Guitar Modeling - Part 4 (Final)
By Akrid 6 Comments
This Week,
I'm still on easy street, waiting for renders to finish up. I managed to increase my processing power by more than two-fold by setting up a network between my computer and another in the household, which is pretty sweet. I now have 8 cores (4 of those hyper-threaded) at my disposal, as opposed to my former 4. I leveraged this power to double the render quality, taking about the same render time it would have with my old setup. This boost couldn't have come at a better time as it turns out. I had to increase the light sampling to the astronomically high value of 16,000 in some of these images, in order to eliminate some extremely pervasive artifacts (And even then they weren't completely eliminated). For reference, light sampling is usually set to 512-1024. Either I did something horribly wrong to cause this or it's time to re-evaluate my choice of rendering engine.
Taking some advice from SSully, I resisted my urge to just make it as pretty as possible and tried to create a more photo-real look for my guitar. I did this mainly by establishing some context in the scene, which really helps the viewer understand how and why the guitar is picking up the light the way it is. I then post-processed the image using a really nifty (and free) program called Motiva Realcamera which simulates camera lenses, adding a slight amount of vignetting and chromatic aberration. This jazzes up the image in a fairly realistic way. Here is the original un-processed version for comparison.
I also did a few more "Product" shots, scenes that were carefully lit in a studio environment. I made the black version of the guitar for one of them, which on a shader level was a simple task, but getting the lighting right on a predominantly black render is a challenge. Fortunately the white trim helped in distinguishing the outline of the guitar from the background, but getting the right shine on the body was a bit of trouble. There are a bunch of things wrong with the black render too, the shading errors that I said wouldn't show up did, the shine on the pickguard is not to my liking, and I completely screwed up the texture of the fingerboard somehow.
Pretty well all of these need to be re-rendered for some small reason or another (None of them have textures for the volume/tone dials for instance...), but they took so goddamn long. I'll eventually get around to it though. For now I'm back to thinking up something else to do!
Regarding my usual Edumacational Section,
does anyone actually enjoy those? I read some of the old ones this weekend and I'm not really sure that I'm doing the covered subjects justice. They're really scattershot since I make it up as it pertains to my work, and I'm not very good at being long-winded so they all read very... Briskly. It's hard for me to determine if this information is of any value to somebody. It's also kind of weird that I'm doing this when my own understanding is still in a somewhat tentative stage.
I went in to this with the grand ambition of instilling some degree of understanding of this field throughout the entirety of GB. I don't think I'll be able to accomplish this the way this is going. Nevertheless, I'd like some feedback:
Should I continue with the explanatory sections or simply post my work with the intention of receiving comments/criticisms?
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