Hi all,

from the little I know about rendering wood furniture, I realise it can be quite a lot of work. I've used both image based and procedural rendering method and both are labor intensive if you see what I mean. One as to take into account both veritical and horizontal single board and mutli board things like panels and all this without talking about joinery for example.

Understanding also that a rectangular piece of wood is relatively easy to render but when you have hundreds of pieces and you want each of them to be unique as in the real world it's complex whichever way you look at it.

So here's my question, would you have any suggestion either about methods and or about programs ( least expensive as possible) to make my life easier to render things like I posted here http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=4699.1

Thanks,
Felix

Some rendering programs like Kerky(Thea) will allow you to adjust the UV of each material in how they project.
I know that VRay in 3DS-Max will allow even greater control, and you can bring that to the next level with UVW Unwrapping.

If you are using a simple program that will let you set up a basic wood material:
If you assign different material colors to you objects, then in the renderer you can assign different grain directions and wood types to each material instance.

For instance: all the long-board panels would have a material that has the grain going vertical, and the trim would have more custom arrangements.
I have a feeling that if the UV of the arched trim you have at the top follows the curvature of that piece, and perhaps the material would follow.

I say, break it down like that and do some experimenting.

Hi Felix, is it for presenting to clients?

Screenshots like those you made are often enough to get the general Idea.

But if you have a personal interest in rendering it's another story!,
I find texture mapping to be one of the most tedious aspect of rendering, especially with wood.

Sometimes just "clay" renders without materials does a great job.

If you have a recent Nvidia Card, Octane render is a cheap solution for a physically based renderer, if you want to do uv mapping you will need another software though...
The interface is not too easy at first but it works.

You can also get free Cararra 3d versions in magazines from time to time, I don't know much about it but it supports vertex normals.

Marc

Mike,

I tried Kerky before and even recently but since it uses Moi style as material definition, this would mean I would have to basically create a different style for almost every parts I've created ie. close to 300 and maybe I would even need to break some apart to have separate piece on the rendering. If I have to UV map each part for example, this would take for ever.

I'm looking at Blender Cycle at this time but it to needs a Moi style for each group of pieces and I would also need to break some pieces apart as with Kerky but the rendering in Cycles can be almost live so I find it easy to tweak until I like what I see. I'd be happy I think with no material at all from Moi but with named objects at least and handle the material assignment the way I want in Blender without having to bother myself with this in Moi because I use Moi styles much more as layers then materials. I think I could use the obj format without material for this and I already know this approach is useless with Kerky, it needs somekind of material groups from the starts, unless I missed something of course.

If I'm not mistaking, 3D Max is somewhere around 2~3K$ and VRay is another 1K$ on top and this is out of the question for me, maybe in an other life...

Thanks,
Felix

Hello,

Thearender is €295, and Colimo is another €129, it might be worth it for your product application to quickly change finishes. Colimo works with a range of products as well. I realize it's still a chunk of change, especially if you are in the EU and need to pay the 23% VAT.

Apparently an GPU/OpenCL solution of the product has been started, which is probably good news for all:

http://www.thearender.com/cms/index.php/news/theas-blog.html

And Kerykythea is the free version that uses the same base engine as TheaRender.

http://www.kerkythea.net/joomla/

Hello,

You could also post a simple piece and ask for render samples, it might narrow things down a bit. I know VRay is expensive but, for example, Rich_Art puts out some seriously impressive renders with that package.

Hi Mark,

I agree with you, if I have an interested customer, I could show them an image like that and it would most likely do the job. The way I would like to work, is to create my own design like I did in Moi, then put a rendered image on my site looking pretty much like the real thing would without having to build it and sell it from the rendered image. A kind of a virtual showroom of the models I'd like to build one day. (Je suis trop vieux pour commencer à me plier aux caprices de tous et chacun et de réaliser des meubles pour lesquels j'ai aucun intérêt.)

If I can sell my work this way I'd be an happy man and if I can't, well I'd still be an happy man. I'm doing these for my pleasure only and I have plenty of models I would like to build for our home and if I can sell a few it would help pay for the things I want a bit faster.

Thanks,
Felix

You might look at Simlab composer, but I don't know how it performs with uvmapping.

It would be nice being to map textures in Moi!

Marc

Mark,

I agree it would be nice to do everthing inside Moi but I don't think Michael sees it that way and it would bring it to the same level as other programs that we started to use much less then Moi because of their complexity.

Mike, I was surprised to see an obj file without material of any kind but with named objects come in nicely in Kerky but without names in Blender. I guess we all no where to address our complaints. With lwo format, I got both the names and "styles" (materials) in Blender

OSTexo,
I think I can figure out if a program will do by looking at the features and other sell materials provided or even dowloading the trial version if it seems ok.

From what I've seen so far, I guess I'll have to be careful on how I name things and how I use styles in Moi such that I have minimal overhead sort of speak outside of Moi. If I understand what Michael is coming up with in V3, at some point, we may have a quite different way of interacting with the outside world in the future. We'll just have to be patient a little bit more.

For now, I'll keep investigating Blender Cycles, it sounds promissing and cost very little. Did I mentioned Cycles is an hybrid node based physical renderer.

Thank you all,
Felix

Carrara 3d has an excellent renderer. You can assign UV's but I don't remember how easy it is. Also there are several bargain renderers for Sketchup.

Hi Felix, like Mark mentions I'd recommend giving Simlab composer a try:

http://www.simlab-soft.com/3d-products/simlab-composer-main.aspx

It's rendering edition is $149 so it's way less in price than those full blown packages like 3DS Max, etc... and it's also a lot easier to use than those big packages.

The other one that you might want to check out is Carrara: (EDIT: somehow didn't see shaun mention that above already)
http://www.daz3d.com/i/products/carrara


> I agree it would be nice to do everthing inside Moi but I don't
> think Michael sees it that way and it would bring it to the same
> level as other programs that we started to use much less then
> Moi because of their complexity.

At some point I do want to include some basic level of rendering directly in MoI just for convenience but it has not been a high priority since there are such a large number of rendering programs out there.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

I downloaded simlab and tried loading a Moi 3dm file and it crashed, very bad for a first impression. It is supposed to read Rhino5 files, but tried an object file and it was ok at first glance. I'll have to register it otherwise it's just a file viewer basically. Anyway I'll give a serious try.

Oh! I almost forgot, would you have a suggestion for export format or should I try them all?

Thanks,
Felix

Use MoI as the mesher for simlab. OBJ.

BurrMan,

my first try didn't gave me a nice looking model even at over 300000 polys, would you have some suggestion to obtain something better?

Thanks,
Felix

Try looking at your output options for OBJ. Quads and tris help. What was wrong with the first try?

I made this with SimLab:


http://www.i386group.com/simlab/sim_pod/pod.html

At first, i used a huge poly count model (To be sure it looked smooth) A subsequent test, with a default obj export (very low poly's) looked the same...

Great!!!

Hi Felix - yeah you probably want to export an OBJ file out from MoI for going into Simlab and also it probably doesn't deal with complex n-gons very well so when doing the export set the option for "Output: Quads & Triangles" instead of "Output: N-gons" and that will probably avoid some problems.

- Michael