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[Dimitri]

Well… hello everybody here… Let say that I know Albatross from its Ppmodeler times, from years ago and have said many things with Pierre from then to now… But those recent times with the adding to it a such promising renderer and a material editing system too I felt the need to be involved much more… Below I am putting some experiments I made those days with the renderer… It has a long way to go yet, no doubt, but it has all the potential to be a superb one… There is the node editing system also, which once it be learned in depth it may be a very powerful aid in manipulating the images after their rendering, in almost no time… Only the first initial renderings from those below has been done by the renderer, the second ones are modified in the node system…

Congratulations Pierre, my friend… wishes for much better things…

[Dimitri]

Here there are two other tries... The first one is rendered with some two point lights and a sky dome... simple raytracing, no GI or even area lights... The second one is a try with an area light... the difference is obvious... the shape of the object is described much better... the soft shadows suggest much more the mass of the object and give a feel of naturalness. Of course the aa settings put were a a little bit high and the render progress slow enough for me to stop the rendering The important thing was showing that the renderer is already one of a high quality, as to its abilities... The render speed is something that have to be considered yet but the general perspective is very promising indeed...

[sk2k]

Hi,

the first picture looks good. Have the object an reflective material or is it just glass?

The red object in the last picture looks very abstract.

MfG
sk2k

[Dimitri]

Sk2k sorry for the delayed response my friend... I had days to visit the forum, though very busy exploring Albatross...

The glass material is a simple glass material reflecting two panels in front of it... I mean two ambient shaded panels put towards it for suggesting some windows (it is a well known trick in studio stagings, when having reflective or refractive objects)...

Below I am putting some experiments I made with the abstract shaped vase (it is an object I have modeled a long ago and use for shading experiments)... The first render is with a simple point light, the second one with a fill light (that's to mean two lights only) and the third is made by the use of a 'light rig' which is uploaded with Albatross' so cleverly put scripts (light domes and light rigs)... It has some ten point lights around the object (one of the top of it) and one which works as the formal light source, having its intensity high so that it may produce a 'main' darker shadow... As you see the effect those light rigs produce is very artistic... One one hand they suggest some indirect lighting, on the other hand the shadows coming from around produce a feel of very suggestive painterliness... Imagine the case the lights of the ring be in different colors too...

I feel thankful to Pierre who has implemented all those practical means in the app, whenever I need to produce artistic results (further than strict photorealism)... They give immense opportunities to the user...

Photorealism is good in some cases, but it renders a scene too restrictive as to conveying a sense of dream freedom, when too strict... The needed thing is having photorealism but 'spiced' somehow, in a gentle way, so that may it convey a very suggestive feel of freedom... So that it may be, say, poetic... Making art is commenting in freedom not copying...

Btw, the second, single render is achieved by editing a simply lighted render in nodes editor... I confess that I do not know to use it well yet, but it seems that once mastered someone may have uncountable ways of achieving various results...

The first render took some 2 to 3 minutes, the second one 3 to 4, the light rigged one some 25... all in 700x700 resolution, in a single core Athlon 2.4, with some 2gb ram... The render is a little bit slow but... the results are quite promising...