I had a nightmare

[tango13]

MLT + path, this one cooked for about 15 hrs, CVS source on Debian Lenny.

C&C welcome!

Ciao,
Piero

[Carbonflux]

here is my CC: You are getting REALLY good at this !

I like how you managed to get good reflections with only a single light source, I would be curious about what kind of emitter you used in the light, did you cover it? the light looks really good.

The charcoal piece is great, I use those still to draw, makes me think of stained fingers and stuff.

Did you do the drawing?

The implied story behind this is fun.

You must have worked a very long time on the ship model.

The cup is fun, a tribute to surrealism is how I parsed it.

The pencils inside are the only real weakness I can find, they seem a bit too plain but its hard to say, not in terms of realism persay, but they seem to "new" or something to me.

And, the texture on the "ground" I just love, you Really did a good job on that...

One the whole I have to say you have done Art imo.

Thank you for sharing this

[g60]

I wonder if you intended so many visual puns: a rendered image of a ship model, floating on a mapped ground plane that looks more like water and islands than wood and pealing blue paint, lit by an overhead lamp. Even the pencil cup is textured to serve as a kind of island that the ship is passing. (carbonflux would have titled this, "this is not a ship" ) It is a fun image and the modeling looks great. The ground texture is perfect for this composition.

I would try for a little more specular on the hull of the ship model. While the eye glasses look perfect, the pencils seem too sharp-edged and the top rim of the pencil cup could be a little more rounded.

[jim]

Excellent image. Inspiring even.

Nit-picks:
The reflection of the light in the lens of the glasses looks like it has some filtering artifacts. As previously noted, the cup looks a bit "sharp" - so do the pencils, and the charcoal too but not as much.

I think the composition could be stronger if the light source was cropped out of the visible image. Compared to everything else, it's boring anyway and we don't need to see it. Cutting 100 pixels or so off from the top so that the "head" of the light isn't visible makes an improvement.

[Radiance]

Very nice modeling

I'd try to go for a museum style environment/lighting...

Radiance

[tango13]

Hi everybody and thanks a lot for your comments, I'm reeeeeeally flattered...

I have to "confess" that I'm not the modeler of the ship... I've had that model yawning on my hard disk for quite some time, so I decided to wake it up and try some scenes with it
However, I chose and applied the textures, uv mapping and stuff, and the same is true for all the other objects on the scene.

@carbonflux: the emitter is just a 5-side cylinder, no cover on it. I modelled a reflector behind it, like in car lights or flashlights to take full advantage of the light emitter. Also, I enclosed the scene in a bounding box and applied some volume rendering: here's where the subtle dusty atmosphere (and the light cone) comes from. The drawing is not mine , I wish I were so good at drawing but I'm not...

@g60: the visual puns are all but casual... . I tried to carefully select, apply the textures and position the objects to try to transmit the ideas and sensations that you described. I'm glad that somehow I succeeded in achieving this goal

@jim: I don't know what happened to the light reflection on the glasses lens. You're right, it seems there's something strange with it but probably that's due to some tiny, invisible irregularities in the lens mesh.

@radiance: thanks for your suggestion, I'll try that.

And yes, the pencils look a little too clean and new, that's one of my weaknesses with rendered scenes in general: I still have to learn a lot about rendering used, aged materials.

A slightly modified scene is attached, with pencils and cup just retouched. Also, I applied some film coating to the lenses, but the result is hardly noticeable.

Thank you!
Piero

[Carbonflux]

I notice the difference on the pencils, really just the label helps a lot imo, thanks for telling me about the volume thats really useful information to see how it looks

[jim]

I don't know what happened to the light reflection on the glasses lens. You're right, it seems there's something strange with it but probably that's due to some tiny, invisible irregularities in the lens mesh.

I believe this type of "ringing" artifact is the result of the image reconstruction filter used, not a mesh problem. (but don't take that as the absolute truth - I'm no expert, and the answer to almost every question is image-dependent anyway)

Forgive me for assuming you're an artist-type and uninterested in the technical underpinnings, but this is the best reference I could quickly find that doesn't directly get into FFT and convolution, image-processing kernels, etc.
http://wiki.panotools.org/PanoTools_Anti_Aliasing_Filter_Examples

If you look at the "Panorama with Mitchell filter" (it may take some experimentation and zooming) you may see how the white lines on the dark background have a little emphasis (sharpening) on their edges in some places. That looks the same effect as the edges of the specular highlight in your image.

If you've got CPU cycles to burn, it might be worth experimenting with the "PixelFilter" - using the "Filter" selection on the Render tab of LuxBlend. Using "Gaussian" or one of the others may do the trick, with trade-offs in the rest of the image of course.

Wish I could help more, but hopefully this will give you a little more knowledge. (just looking for the examples helped me learn too)

Again, thanks for posting the image.

[Radiance]

Hey,

The mitchellfilter is indeed reponsible for ringing...

'gaussian' does'nt have ringing, but it's a bit too blurry.
'mitchell' does produce ringing, but is sharper/better.
'sinc' is imo the best, but it introduces a LOT of ringing...

we would do good to sort this out before v0.6 release and have a good 'allround' default,
which imo should be the mitchellfilter, but with it's parameters a bit modified so it rings a bit less...

It would be nice if somebody could spend some time and create different renderings with the mitchellfilter with different parameters,
so we can find a better default.

Unfortunately i don't have time for this as i'm quite busy working on all the rest at the moment.

anyone ?

Radiance

[jeanphi]

Hi,

I once did a little research on the subject and the mitchell filter has been specifically designed to overcome the problems of the gaussian filter (blur) and of the windowed sinc filter (ringing).
I remember seeing a little chart describing the filter properties according to its parameters and lux defaults are the authors recommended settings to have the best balance between blur and ringing.

Jeanphi