AnnieC - WiP - learning Corona (and 3D)

[AnnieC]

Hi all!

I will occasionally post pictures here about some stuff I'm working on. As I'm a beginner feedback is always welcome.

In my spare time I'm modeling a subway train which was used in our country until a few years ago. The model was originally intended for gaming purposes but I was curious to see how it would look rendered with Corona so I began to set up the scene for rendering. The 3D model, the textures and texture mapping is unfinished, a lot of small details are still missing, I'm working on it.

I am not sure if I'm doing everything correctly with the lighting. I want to create physically correct lighting so I modeled the internal parts of the lamps and tried to set up the materials based on my very basic knowledge. The only light sources are the simplified light bulbs inside the lamps, as it would be when the train is in a dark tunnel.

I have attached two versions of the rendered image and the material settings of the lamp shell and the light bulbs.

Am I going in the right direction if I want recreate the real lighting conditions?

[AnnieC]

Attached the screenshots of the material settings to this post.

[Ludvik Koutny]

There's no need to overdo it with physically based lighting. It doesn't mean you need to model light fixtures exactly as in real world. It may actually often make rendertimes skyrocket. So just placing regular spherical CoronaLights is often enough. What you did with CoronaLightMTL was quite good choice for this scene.

Renders look good, but i think that seat cushion texture is the weakest part. It looks quite lowres, lacks some randomness (deformations, scratching, stains) or something that would break up texture tiling at least little bit, and there are obvious UV seams on the top. :)

So far it looks quite photorealistic. It's just missing some glares around light sources. You can never photograph such bright light without getting any kind of glare. Like on this picture:

[AnnieC]

Thank you for your feedback! I agree about the seat cushion textures and mapping, they are quite bad right now, I did not spend much time on it yet. I'm supposed to get more high res pictures of the seats soon to make the textures better but it's not easy when the trains are guarded by security :D If I can't get more pictures I will get creative :)

[Ludvik Koutny]

You can always create them procedurally, or find some texture that is close, and adjust it a bit in PS. Or do both...  find some texture that matches, and mix it with procedural textures :)

[AnnieC]

I had a little time on my hands, tried to add some glow.

[fellazb]

Composition wise it would be nice to introduce some center poles like you can see on Rawalanche's reference I guess. Good job already!

[Ludvik Koutny]

Composition wise it would be nice to introduce some center poles like you can see on Rawalanche's reference I guess. Good job already!

Well, if it's 1:1 real world model recreation, then unless those poles are there in the real subway wagon, i would not put them in in the CG one.

[AnnieC]

Composition wise it would be nice to introduce some center poles like you can see on Rawalanche's reference I guess. Good job already!

Well, if it's 1:1 real world model recreation, then unless those poles are there in the real subway wagon, i would not put them in in the CG one.

Thanks for the comments. I do not understand why didn't the local transport company add center poles when they refurbished these trains but they don't have it in real life, of course the trains which are now used on the same line have center poles.  I will just add the missing hanging handholds.

[AnnieC]

Added the handholds and tinkered with the textures and mapping  a little bit(only changed the mapping on the seats in the center). Still not satisfied with the seats, I will experiment further. There are a lot of other little details missing like some screws, holes for speakers, little decals and some objects need more detail to look like the real one.

[AnnieC]

The first picture is just a little experiment with DoF, the second is a render of a part I'm making for the driver cabin.

[RolandB]

Wonderful beginnings AnnieC !
Maybe you could, too, add some dirt on the ground. A subway is never clean, and it will give more realism to your final renders...
Congrats anyway !
Roland

[AnnieC]

Wonderful beginnings AnnieC !
Maybe you could, too, add some dirt on the ground. A subway is never clean, and it will give more realism to your final renders...
Congrats anyway !
Roland

Thank you for your encouraging words!
I'm planning to add dirt, scratches, graffiti and wear later when I'm finished modeling all the interior parts. Sadly, you are right about this, these trains(or any public transport vehicles in this area for that matter) are not that clean in reality, only when they are new.

