The sky he used was 1342 Cloudy and you can find the complete set of images on his blog: bullfinch visuals.

These are from George Nijland (Triple-D Visuals) who was kind enough to let me share them here, and who has been experimenting with the reduced gamma HDRi workflow that I blogged about here.

The skies he used (from top to bottom) are:

0743 cloudy morning sun
1725 sun clouds
1954 dusk

I love the moody morning one, must try to use it more often!

If you have been using my products then I always appreciate an email to show what you have been making, and I might even share them here.

Some very exciting news for fans of high quality HDR skies! As well as having 9 new products out and a corresponding super-saver-multi-buy-pack, 3DOcean have a great deal on this month where you get 50% marketplace credit back on all purchases!

Essentially you can increase the apparent strength of the sun (and therefore get stronger shadows) by changing the gamma of the loaded HDRi map.

If you use the vrayHDRi map (which I now prefer as you can adjust the rotation in degress) then it’s a simple matter of changing the gamma from 1 to something lower. Through trial and error I have found 0.75 to be a good compromise. Any lower and there is a risk the sky can become too saturated and contrasty. Something between 0.75 and 1 should suit most skies.

If you use the 3dsmax bitmap loader, you change the gamma of the loaded file as follows (note that you need to enable the gamma/LUT correction in 3dsmax preferences):

Here is a quick comparison of gamma 1 and gamma 0.75. The main advantage for me is a punchier image, and that you dont need to use a 3dsmax sun in addition to the HDRi sky. All of the products I sell on 3docean have a very high dynamic range compared to most products on the market, so bear in mind you might not get such strong shadows with other HDRi skies.

gamma 1:

gamma 0.75:

Saving from 3dsmax

I usually save renders as 16 bit png files, so that if I do want to work with the image in Photoshop or Lightroom there is more information to play with. This is an example of a straight render from 3dsmax, I was pretty happy with this result, but on opening it in Lightroom I soon realised I could push it a bit further.

In order to open the 16 bit png in Lightroom, you will first need to open it in Photoshop and save it as a 16 bit psd file.

Straight render from 3dsmax

Colour Temperature/White Balance

This first thing I have tried here is to drag the temp slider up and down and just see what effect it has on the image as a whole. This is a level of control I really miss in photoshop as I just don’t find the colour balance tools as intuiative.

Initially, I settled on making the image a bit cooler (-13 on the temp slider).

(click through to flickr for high res)

Checking Contrast & Exposure

This is something i often do in photoshop as well, even if I don’t plan to do anything else to the image. It’s always a good idea to double check exposure and contrast even if you think you are done with an image. In photoshop I normally just click and drag on a curves adjustment layer. In Lightroom everything you do is non destructive so you can just go ahead and experiment. There are 3 ways of adjusting the tone curve, you can 1. click the direct adjustment tool (or whatever its called) and then click and drag on the image itself. 2. Click and drag on the curves as you would in photoshop 3. Adjust values for highlights, lights, darks and shadows.

Vignetting

Adding vignetting to images works very well in LR, in fact I much prefer it to using the lens correction filter in Photoshop. By leaving the post-crop vignetting tool set to ‘Highlight Priority’ you get a much more realistic looking vignette (that typically doesnt darken skies too much which is the most common mistake).

Graduated Filters

I use this tool a lot in LR, and occasionally the brush tool as well. By clicking and dragging on your image, you make an area of influence which is essentially just a gradient mask. This mask can then affect exposure, contrast, saturation etc. or a combination of effects.

For this stage, I am simply lowering the exposure of the sky by nearly 1 stop in order to bring some detail/interest back in a sky that was otherwise quite featureless. Here we can really see the advantage of saving a 16 bit image from 3dsmax, if we only had 8 bit data to work with, we wouldnt see so much detail returning.

Additional note: You can experiment with with the brightness slider rather than exposure, it can sometimes give a more pleasing effect.

Final Steps

Once I have got to this stage, and especially after seeing the detail and colour return to the sky, I decided I like the warmth of the original at least in the lower parts of the image. So for my final adjustment, I toned down the colour temp shift from -13 to -6, then I adjusted the graduated filter to boost the contrast and blue colour of the sky.

Below are the 3 images for comparison, the 3rd one being my final choice.

Select your light and type the following in the MaxScript listener:

$.dome_visibleOriginal=2

That comes from Vlado on the chaosgroup forum, he goes on to explain:

It just controls when the dome texture will be evaluated fully and when the values will be taken from the pre-sampled version specified by the “resolution” parameter. The presampled version is calculated faster, but is jagged. A value of 0 means that the pre-sampled version is used always; a value of 1 means that the presampled version is used for GI and glossy rays, and a value of 2 means that the presampled version is used only for GI rays. 2 should probably be the default, now that we have it.

I have never really noticed it, because the places it might show up (architectural glazing for example) I usually dont use glossy reflections. When I say glossy reflections, I mean any vray material with a glossy reflection value of less than 1.

Here is an example of the problem:

and fixed with the secret maxscript code:

Hope that’s useful to someone!

Wishing all readers of this blog a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! God Jul och Gott Nytt År.

Thanks for your continued support & comments and I promise I’ll try to update things here a bit more often in 2012!

The above image is a bit of a mash up of different things (alpine cabin plywood, ‘twins’ landscape) with a plywood Christmas tree that I found on build blog.

Wednesday 7th December, from 7pm, at Hayes Davidson’s Office.

More info, including how to get there, on the 3ds London blog.

If you didn’t make it to the State of Art Academy Day in Venice, then try your best to get there for the next one! I had a great time, and I think the general feeling was that Gianpiero and Roberto did a fantastic job of organising it.

I ended up talking about both my recent Blacksmith’s Cottage project and the Allandale House project. I’ll post a summary of both presentations here on my blog, but there won’t be a video from the event I’m afraid. The best thing about events such as this one is actually being there, and getting to meet so many interesting people.

If you are looking for a good summary of all the different workshops, I recommend you check out James Shaw’s blog: (thanks James!)

Workshop 1 pt 1, Peter Guthrie
Workshop 1 pt 2, Peter Guthrie
Workshop 2, Ronen Bekerman
Workshop 3, Roberto de Rose
Workshop 5, Ronen Bekerman
Workshop 6, State of the Industry
Workshop 7, Piero Mazzoli

There are lots of photos from the event here on State of Art Academy’s facebook page and also lots of sets on the State of Art Academy tumblr.

Congratulations again to Roberto and Gianpiero, I can’t wait for the next one!

• The ‘Allandale’ project making-of
• Go through the ‘twins’ project in more detail
• A new made-up architectural project set in the ‘twins’ landscape
• My current project making-of (I havent published it yet..)

I’m tempted not to go too much into Sketchup, as people tend to either love it or hate it, and I don’t want to get into that!

I’ll be preparing things to show and talk about over the next 2 weeks so if there is anything in particular you would like me to cover then please add them in the comments.