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Websites for Rendering Reference
Let's talk about websites where you can find reference for your rendering projects. Obviously, You can go to Google and find lots of reference there. But there are three problems with reference you find on the Internet. And those are copyright, resolution, and quality. The first is Copyright. If you use someone else's copyrighted material without asking permission, you can get sued. The chances of you getting sued are slight if you massively change the photos you're using, color correcting and distorting them, or only using small pieces.
However the chance is still there if you're using copyrighted material. Second is resolution. I think every matte artist has had the experience of finding what looks like the perfect piece of photo reference, but when you click on it, you find it's not at a usable resolution. The higher resolution you start from with your reference material, the sharper it'll be. And the more distortion and color correction it can stand. The last is quality. Most of the photos on the Internet have severe JPEG compression on them, to make them as small as possible.
Those compression artifacts compromise the image to a greater or lesser extent. So finding higher quality reference is desirable. That brings me to the first great site for finding reference for you rendering, environment-textures.com. It costs a bit more than $100 a year to belong, or about $18 a month for monthly membership. You can download three photos a day for free if you register with them. The site was set up specifically for matte and texture artists and features a huge collection of photos of every possible subject.
It doesn't have people on it, the same organization has another website specifically for figures. But it has buildings, mountains, skies, everything you could need for a rendering, all at very high resolution and extremely good quality. If you're a yearly member, you can also download large quantities of photos of the same subject in a zip file. I've been a member for many years, and would highly recommend you buy a membership, once you become a working professional.
Also, there's an effort made to shoot the photo straight on. In general, having photos with no perspective in them is easier. If the photo was shot with the subject at an angle, you'll often have to remove the existing perspective before you can distort it into the perspective required for your project. With a membership in this site, you can use the photos for commercial projects, as long as you modify them and use them creatively. One thing you can't do is download a bunch of the photos and resell them unaltered. Next is freetextures.3dtotal.com.
This site doesn't have anywhere near as many textures as enviroment-textures.com, but like the name says its free. All the photos are at very high resolution and good quality. After that, its cgtextures.com. This site has an usual policy where you can download up to 15 megabytes a day. And then it cuts you off for 24 hours. You can also buy a membership for around $80 a year, and you can download up to 100 megabytes every 24 hours.
Once again, these are very high quality and at a usable resolution. The next site I'm going to mention is the most expensive one, cgskies.com. This is run by the same people who run CG Textures, and it's all about skies. Each sky costs about $30. And these are huge files up to 18,000 pixels wide. The free version that give away so you can test it in your project is 3000 pixels wide. This price may seem steep, but the quality is top notch.
And if you're working on a big project and need the perfect sky at very high res, this is the site to visit.
The Sketchbook Project Explained in 96 Seconds
"Everything you ever wanted to know about The Sketchbook Project explained in 96 seconds! Featuring James K. Polk and Presidents, A horse, and some other fun characters.…"
Be More Creative Instantly
Smile to get smart! Being in a good mood makes you more creative, finds new research from the University of California, San Francisco.
Scientists reviewed a collection of studies that all pointed to the pros of a positive mood. Happy men had a more holistic approach to problems than negative guys, meaning they were able to recognize innovative solutions others may have missed.
How come? Research suggests when you’re happy, you release more dopamine—a neurotransmitter linked with motivation—which increases your control over your mind. Happiness also boosts activity in areas of the brain that handle decision-making, learning, and processing.
Manipulate your mind—even if you’re down in the dumps—by recalling happy experiences or simply smiling. Research has shown that if you’re bummed out, faking a grin can trick your brain into feeling happier.
Increasing Your Creativity at Work
Do you ever think, "I'm just not that creative"? You're not alone. But companies increasingly expect their employees to think about problems in new ways and devise unexpected solutions. The good news is that creativity is not a gift, but a skill that can be developed over time. Learn how in this course with innovation expert Drew Boyd. Discover nine simple tips to boost your creative output at work and learn how to think about the world in a different way, break problems down into manageable parts, divide and conquer a problem, and evaluate ideas systematically.
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If you’re new to Chaos Group you’ll get 20% off any Chaos Group products just for registering for one of CGschool's live or online masterclasses. If you’re an existing customer, you’ll get 20% off any product upgrade. With V-Ray 3.0 just around the corner this could save you hundreds or even thousands of dollars off your studio’s upgrades.
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GRAVEL - VOLUME ONE
Next to 3D people and vegetation, rendering realistic gravel is one of the last remaining challenges when it comes to architectural visualization. Most 3D artists try to avoid graveled surfaces wherever possible. But gravel is a very important building material and cannot always be avoided - nor should it be. Its role in architecture, landscaping and even interior design will let this challenge persist.
Fortunately, technology has now caught up with the problem. With this texture collection we are attempting to close this particular gap between the imagination of the client and what you as a 3D artist can deliver. This collection contains 134 different gravel textures and - as an industry first - gravel as real 3D geometry. Along with the included 257 stone textures, this opens up a near-endless variety of different gravel styles.
