Color Palette Creation is a Breeze With ColorPic

Ever tried using a color picker on a high resolution monitor? It's impossible. That's why this color picker has a magnifier attached. Grab palettes of up to 16 colors at once and use four advanced color mixers to select a spectrum of possibilities.

Version 4 is now available, with the following features:

• Easily pick any color from the screen
• Totally 100% Free!
• No popup adverts or spyware, it really is free
• Colors shown in hex and decimal
• Adjust Hue, Saturation, Value, Red, Green and Blue values
• Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black percentages shown
• Easy to use with any other program
• Resizable magnification area
• Overlay a grid for quick colorpicker alignment
• Use arrow keys to nudge mouse pointer
• Save multiple palettes of colors automatically
• WebSafe Colors and names displayed
• Snap to nearest WebSafe color
• Point sample, 3x3 or 5x5 pixel color sampling
• Adjust color with four advanced color mixers
• Edit colorpicker values after selection easily
• Easy to use collapsible sections
• Works with Firefox, Internet Explorer, Photoshop and any other application

Download ColorPic

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Theft vs Creative Inspiration

Rick Sammon joins me for a discussion about drawing the line between stealing and being inspired by someone's work.

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Managing Nonpayment Situations

Once in a great while, polite correspondence between you and a client about an unpaid invoice stops being productive. You need to take a more aggressive approach to recuperate at least some of the money that you're owed. If things get really bad, I found that threatening letters from attorneys can be helpful.

Depending on the amount owed, your best option may be going to small claims court. You can get a judgment against your client if you are able to prove that you performed according to the contract, and that the client owes you money. This may or may not help you. Small claims court can pass a judgment in your favor, but that doesn't make cash magically appear. It does give you the leeway though to garnish funds from their bank account. Small claims court resolves disputes under $7,500.

Even if the client owes you $10,000, it's sometimes worth it to cut your losses and get a judgment for $7,500 through small claims court. In regular courts, attorney's fees and legal costs can mount up quickly. If what is owed to you is more than $10,000, my recommendation is to resolve the issue through binding arbitration in a city where you do business. These problems rarely happen to me because I'm really conscientious about the language of my contracts. But when they do, it takes persistence and professionalism.

There have been times when I've been persistent, and after two years, I was paid $20,000 that I was owed. But there have been a couple of times where I've had to let payments go that were under $1,000 because it just wasn't worth my time to collect them. Generally, being conscientious of your client's financial health at the beginning of a project is one of the best ways to determine whether you will be well-served to work with them. Following professional protocol and making sure you have signed contracts and approvals for your revisions should keep you out of trouble

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White Color Balance in PhotoShop

This tutorial is for those “special times” when you either forgot to set the white balance setting on your V-Ray virtual camera, or you like the control you get in post.

White Color Balance in PhotoShop

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Dodge and Burn

Dodge and Burn refer to a darkroom technique when printing analog photographs in a dark room.

When you are dodging a print, you take a wand with a shape on the end of it that would block out some of the light from the enlarger from reaching the paper. Conversely, you could burn a print, or make it darker, by taking a card with a hole in it and only adding light to the print through that hole.

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Working Non-Destructively

I want to talk a bit about working non-destructively. Some rendering artists prefer to work completely non-destructively or never apply color correction directly to a layer. I began my career painting traditionally, with physical paint, markers, and color pencils. Where, every stroke the artist added to a matte was for real and couldn't be taken back unless you painted over it. In some ways, I think artists have lost something. Especially in spontaneity and directness, when you never have to make a final decision on any element.

Working entirely non destructively also results in huge file sizes. And projects with so many layers it gets nearly impossible to tell what layer is doing what, or find any element. This is counter to where the industry is moving, but I will often work directly on simple layers for the sake of keeping my project more manageable. Like I said, this is a matter of workflow, and you may want to work completely non-destructively in your rendering.

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Color Correcting Individual RGB Channels

Lets talk about the really super charged part of color correcting, and that's working with the individual RGB channels and curves. I'm just going to show you how to do this in curves from here on out, but you can do all of this in levels just not as well. First lets look at the red channel, so choose it from the drop down menu If you pull up on the mid tone you'll add red to the image and lighten it. If you pull down on the curve you darken the image since you are removing red, and add blue green to the image.

RGB color correcting can be a little confusing since the next choice in the menu is green. You may think, won't that do kind of the same thing, when I pulled down on red, I added green, so won't this just be the reverse of the red channel? The answer is no, the two channels give you very different results, since if you pull down on the green channel, you add a magenta-red. Well the red channel added an orange-red when you pulled up on it. If you pull up on the green curve, it adds a yellow-green to the image, quite different from the blue-green the red channel added.

So, the two channels aren't just mirror images of each other. They yield very different color results when you modify them. The last channel is blue, and it's obvious that if you pull up on the curve it adds blue to the image, and lightens it. But, if you pull down on he curve it adds yellow.Maybe not the color you would have immediately thought of as the opposite of blue. So the color you get, especially from pulling down on curves may not initially be what you expect. The only way to internalize what these channels do is to work with them a lot and over time, you'll see what moves give you the results you want.

I'm primarily showing moving the mid-tones of the color channels, but you can also pull down on the white point in blue to flood the image with yellow. Or pull up on the black point to reduce contrast, and add blue all over the image. Same with the red channel. Pull up to flood the image with red, or pull down to remove red. And the green channel. So you'll just need to experiment with these, until you really get the hang of what each channel does. Before we leave this topic, I want to mention what I think is the best book on color correction ever written, called Professional Photoshop: The Classic Guide to Color Correction by Dan Margulis.

