3D Render.com Render Challenges

I've found that 3drender.com has one of the nicest setups for personal improvement in terms of lighting and shading. I remember visiting their website a while ago so it was an easy find. For this personal project I've taken Challenge #1, the fruitbowl, as I think fruit is one of most difficult subjects to shade tastefully. Yesterday night I've set up a few lighting keys, but I think of them as just tests. Tonight I will prepare the models for texturing in Mari.

The darkest of them all has a nice key however, clearly too dark. The others are just tests with different HDRi's as a feed for the lighting. Not sure yet if I want to keep the model in the center of the image, but seeing as this is a presentation of materialism, I don't think I need to spend much time on composition.

I've also looked into using Ptex as a viable option for rendering in Arnold, but I have found only little support for it. A two year old workflow presented by therenderblog.com offers more insight in the availability of this method, but alas nothing more. This Russian website has a working plug-in called 'BeshaPtex' which works... but at the cost of having to downgrade your Arnold version. I'd rather not... so I'll do it the old-fasion way.

...
Fast forward a little over an hour, the UVs are done. Ready for texturing.

As I continued, I noticed the pear appeared missing from the scene. How had I not noticed this? Then I wrote a small script to enable Catmull Clark smoothing on all assets and exported my file to an alembic for painting in Mari. The visual difference of the smooth is slight but, surprisingly, shaved half a minute off of the rendertime. Now to see whether or not the UVs hold up; stranger artifacts have occurred.

Current UVs are placed in an orderly fashion and I am planning on using udim's just so I can avoid having to export and manage so many different folders, locations and file names. 

Kind regards,

Pim

Autumn to Winter in Ghent

edit: Seeing as I am getting more and more into photography I thought it would be a good idea to create a profile on 500xp; a sort of portfolio website. This is me.

Photographic update on life in Ghent and with that a written start of the search for a Minolta AF 135mm f2.8 (100mm is fine as well) and perhaps a better (affordable) all-round lens for my a-mount bajonet as the one I am using right now -although fine- is giving me poor results in low-light conditions. A tripod may be a better solution to this nuisance.

Anyway, I've shot the occasional panorama during my walks from work. Below are the two best ones. The camera on my phone performs (unsurprisingly) even more poorly in low-light conditions, so both panoramas are from quite a while ago.

6th of October at 6.26pm

9th of October at 6.17pm

The following pictures (not the ones in this blog), taken this weekend, have offered me the insight that my lens might need calibration or replacement soon. Many of the pictures suffered from the same type of blurriness that I was not able to adjust by manually focusing the ring.

Shoppingcenter Zuid (by Karlijn).

Miniature cyclists.

Sint-Simon en Sint-Judaskerk from the Gentbruggebrug.

River Schelde from the Gentbruggebrug.

Thanks,

Pim