The product consists of the following three major parts:
GRAVEL TEXTURES (Disks 1 and 2):
This product contains a total of 134 gravel textures, based on 15 different gravel styles. Each texture consists of diffuse, bump, normal, displacement and reflectivity maps, as well as a number of special maps that will help you to modify the gravel textures or to create entirely new textures. Also included are ready-to-use material setups for 3DS Max™ and MaxwellRender™.
GRAVEL MESHES (Disk 3):
As a first on the market, we offer gravel 'textures' in form of real 3D geometry. This product contains gravel meshes based on 15 different gravel styles in sizes of 4m² and 16m². All meshes are provided in .max format (compatible with 3DS Max™ 2010+), as well as .obj format (compatible with many other applications).
STONE TEXTURES (Disks 4 to 6):
Meant to be used with the 3D gravel meshes, this product also contains especially optimized stone textures in 257 different styles and colors, based on 94 distinct sets. Each texture set consists of diffuse, bump, normal, as well as reflectivity maps. As with the gravel textures, we also provide ready-to-use material setups for 3DS Max™ (2010+) and MaxwellRender™ (2.x). For further information to this and other products,
please visit our website: www.arroway-textures.de
New, FREE 3D scene for you!
There is new, FREE scene for you in Downloads section - Living room by heobunt. Grab it here: http://goo.gl/Ex5yWi
Architectural Photography Shannon McGrath
Shannon has honed her practice over the last 12 years, concentrating on architecture and interior design, producing amazing photos used in many international magazines.
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QUIET: INTROVERTS AT WORK
Not everyone is cut out to be an aggressive sales person or advertising executive. Certain jobs require certain personalities, often people who don't mind being in the limelight and speaking up. But introverts shouldn't be discouraged, as there are plenty of careers suited for them. Let's take a look at some interesting facts regarding introverts and the jobs in which they can thrive.
From Bits To The Lens
In essence, this is a book on digital art. It compiles a host of high resolution computer-generated images taken from the scenes and spaces contained in “The Third & The Seventh” short. Plain and simple.
At least that was the initial idea. However, as the idea for the book took shape in my head, I decided to alternate these graphic impressions with some text (which at the beginning was quite concise) to divide the book into different chapters. These chapters focus on the different stages of the actual CGI image generation process using the greatest possible degree of photorealism and they aim to cover each of the aspects I bring across in my work: the initial planning and modeling stage through to the render and post-production stage, touching upon key themes such as lighting and the virtual creation of vegetation.
Each chapter digs into thoughts, procedures, theoretical principles and my own personal, and absolutely subjective, preferences that I have compiled for this book after many years of trial and error.
This essay largely aims to transmit knowledge and experience, focusing primarily on helping the artist read, understand and appreciate both basic and advanced concepts related to pictorial, photographic and synthetic art (taken as a separate discipline and final process).
Nevertheless, many of the artistic concepts described within can easily be applied to other disciplines such as painting and photography, since they share a universal foundation. All these thoughts (which are mostly abstract) are completed with concrete data, which I have tested in a genuine production environment.
The so-called “practical” part is based 100% on the VRay rendering engine inside 3dsMax. This practical section can however be exported to any other platform and/or rendering engine (describing concepts and values as timelessly as possible).
In addition to being a book on art (CGI art in this case), this book has a second purpose. Although I have not devoted my life to teaching, I have always found it extremely interesting. I warmed to the concept of transmitting my knowledge from the moment I began managing people (first as a senior designer and then as art director) at several companies throughout my career in the ArchVIZ sector.
The artists I was supervising that were starting out all shared two marked characteristics that immediately caught my attention. On the one hand, they had little (or no) training in any aspect of fine arts (mainly lighting and materials) and, on the other, they were relatively obsessed with simply learning about numbers and parameters without understanding or learning how to use the rendering engine.
People are going to find a strong emphasis on artistic principles as well as an important part dedicated to CG techniques. The idea is to have a book that can be useful both as a resource for strong traditional arts theory as well as a reference book, combined with a great collection of over 120 high resolution CG images. It is not a step-by-step tutorial book, though. It intends to deal with much more essential concepts that in my view are lacking in the way digital artists are trained these days, and that’s what I wanted to address.
Hence the idea for this book. This is my modest contribution to that group of people. This is what came of much, but not all, of my work with these artists. Regardless of how software evolves or how hardware advances, the principles behind an impeccable result have been the same for hundreds of years.
This is what this text is about. I have attempted to help the reader understand that both numbers and parameters will become obsolete and useless even before the reader finishes this book.
In short, and bearing in mind that experience can only come from experimenting, I have attempted to put into words my honest point of view regarding a technique called CGI so that the reader can take stock of what it takes to learn this, or any other discipline.