesh. The image was on my computer at school and its origins are unknown. Any high-res fabric photo that has the type of pattern found in berber/industrial carpet will do just fine. Always remeber to add bump mapping and set realistic Specular/Golssiness values. Good luck.

Very nice... I actually didn't have anything to say about the carpeting/metal. Instead, the polyethylene looked the most fake of anything. However, it is by far the best rendering of the field to date that I have seen.

Agreed. The HDPE needs a more reflective/glossy surface. Otherwise, beautiful stuff. I gave up in 3DS after blowing up a teacup :)

TEAPOT YOU INSENSITIVE JERK!!!!!!!!!!!! Just kidding.

Haha...
I would have to agree with you on the criticism of the HDPE. Im still trying to get that to map correctly. It keeps turning out really really white.

It's okay sunny...Some people juss dont understand...

all in all the image doesn't look too bad.. but the shadows need work.. there aren't any coming off of the boxes.. that's one of those things that you have to MAJORLY look for, my guess is that you either did a scatter or copied them, and when you did, to reduce render time you just extluded them from the shadows list.. but either way.. there's no shadows... sorry but i just noticed that first off.. and sunny is on the money with that metal textures thing.. but hey.. all you can do is just guess and test stuff.. good job all in all though ;)

Now that's what I like to hear, and you are also right about the shadows, though you could get away with them with the proper "false lighting". By that I mean just make it look like there are a lot of lights in the arena, as there usually are.

Wire Mesh Texturing
 

I wonder if there are any easy ways to map the wire mesh on the surface of the ramp. Right now we just hawe a plane with mesh texture+opacity+specular maps, and it looks alright at a close-up, but the problem with it (and i think it is in some way similar to the problem with rendering originally posted in this thread) is that the mesh is almost invisible if viewed from farther away, creating an illusion that the ramp consists just of the bare support structure. Is there any way to solve that? (I tried adding self-illumination, making the mesh wider, bump mapping, but it doesnt seem to help)

I think the problem we are dealing with is a product of the 640x480 resolution. There is only do much data that many pixels is able to convey. It is certainly limited when compared with reality.

Perhaps the only solution is to choose angles that accentuate the mesh and hope for the best in final render. I dont think making it brighter will help. Think of it as a pixelated image. You can't clear is up without adding more pixels.

Do not interpret this reply as a recommendation render your aniumation at greater than 640x480 pixels. You will just run into more problems compressing it back down for the judges.

Just my opinion... any other ideas?

the resolution idea seems to be my idea...and I don't kow if there is any other way around that...but test this out. Just render a still frame...if you see the wire mess then it's your compression...if you don't see it then try this. Adjust the amount of length and width segments in your box...this would give you more wire..that it visible from a distance. Sorry i can't help out that much..but I'd have the see the model to solve it.

also a question to reisser (hope I spelled it right) How did you material the wood on your model...I am having an incredible difficulty materialing the wood to look as realistic as yours...any help would be appreciated.

This is definitely not a compression problem, at least not in my case. (Try takling a real picture of the ramp mesh - if you scale it down to 640x480 you'll still see the wire mesh).
As far as i understand, the main probmel comes from the fact that the rendered mesh itself is flat, and when viewed at a not-direct angle, the width of each wire is decreased. Of course, i could increase the wire size, but then it would look too large from more direct angles.
My renderings also seem to have another problem - when viewed from very far away, the ramp looks like the supposrt structure covered with a WHITE semi-transparent solid... This is what puzzles me the most - where did white came from? I checked the specular/opacity levels, and everything seems to be normal... any ideas?

Just a possibility - maybe use a very crude geometry for the mesh instead of a flat plane (just a box per each wire with correct opacity maps will give much better results) - should take about 4000 additional polygons.

Another thing i noticed is that shadows significantly improve overall quality of the wire renderings - A mesh-like shadow cast on the carpet and the ramp structure with raytarced shadows creates a nice contrasting background for the wire itself, improving its visibility.

The problem comes from having the plane opacity mapped, I expect. Try doing it using three-sided unsmoothed cylinders and see if you still get the same results.

The wood texture is black paint. It has somewhat glossy settings and a noise bump map for some irregularities. I don't remember where I discovered that it should be black... but it should. Good luck!