Cerbera

Have you tried a simple omni in ambient only mode used as a fill light ? That should sort your shadows out no matter how large your scene is... CBR

There's all sorts of ways to fake GI - the most simple one is just to do it with a large cloned skydome of omni lights. But I find the best fake GI looks are done with merely lots of standard lights faking not only the strong directional main light sources but also the bounce lighting as well. Here's a very good video on that approach... Oh, and let's not forget this one, which impressively deals with lighting an atrium... CBR

Thanks for posting these - very helpful... CBR

Lovely job ! That's a great little dragon you got there :) CBR

Not that I wish to subvert the thread, but talking of features and stability, how are you guys getting on with making OpenSubdiv work with UVs ?! CBR

I like that. And couldn't help wondering how cool it would look used as displacement ;)

The key for me is to root your hard surface designs in reality. Whether it exists or not, there will be principles that apply. Designs have to make logical sense, to look like some effort has been put into their design, and that every part has a reason to be where it is and also has a design and manufacturing story behind it. This is quite difficult to do if you are modelling on-the-fly with no reference material or story behind your creation, so most people find it useful to have a good solid idea, drawings, sketches and a ton of photo reference before they actually start modelling in 3D. However, when you are just doing modelling practice, to get your skills up to scratch, none of that applies, and you can freewheel along quite nicely making random greeble style hard surface elements that you can use or adapt for later designs. That's why I recommended Arrimus, even though he is in 3DS Max - nobody is better at improvising hard surface shapes on the fly than that guy :) CBR

Oh, and I should mention videos 3, 4 and 5 in this excellent series by Christophe Doe. CBR

There are a ton of good tutorials out there on hard surface modelling. One of my favourite series is this one, which is quite old, but goes over a lot of basic techniques. But as you are in R18, you should also watch a decent tut on the new knife tools in that version as well. But you shouldn't limit yourself to just C4D tutorials. Once you are well familiar with Cinema's modelling toolset you can also learn a lot from people working in other programs - I like Arrimus in 3DS Max, whose hard surface skills are top notch. While it's good to watch tutorials initially, the fastest way to increase your skills is by actually getting in there and doing it, every day, until the techniques become second nature. CBR

That's not the only secret thing hidden in Cinema - around Easter you can have Easter Eggs as your material previews, and there used to be a Christmas tree that turned up on Xmas day... although I don't think that's in later versions - they may have stopped that just after R9. CBR

Oh that's excellent - thanks for sharing :) CBR

Well, part 8 of this excellent series has dropped, and at the beginning it contains a very interesting insight into the problems we might get while trying to bake our procedural textures. Long story short, after a fair bit of running round the houses, Adam gets it sorted in the end, but it's not immediately obvious what was going wrong in the first place, and I wondered if anyone here could shed any light on the following... In his landscape material, he has a colour, diffusion, bump and displacement going on, and makes use of the terrain mask in several of those channels, which is why he needs to bake the textures, as it is impossible to bend (or otherwise deform) the landscape without breaking those height-based terrain masks, and possibly also the displacement (which continues to give him spurious errors and weird angular polygons right til the end !). So, when baking, in particular: 1. Why does a bake of his colour channel give that horrible washed-out result ? I would expect this to be a linear workflow issue if anything, but it isn't ! 2. Why does the bake of his bump channel give a radically coarser and different noise result to what is shown in viewport and render when making that material ? 3. Is there a problem or bug with baking displacement, that gives him the weird angular polygons in certain places ? or if not, what else might have caused this ? Very interested to hear from anyone who might know why these things might be the case... Cheers CBR

Good share - thanks :) CBR

Yep, always use standard renderer, more than 2 lights, and soft shadows on all of them for anything with this much hair on it :) CBR

Very cool. Unlike nearly everyone else who has modelled this, nice to see you got the visor / eyes exactly right :) CBR

Yes that's excellent :) Lovely job ! CBR

Hey Cafe I'm a big fan of 3D mountain ranges and epic landscapes, so I keep a special eye out for any resources that help us do that sort of thing really well in Cinema. Last time I posted about this, I was sharing the excellent Nikolaus Schatz tut on making mountains with the landscape primitive, but now, with the release of the IBC rewinds, I was very pleased to see this lecture by landscape master Eric Smit, the man behind one of my favourite C4D add-ons, the Landscape Shading Kit. Here, he breaks down all the ways he uses displacement, layers, noises, distorters and terrain shaders, physical sky and atmosphere to produce probably the most realistic landscapes that Cinema can (without recourse to DEM earth etc), with a particular emphasis on the different noise types, why and when to use them, and some very helpful techniques for making noise-based terrain look more natural and less noise-based ! So if that's the sort of thing that interests you, you'll probably enjoy this as much as I did :) CBR

Coool. In both senses ;) Will do that in another post at some point...

Thank you guys for all the nice comments :) Tbh, I wonder if I would have done, had it not been a job for a client ! Ha - if I'm honest, I will need another couple of hours at the end to go round and finally eliminate them all - there are few shameful intersections remaining :) Thank you buddy. But it's just standard SDS modelling techniques + time - I have every confidence you could do this sort of thing. The initial reference pics were pretty scary looking at them as whole, but once you start breaking it down into manageable sections it becomes less daunting, and plans start to form. Oh excellent - can I show them the fridge ?! :) Thank you dude. Can I convert those to cash ? What are they - £100 each ? ;) CBR

I do like your sand texture as well :) CBR

Alas - no - client work has been keeping me mega busy ever since then. But it's still on my list of things to finish on a rainy day :) CBR

Just close the sticky note with the little cross. I don't know if this message only gets sent to those with it still turned on - it might just go to everyone -we'll have to ask @Igor. CBR

Hey Cafe I've been on some pretty epic modelling adventures recently for an upcoming film project. My producer has kindly allowed me to post some WiP shots of the base model for our close up hot air balloon. This is the first round model, enough to begin simulations on the envelope, so there are still details and additional ropework to add / refine, but we are most of the way there. *Vital Stats* Objects: 940 Polys: 80,218 (100% quads) Subdivided Polys: 6.75 million Modelling Hours so far: 32 The wicker work was certainly an interesting one, as were the tie lines, and various bits of rope style business, and the burner shrouds. All in all a very rewarding thing to model ! Here's some wires and clays... CBR

We could do with a link to the file ! CBR

Yep, lovely job, top topology :) IQP Gold star for you.