Continued toying with Vray here are the results, first with post effects and second without:

Just playing back in C4D with Vray, haven't touched this in years. I miss the relative simplicity and sanity of this work now

:-D

I just love Vray, once you know all the things you shouldn't use and set all the defaults up to something sane anyway, which only takes a few years of tinkering to figure out -_-

3D would be super easy for almost anyone if the defaults were even close to useful. Even HDR images for sky are often all incorrectly 'normalized' with the sun being relatively too dim to cast shadows properly. So I wanted to try again at lighting a render as simply as possible, No messing with render quality settings shadow bias's and stochastic samples, none of that hideous rubbish of the past. Just make the scene the correct size, the camera the correct f-stop exposure, and throw in a sky with a bright sun. Simple as it should be. Brute force + Light cache so there is practically not settings or tweaking, and hit render, done. A Vray does it wonderfully, pretty fast too ( at least for a sill )



Now to tax it, throw a stained glass window in front, can it cope... yes it can, wonderfully, go Vray! it gets a bit noisier, but not as noisy as I expected. I think in 3Ds Max Vray you can turn on optimizations for glass to do with bidirectional ray tracing or something too.



Not the worlds most impressive render or scene. But it cheered me up to see me get something simple rendered realistically in about 3 minutes, without having to fiddle of hours like the old days.

I do miss it, I learned so much about 3D rendering and light/materials and never really got to make anything with it. I spent so long fiddling and learning, actually making things got neglected!

Ah and I just found about Light Portals, which should make it even betterer, fancy that.

Rainbow!



Screwed something up and added speccy noise, but otherwise looks pretty good!


And then I stumbled on this old website again, the old Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, I should totally put my religion as Pastafarian on the next form I fill out



"I welcome you to join me in silent reverence to His Savoriness, the Noodle in the Sky, our Saucy Master, The Flying Spaghetti Monster. May you be forever touched by His Noodly Appendage."

From here:


But I digress, revisiting some old renders with Vray that I am now yet again bored of fiddling with, first with post effects and second without




Just been playing about with Octane Render on Mac with C4D, wow amazing really. Very fast if you have a good card, scary fast, definitely need to look into it more, they seem like a good solid company too.

How many CEO's of Octane can sit on a Stanford bunny.. why as many as wants to:

And realtime cloud based, HTML WEBGL 3D tool!?!?!? for the web:

They are adding Vray Cloud support soon too

And some plastic, cus why not! Couldn't be bothered to get a better scratch map, but you get the idea, 4 hours well spent... thanks to fumbling around trying to figure out why it wasn't working, to find Vray has reflection cutout on by default *shakes fist at sky* why are all the default settings so WRONG!!!