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As you can see it is pretty straight forward and easy to use and adds those small photographic imperfections to your image, making it even more photorealistic.

Ok, so what do all these values mean?

Bloom power (value range from 0 to infinity): controls the strength of your bloom effect (the higher the value, the more bloom you get), adding a nice glow to your brighter objects.

Glare power (value range from 0 to infinity): controls the amount of glare in your image, creating those nice star-shaped effects around your highlights, as if you'd be taking a photo with a higher aperture

Threshold (value range from 0 to infinity): this one's a bit hard to explain. Basically by changing the value of this function you change the reach or border of both the bloom and glare effects. The higher the threshold value, the less reach will both of those effects have.

Hue power and hue shift (value range from 0 to 1): these values grant you a limited control of the bloom and glare color. Pretty darn useful for animation and those nice lens flares.

Ray count (value range from 1 to 8): ray count value allows you to change the number of rays in your glare effect. In photography this would be dependant on the number of aperture blades manufactured into your lens. Each ray value produces two "spikes" around your highlight, so the value of 8 will actually show sixteen "spikes" around the brightest part of your image.

Ray angle (values from 0 to infinity degrees, not sure why as anything above 360 degrees is pointless...): this one allows you to change the angle of rays in your glare effect.

Ray blur (values from 0 to 1): this value blurs the boundaries of your light "stars" created by the glare effect.

How does all of this work in real life? I found myself using Glare, Ray count, Ray angle and Ray blur most often, as it already allows you to achieve some amazing effects in your still images, but I'll definitely be using all of these for animation.

Hope you'll find all of this helpful.

Best

Simon

This time it's really worth it to download the latest daily build of Corona Renderer. Recently the gents behind it introduced an awesome feature called LightMixer. Up until now similar stuff was only available in Maxwell and Fryrender (is that still being developed?!), but right now everyone will have access to this incredible thing. Below you'll find a short how-to and you'll also find my notes to that video right underneath.

Ok, based on this video I'm sure you already have a pretty good idea about how this works, but just in case I'll do a small run down.

What is it? Basically Corona LightMixer allows you to control the power of your light sources straight in the frame buffer. It works with both interactive and "regular" rendering so it can be pretty useful.

How it works? Looking at the video above I'm sure you've already noticed that it's basically a render pass, very similar to VrayLightSelect, but one that allows you to control it's multiplier straight in the framebuffer, instead creating a need to comp it in postproduction.

To get LightMixer working you have to create a new CShading_LightSelect pass, scroll down and add all the light sources that you want to control in this particular group, to the Light Select Render Element list by pressing "+" and selecting each light individually.

IMPORTANT! LightSelect pass does not care about instances. If you have 100 lights that are all instanced, you have to select all of them.

The amazing thing is that LightMixer also allows you to change the color of your light sources, but in the end, and this is an important one, you have to remember that this is just a postproduction gimmick, basically combining together different LightSelect passes like you would in photoshop, it won't change anything in your scene, which means that as soon as you'll reset your frame buffer to defaults or merge those lights into a new scene, you'll have to go through that entire process once again. 

Still! What an amazingly useful thing! Hope you'll enjoy it.

Best

Simon

Well, ok, this time there is also some video here, which is suppose to inspire that photographer inside of you.

Ok, first of all you'll unfortunately need a device that can create a 360 photo. In my case I'm using a Samsung Galaxy Note 3 and the Google Camera App. Inside the app I've selected a photo sphere and started creating one:

After this process you should end up with an image like this:

Download that photo onto your PC and open it up in Photoshop together with your 360 CGI. What you have to do right now is scale up (or down, depending on the size of your panorama) your photo so that you'll be able to paste your cgi into it.

One thing and this is important: YOU CAN'T CHANGE THE ASPECT RATIO OF YOUR PHOTO AS IT WILL LOOSE THE LENS DATA AND WON'T WORK ANYMORE!!!

After saving this image all you have to do is drag and drop it to Facebook and it will be automatically converted to a 360 panorama. That's it!

Ok, there is one more thing. I do realize that not everyone has the hardware to record such a photo so below you can download the above panorama, which you can use to overlay and create your own one. 

Happy 360ing

Simon

Every now and then I'll be publishing an entry like this, talking about all the CG related events, tutorials worth watching and general 3d news that might be useful to you, so keep an eye out, cause this might be a good one!

