Captain Morgan Bottle

[itsallgoode9]

This is my first post in a REALLLLLY long time. I've been doing renderings for a package design/branding company for the past 1.5 years or so. Here's one of my most recent ones. This is 100% render.







see the FULL hi res image here:
http://img25.imageshack.us/img25/378...mpblackosr.jpg

[CathyH]

Wow, that is great. How long did it take you?

[Cupcake]

Very Good.

[MiningArt]

Excellent work, very nice.

[pixel_monkey]

That looks nice. Which software and renderer did you use?

[itsallgoode9]

Thanks for the great compliments everybody!

I am not 100% sure how long this took...i was doing this as a portfolio piece as well as an experimentation piece, therefor, I probably noodled around with it way longer than I should. When working on projects, I don't really have time to experiment with the details and new techniques, so I do that in my downtime and apply my findings to the projects in the future.


For this I used Maya and Mudbox for modeling, Photoshop and Illustrator for textures and Maxwell Render for Rendering.

If you haven't looked at Maxwell render, I HIGHLY recommend it if you're going for realism and have photography knowlege. www.maxwellrender.com

[pixel_monkey]

Nice. I've heard about the potentials of Maxwell. I wanted to learn it at one point, but I was also interested learning Vray. I'm using Mental Ray now. I've invested way too much time in that renderer to switch at this point. I'm not sure if it even worth the time and money to switch. Mental Ray does have the ability to render anything realistically if you know how...I'm just not quite there, yet.

[itsallgoode9]

I used to use Mental Ray quite a bit and it is super powerful and SOOOO completely open...open to a fault in alot of situations, really.

For my purposes (Realistic still shots), I never looked back once I started with Maxwell. The great thing about Maxwell is that the quality of your rendering is based around your knowlege of lighting....not whether or not you know how to set the photon rays correctly to get the DGS dielectric shader to look correct or whatever technical settings are needed. Maxwell is setup in a way that it uses no shortcuts when calculating light and its interactions. (Final Gather, Radiosity and Global Illumination are all shortcuts in algorithims).

This can be good or bad depending on your needs. If you know photography, then I would highly recommend checking out maxwell...it really is quick to learn since it's pretty non-technical for the most part.

I attached some samples tests that were done which show how Maxwell works in relation to real world, in terms of settings and usability. notice no photon settings or sampling settings or anythign like that.

[pixel_monkey]

That looks interesting. I know what you mean. Mental Ray is very powerful, but there are times you can tweak to death and it still won't look the way you want it to look. It can be very frustrating at times.