CompuServe Messages

Here ya go…… Hi all, While I was at Siggraph, a number of folks came up to me and told me that, in their experience, the 3DS renderer looked a little "plasticy" and "flat" to them. After I showed them the demo reel, however, they were shocked at how so much of the new work doesn't have that look. Instead of just sending them away with a "you go figure it out", I spent some time with them trying to discover what they might be doing with their materials and lighting that would give their work a flat or plasticy look. Lo and behold, we figured out one extremely important Medit issue that apparently is not being understood well enough. The common factor between these folks' work was that, when they made materials, they locked the Ambient to the Diffuse color so that they were both the same. BIG MISTAKE. When you do that, you're depending 100% on the lighting to create the range between the diffuse and ambient components. And no matter how well you light the scene, that range just won't be large enough to provide the dynamics necessary to make an image look "deep". There are two techniques that you should always use to set your ambient component. 1) Make the ambient a much darker version of the diffuse. Use the same Hue and Saturation… just a different Luma. 2) Make the ambient a complimentary color of the diffuse. This is the Maxfield Parrish effect, and it can be used in many beautiful ways. So please, people… Go into your material libraries, follow the above two rules, and bring some more depth to your work! – G PS: Don't ask why most of the materials in the shipping 3ds.mli have locked ambient/diffuse. I could kick myself for that. (sorry)