Ok, first thing's first there are a lot of great CG related meetups coming up in the next months and they are all fantastic.

You probably won't be able to make it to this one, cause it's this week and it's already sold out, but it should be a great one and I do hope that there will be some kind of footage or report available from it. It's the End User Event and I do have to say that the speakers that will be presenting are absolutely top notch! The event is taking place in the Netherlands, in a pub, which should make it even better. Have a look!

And check out the speakers right here. What a team:

The next event, happening in August in lovely Vienna, is the d2 Conferences and although I don't know much about it, I've heard good things and have noticed that it's becoming more and more popular. The speakers list is also quite impressive.

Third even of this year is probably my most favorite one and yes, I will be attending this year, same as I did last year. It's the State of Art Academy Day #7, which right now is most well known gathering of architectural visualisation related artists in Europe (ok, maybe it isn't, but I do think it is). This is an amazing chance to meetup with a lot of people that do what you do, have a chat with all your 3d heroes and learn a thing or two about how it's done. If you've never been before I do encourage you to go this year. The event will be happening in the Hilton Double Three hotel in Mogliano near Venice, which, if you'll be coming, you'll have a chance to visit with everyone during your stay there. Check out some of our photos from last year.

The event hits off on Friday, 7th of October and will host some of the worlds most well known names, as it usually does, so I do hope to see you there!

Ok, as far as great events go this is it for this year. Every month you can also find me at 3ds London, a fantastic tho bit local event held in one of the London pubs. Last month was really incredible with Corona Renderer related presentation and I'm sure next ones will be great as well, so if you're around do please drop by.

One last thing is that I'll try to mention some cool tutorials in these as well so for now I'm leaving you with this one, Forest Pack Effects. And if you're not using Forest Pack yet, shame on you!

Till the next one

Simon

Hi guys!

Another set of inspiration photography to get you running this week. Below you'll find some of the coolest (in my humble opinion) interior designs and architecture photos that I've found over the last week or two.

Get inspired!

S.

Don't forget to follow us on Facebook to stay up-to-date with all our latest models!

Every Friday we'll try to show over here photography of architecture, interior design, product design... anything inspiring that we've found during the week. Hope it'll give you some inspiration as well.

Have a good weekend!

License:
Licencja Creative Commons
These models are available on the basis of Creative Commons license 3.0 Unported.

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3ds max 2010 or higher

What you see on the images above is a simple box with some plants on it. All of this was created with GwIvy. And how? Well, lets look into that.

First of all i’ve created some geometries tha i’ll want on our gwivy. We have a leaf and a flower. Please do remembrer that the more polygons will your flowers have, the harder it will be to work with them, as GwIvy takes loads of ram memory for such creation process, so in the end it is better to created more smaller gwivy sources, then to work with one big one.

After creating our geometry we have to, and this is a very important part, set the pivots of our flowers. This is important because our flowers will be attached to the GwIvy branches exactly by those pivot points, so if you won’t set them right you might end up with some pretty weird plants. ;)

This is were i’ve set my pivot:

Now please notice that although the flowers on the render are hanging down in here they are pointing up with the pivot set at the bottom of the geometry. It’s because i forgot to rotate the pivot and its Z axis is pointing down.

To change/move the pivot you have to go to the Hierarchy panel in 3ds Command Panel:

Ok, now lets create our main GwIvy branch. I won’t be explaining all the settings, as all of this can be found on Guruware website , i’ll just show you my settings.

I’ve placed this GwIvy source on the top of my box with the settings below:

and pressed “Grow Ivy” until i was satisfied with the effect:

As you can see above i’ve set the leaf density to be a bit lower, so that my PC won’t freeze after adding the geometry every time i’ll need to change something. That is due to the massive ram usage i’ve mentioned before.

The next step is to replace our standard GwIvy leafes with our custom geometry. To do this we just select the first position in GwIvy Leaf Meshes section and select our previously created flowers/leafs:

I’ve also created a new GwIvy for the leafs like the one above, just with higher density:

IMPORTANT! GwIvy takes up a lot of ram memory, for the creation process and for rendering. It is good to work with it on a “better then average” PC. Also after creating GwIvy it is good to export it to proxy to save some memory while rendering.

I hope that this will be helpful. Have fun!

S.