328 replies to this topic

[flupper1]

Renders look fantastic man. Making me jealous;) Plastics look incredible love the how the Gi is making the plastics texture illuminate I'm having the hardest time getting it right in 3drmax. That chrome on that metal post is dead on. Beautiful. Flashers look great, almost blown out in the middle like that, perfect. I need to get to work;) 

 

Plastics was quite a challenge, I have it set up like this (G5K has something similar, we discussed this some time back):

There is a separate planar prim for the decal and right above that the mesh with a glasslike shader (for Blender Cycles it almost always works to simulate the real thing as much as possible)

the down side of the planar prim for the decal is white (with just flat opacity, uniform white, a glossy shader roughness 0.2, to send back more light to the playfield)

As the base texture is a png

And next to that I added opacity based on a desaturated version of the texture, so that light areas let through more light than a dark area

The part of the shader that shows the light through the decal, is a ”translucent BSDF” shader, this has no other options, but works sort of like a refraction shader with a very high roughness

I added a glossy shader on the topside to show the texture when there is no light underneath it lit up (I used an ”Add Shader”, which is not true to life, but it needs less light intensity like that)

In this image you can see my shader nodes setup in Blender:

https://vpinball.com...ialplastic3.jpg

[bord]

Great look into your plastics process. I always fudge a bit by keeping a mix shader on the decal portion and balancing between a translucent BSDF and glossy until it looks right.

[robertms]

I always fudge a bit by keeping a mix shader on the decal portion and balancing between a translucent BSDF and glossy until it looks right.

 

Wow, no idea what any of this meant. But keep fudging with them shaders guys, the results speak for themselves    

[3rdaxis]

That's exactly what I'm trying to get right in 3dsMax. Such a pain.

 

Doing the very same thing with a separate thin geometry for the silk-screening underneath the clear plastic.

But now I'm thinking the same thing with a white translucent layer to kick the light back down to the playfield.  

 

 

Edited by 3rdaxis, 09 October 2018 - 10:07 PM.

[Ben Logan]

Bravo! You guys are killing it.

[Drybonz]

Nice to see the pros sharing notes about their respective processes.  I, also, have no idea what most of it means but it's like watching some nasa scientists huddle up to prep a really pretty spaceship.

[delt31]

looks amazing - did I missed the ETA on this?

[Fleep]

looks amazing - did I missed the ETA on this?

I don’t recall any ETA...it’s a WIP...so...



Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Drybonz]

I don't really remember seeing an ETA on any VPX tables ever.  Maybe a guy will say "this is almost done" every once in a while, but that's about it.

[Knorr]

 

Renders look fantastic man. Making me jealous;) Plastics look incredible love the how the Gi is making the plastics texture illuminate I'm having the hardest time getting it right in 3drmax. That chrome on that metal post is dead on. Beautiful. Flashers look great, almost blown out in the middle like that, perfect. I need to get to work;) 

 

Plastics was quite a challenge, I have it set up like this (G5K has something similar, we discussed this some time back):

There is a separate planar prim for the decal and right above that the mesh with a glasslike shader (for Blender Cycles it almost always works to simulate the real thing as much as possible)

the down side of the planar prim for the decal is white (with just flat opacity, uniform white, a glossy shader roughness 0.2, to send back more light to the playfield)

As the base texture is a png

And next to that I added opacity based on a desaturated version of the texture, so that light areas let through more light than a dark area

The part of the shader that shows the light through the decal, is a ”translucent BSDF” shader, this has no other options, but works sort of like a refraction shader with a very high roughness

I added a glossy shader on the topside to show the texture when there is no light underneath it lit up (I used an ”Add Shader”, which is not true to life, but it needs less light intensity like that)

In this image you can see my shader nodes setup in Blender:

https://vpinball.com...ialplastic3.jpg

 

 

Wow, sounds really complex. Since i work with corona i only have a lot of light bounce problems...., i remove the bottom polygon of a plastic, of course a base transparency/glass layer then a stagged one for the decal. The transparency/opacity shader is loaded with the alpha channnel of the decal. This gives me all control of the light which should get trough without losing the "solid" look of the decal. Since the bottom is missing in the glass shader no light is absorbed and i dont need to shoot excessive amount of light against it... In the image you can see left next to the green ball how the white spot is also lighter then the purple plastic...

 

Dont know about blender but maybe this helps others with raytracers...

 

sorry for the bad resolution, i rendered that very quickly....

 

[flupper1]

It is a hobby, so no ETA. My other tables took about a year... 