Books by Dan Margulis

Dan is a prepress master, and a lot of the book involves color correcting in CMYK color space, the space where all printed materials live. However, all of the color correcting concepts are valid in other color spaces, and in later editions he has gone more into RGB color correction. I learned more about color correction from this book than from anything else I've ever read, and I would highly recommend it to any aspiring matt artist.

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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.

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Global illumination (GI) explained

V-Ray comes equipped with a number of extremely powerful Global Illumination, or GI, engines that can help us recreate pretty much any natural lighting scenario-- and a good number of unnatural ones--should we have a mind to. If we just come into the 3ds Max User Interface, if we come up to the Render Setup dialog, we can just show you where V-Ray's Indirect Illumination Tools are found. And we just want to come along in our tabs to the Indirect Illumination tab, and here you can see with the systems turned on, we have access to a whole array of Global Illumination Tools.

We have access to a number of different Global Illumination engines. The feature sets of these tools are robust, they are powerful, they give us the ability to easily switch between physically-correct and artistically-correct approaches to our lighting setups. They can be tuned to be fast enough for even the most demanding of production schedules and yet at the same time still output high-quality images for us. Ultimately, these systems can remove an awful lot of the guesswork that would otherwise be involved in trying to manually recreate a realistic lighting solution.

Really all we need to do is evaluate the lighting needs of our current project, choose the tools we want or need to use--of course we need to run through our lighting setup--and then we can have V-Ray's GI engines assist us in achieving our artistic goals. Now, for the benefit of those somewhat newer to 3D rendering, we are going to start this chapter making the assumption that you may be somewhat unfamiliar with just what Global Illumination is and so would benefit from just a quick breakdown of its definition and workings. An understanding of just what Global, or Indirect Illumination, is can probably best be gained by contrasting it to its lighting opposite, which is Local or Direct Illumination, as we see here.

By default adding CG lights into a 3D scene and rendering without any GI systems enabled will give us only this type of Local Illumination. This computer graphics illumination is not, of course, how light behaves in the real world. This is why we need GI systems in our renderers. They allow us to simulate the physical reality of light, which of course in the real world, spends a lot of time, a lot of energy bouncing around our environments.

Even the V-Ray Dome Light, although it does give 180 degrees of light, is still a direct only light source. Let's have a look at the basic GI process. It goes a little bit like this. As direct light is emitted from a source, such as our light here, it will travel until it strikes the surface of an object in our scene. At this point,  a lighting phenomenon known as inter-surface reflection occurs. All this phrase really means is that a portion of our life energy will reflect, or bounce, and create a Global or Indirect Illumination effect in the scene.

Dependent upon the amount of energy coming from our light source, we should actually see that our light is able to bounce from a number of surfaces. With each bounce,  it will lose a bit of energy, and with each bounce it will pick up a little bit of coloration inherited from the diffuse properties of surfaces it has interacted with so far. The result of all of this bouncing is that our surroundings become lit, and even the dark nooks and crannies of an environment will end up receiving at least some level of lighting, even though they may be far away from direct light sources.

This complex process is what really gives us the ability to create lighting scenarios that have a very high degree of accuracy and realism to them. We can even conduct lighting analysis test that will give architects, engineers the ability to measure just how much illumination a given environment and a given set of light sources will produce. And now with that primary explanation of Global Illumination, we are ready to move on to examining a very particular aspect of V-Ray's GI implementation, and that is its use of primary and secondary bounce engines.

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Staying Motivated and Inspired

Successful freelancers are passionate about what they do. They commit to their clients and to the projects they work together on. To be inspired, you should be interested in where architectural rendering is going. It will help you craft a vision and a plan. Become voracious about architectural renderings. What work is being done that is transforming our industry creatively and economically? Knowing this helps you see where you can be most efficient in the work that you do. The best architectural illustrators keep great resource files, either digital or physical, to draw upon for ideas and inspiration.

One of the most insightful tools are architectural illustrator's journals and sketchbooks. They become rich documentation of a illustrator's evolution. They force you to become committed to your view of the world. I suggest joining and participating in cg rendering-related communities such as the American Society of Architectural Illustrators (ASAI). Meet fellow architectural illustrators and contribute your ideas. Become part of communities that are positive about the impact that architectural renderings can have for commerce and for social or environmental good.

Avoid the complainers. Commiserating with whiny architectural illustrators is a waste of time. Read forums such as Chaos Group, CGRamp, Evermotion, CGArena, and Computer Graphics Society; they will help you understand the greater impact that architectural renderings is capable of making. What you will learn will make your conversations with colleagues and clients much richer. It's great because you become a resource for new and innovative thinking. Understand the economy and culture of the city that you live in.

Even though we're in a global economy, most of the freelancers' work will come from large and small local sources. Stay relevant and clear. Clarity is necessary to make tough decisions faster. It's a required skill to navigate the peaks and valleys of our economy. Clarity is also required to access our intuition and our creativity. It's a necessary component for empathy, the successful Architectural Illustrator's secret weapon. As a freelancer you should ask yourself, is this work meaningful and lucrative? If the answer is yes, you have a great foundation for your work that can sustain your effort for the long term.

Enjoy yourself and take pride in the fact that you're in control of your own destiny.

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