pixelab.be blog

About me & this blog

Graduated Architect living in Brussels, I'm specialized in the field of architectural visualization.
This blog covers mainly non-professional CG work, architectural rendering, WIPs, photography, CG materials & methods, tutorials, render theories etc.
To see my professional work please visit pixelab, and don't forget to buy me a coffee if you find something useful here ! ;)

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3dsmax animation archviz carpaint cg concert displacement flickr flyer fog freebie gamma haiku luon LWF map masks material model kit modelling news opacity map photo photoshop pixelab quick-it reference reflection refraction render tachikoma texture tutorial Uncategorized V-Ray wip

Virtual visit of the Vaillant House

Pixelab rencently did for Luon some CG stills and wireframe animations of key rooms of a contemporary house for a Vaillant marketing campaign.

Virtual visit is here (French or Dutch)

Images rendered with V-Ray and in-between animations with V-Ray toon, enjoy !

Frosted Mirror

update / 04-nov-2009 added material details

After making a quick test for a frosted mirror material (sort of frosted glass in front of a mirror) I couldn’t resist making a nice studio render with heavy post production :)

Frosted Mirror

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Masks : Essential tools for your CG workflow 1/2

update 1-oct-2009/ thanks to Peter, I’ve learned that Multimatte workd by default with object IDs. The topic has then be corrected/completed

update 27-oct-2009/ added some info on the “Affect channel : All channels” option of a material

When it come to archviz rendering, one of the first thing to learn is to create good masks to retouch materials or objects individually in photoshop. If the most popular alpha mask allows you to cut out the entire rendering from his background, other type of masks (based on elements or objects) became essential for an efficient workflow in archviz.

TP_MDW_insula_white.MultiMatteElement.0000_resize_resize
fig 1. A perfect mask

I remember times where I did a second rendering with the same point of view, where every material was replaced by a self-illumated conterpart in order to save one or several DIY “masking pass” …a time consuming method, either on material editing or rendering. I even remember cutting out glass masks for buildings directly in Photoshop. Brrrrr :)

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Diplacement and Gamma issues #2

Seems that the solution was far more simple than I thought in my previous post :

Just use the Gamma Override when you load the bitmap in max and I’ll work like a charm !

Capture3

Diplacement and Gamma issues with V-Ray

This might intrest thos who work in Linear color mapping with a gamma curve (like the so called Linear Workflow LWF with 2.2 gamma correction). I recently bumped into an annoying side effect of putting an input gamma for bitmap files other than 1.0 in Max : Diplacement maps gets corrected aswell…

Capture1

Capture

But here’s how to fix it !

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