[flupper1]

@Knorr: thanks! I did a quick test (removing the bottom from the glass-like primitive), but it does not seem to give me advantages in Blender Cycles. Render time stays the same and the render noise is different but not any better. It does introduce issues around the edges of the plastic, so all in all, for me it does not improve the speed or quality unfortunately. Btw, my renders in the back of Totan (with the genie partly visible) took about 1.5 hours each (resolution 3000x2000). Not really different between GI on or GI off. I am trying to lower this.

[drickman156]

Your last renders literally left my mouth open for a good minute. Amazing stuff! I know you mentioned you don't have a render farm, but can I ask what type of hardware you are rendering on?

[flupper1]

A little more than a year ago I decided that since I work a lot with Blender, I would buy a GTX 1080 Ti when it became available. It sure was a lot of money, but I did not expect that card to become even more expensive in the cryptohype era. I just checked, and the card I have is still more expensive today then when I bought it, even though it is from may 2017.
Blender Cycles 2.79 renders fully on the GPU, so Blender benefits a lot from a fast videocard. Even so, a raytracer generates a lot of noise when rendering many small lights, so I also use the Blender denoiser:
https://docs.blender.../denoising.html

Edit: and to feed the 1080 Ti I have a core i7 with 32Gb of ram.

Edited by flupper1, 11 October 2018 - 06:53 AM.

[Schlabber34]

Could you please show the settings that you are using with the denoiser? It's hard to find the sweetspot on this one!

[flupper1]

I just use the default setting with the denoiser, if it generates too much blur/artifacts, I up the amount of samples or light path settings. My basic assumption is that the denoiser cannot fix, what is not there, so the basic rendered image needs to have a certain quality, the denoiser is only the icing on the cake. I am now experimenting with the branched path setting for the renderer, but more for reducing the render time. 

[Schlabber34]

Understood! Thanks!

[drickman156]

Cool, thanks for the info!  I have played with simple renders (not in blender, but others) and always wondered how people get a render without the noise.  

[BrandonLaw]

That light diffusion in your last render...such good!  Between what you're doing here and g5k is doing with AF...man....I can't tell these are cgi in their current renders..  The VP game is seemingly revolutionizing.  

[flupper1]

A story about the insert lighting...:

 

I have used (yet) another way of lighting the inserts on this WIP. In this post I will tell you how I did this. This is the result of the procedure below (animated gif):

 

What's new to this lighting is that there are two images involved: 

1. the playfield image which has the "insert light on" image embedded in it; the normal vpx light is put on top of this

2. a primitive flat surface 0.1 units above the playfield with the "insert light off" texture with a 60% opacity 

Now, if the insert VPX light is off, you will only see the texture on the primitive flat surface (60% opacity is opaque enough to hide the playfield underneath it). If the light is on, it is bright enough to shine through the 60% opaque primitve surface.

 

How I made this:

 

First I modelled the insert in Blender. The basic insert is modelled with correct geometry. With some modifiers in Blender it is made somewhat smoother and around the insert I put a box which simulates the insert being embedded in the playfield. With a correct material the final texture can be rendered with environment HDR lighting as the only light available:

When rendered, this is the lights off texture.

 

The same insert but then rendered with a HDR light underneath and without the enclosure generates the "lights on" texture:

 

The lights on texture combined in photoshop with the lights off texture is the final "lights on" texture to be used (right), a brightened version of the lights off texture is the final "lights off" texture (left):

 

In photoshop I then create the two texture mentioned before:

1. The playfield (lower part of the image)

2. the texture for the 60% opacity 0.1 unit above the playfield primitive (upper part of the image)

 

In the animated gif you can see full animation of the light, there are no steps like in VP9. Only two images are involved and one VPX light. I made this with Blender but I see no reason why you can not replicate this in real life, by making a photo of an actual insert, once without the insert lit up, once with the insert light on. It would require the exact same camera point of view and no over blown colors/noise/etc. If somebody wants to try this, I am happy to help get it running so send me then two photos of the same insert (one off, one light on).

 

 

And an update on modelling and rendering:

 

I reduced the render time to about an hour for this image with an increase in quality:

 

I used a variant of this technique:

http://www.ngon-para...les-noise-paper

 

This means: instead of rendering one image with 1000 samples, I rendered 10 images of the same camera view with 100 samples. These 10 images have all different noise patterns, and when combining these 10 you get better quality than with one render. I do use the denoising feature of Blender, but with reduced settings (radius: 5, feature strength and strength at 0.2).

 

I also reworked the hair of the genie, it bothered me that it was not the same as the real one. Together with some other new prims:

 

Edited by flupper1, 27 October 2018 - 01:12 PM.