[fellazb]

What function do those bolts have on top of each part of the side of the bench? There isn't aything attached to it.

edit: I know see that it holds glasspanels, my bad. Perhaps you could lower the refraction value a bit or change the IOR for a less transparant surface.

[PROH]

Holding the glass?

[AnnieC]

Yes those are holding the glass panels but the glass is quite hard to see currently. In reality these panels are mostly scratched up by stupid kids,  and that makes them more visible, otherwise they can be hardly seen when they are clean. Maybe adding those scratches would be enough to make them more visible. If not, I'll try fiddle with the refraction or IOR values. Thanks for the tips.

[Ludvik Koutny]

If you got real glass set up (reflectivity and refraction at 1, and both IORs at 1.52) then all you really need to do is to find some scratches texture and put it into reflection glossiness map slot and the same one also in bump map slot (also remember to reduce bump value down, since it's quite strong by default) Most of the map should be completely white, with just a few darker scratches. That will ensure reflection stays mirror sharp, except for scratched areas. You can always tweak that using RGB Level and RGB Offset parameters in output rollout of bitmap. :)

Alternatively you could get some physically based stupid kid simulator plugin and simulate those scratches.

[PROH]

Hi AnnieC. Just to clarify - I had no problems seeing the glass. I really like your work so far, and is looking forward to se how it progress.

The model looks very accurate, so I was wondering: Did you model it all in Max or did you use other programs too?

Keep it coming :)

[AnnieC]

Hmm, now that you say Rawalanche, I checked my glass material and it was not set up correctly. It seems I did not think it through, just blindly applied some values I found for glass somewhere. Reflectivity was at 0.7, refraction at 1, Fresnel IOR was 1.98 and IOR at 1.52. I corrected it now. I had a feeling something is not quite right with the glass, and remembered vaguely that the IOR should be lower, but it did not seem to be an issue at the time and then forgot about it. :)

Thanks for the useful input about the scratched surface, I would have probably gone in the same direction with the material setup eventually but it is always good when experienced people confirm that I'm going in the right direction.
Hehe, maybe my next programming project will be a physically based stupid kid simulator plugin :)))

I will need to have some graffiti tags on these glass panels too, so I thought I would set this up in a similar way as the scratches. One mostly white map with black "writing" on it connected to Refraction Color and then connect the same map to Diffuse, Refl. Color and Refl. Gloss too, just with different color correction filters to adjust the final look.
It seems I can achieve the looks I want with this method but is this the best way to do it?

Thanks PROH, the model was made entirely in Max. Sometimes I find Max to be frustrating after Rhino when I want to be totally accurate, but I decided to stick with it so I could learn.
I have some information about the dimensions of these trains and have some drawings of them. As it turned out, the data I have is not 100% accurate. The local transport company trusted the dimensions on the drawings but when they built a station based on these drawings they found that the whole train is a few meters longer than what they expected :D So there is a lot of measuring involved in the process when the security is not watching and a lot of educated guesses on my part which can be especially hard when I can't even see the real subway wagon myself, only rely on measurements and pictures taken by others.

[AnnieC]

By peeking through the window, the emergency door opener and its sign can be seen which I added quickly when I couldn't sleep. Hopefully I will be able to add the missing minor details this weekend.

[AnnieC]

Last weekend I made a todo list for the interior, it had more than 40 items on it, and I could only finish little more than half of them in the available time, and as always I found new things to improve, so the list got bigger. I finished the modeling of the back of the train which was the most neglected part until now and added a lot of little details which can only be seen from a close distance. I still did not refine the seat texture and mapping but I have a lot of ideas to do it, just no time to do it. As I don't know Russian I needed a little help and spent quite some time to recreate the exact text and font on a sign above one of the doors.
I made some new renders, but they do not show much of the new details so there will more renders along the way.