by admin on November 19, 2009
Magazine editors love white! Paper is white, so anything on a white background will blend seemlessly into the contents. There is nothing more versatile than a simple object or scene surrounded by some white space.
For stock photographers it is a significant effort to shoot perfect pictures of isolated objects. They need expensive equipment and much experience in setting up the studio lights. Some photographers try to avoid this tedious work and try to isolate their objects with Photoshop. But this is not easy either. Badly done Photoshop isolations are daily fare for reviewrs on microstock sites.
Rendered 3D computer graphics has got a defintive advantage over photography here. You have to setup your basic white scene only once, and then you can put anything into it you want. Possibilities are virtually unlimited, but 3D designers have a different problem to solve: If you want to render something, you obviously need a model.
Depending on your skills and personal preferences, you can either model the object yourself or try to get hold of a model that somebody else designed. There are countless websites where you can buy commercial models, but there are also plenty of possibilities to get free models that can even be legally used in a commerial environment.
But as nice and useful isolated objects may be, there are so many other things that can be done with computer graphics, that it would be a shame just to rely on them. I think most photographers couldn’t imagine just to shoot isolated objects and nothing else. And as far as I am concerned, I feel much the same. I regard the isolations as bread and butter work, but it’s always better to have some ham or jam with it!
by admin on November 18, 2009
A valuable tool for creating impressive pictures for mircostock is DOF (Depth Of Field). By simulating the effects of a normal camera you can add that extra bit of realism to your pictures that make them stand out from the rest.
The impression can be intensified when the subject of the pictures itself is not realistic. My example picture shows a fantasy model of a virus which I created right at the beginning of the swine flue craze.
The use of DOF gives the impression of a look through a microscope into a drop of a virus infested liquid. Using green colors for the picture is essential for the potential to sell. In nature, green is the symbol for a healthy environment. But as far as the human body is concerned, green symbolises sickness and decay. This is simply becasue there is nothing green in an on the human body unless we are really very ill. So a green coloring transports the message of the dangerous threat from viruses better than for example red.
How to Set Up Depth of Field in Vue
DOF is turned on in Vue by setting the “Blur” value in the camera options box to a non-zero value.
It is impor
tant to set the focal point of the camera where you want to have the focus on your picture. You can either set it by changing the focal distance in the camera options box, or you can klick on the tiny square at the tip of the line that sticks out from the center of the camera symbol and drag it to the focal point.
Make sure your render options include depth of field rendering. But be warned that rendering pictures with depth of field takes a lot longer than without. Generally, the result will justify the longer rendering time, but when you combine DOF with other time consuming featurs like volumetric clouds, radiosity and materials with subsurface scattering, your picture can take days to complete, if you don’t own a render farm.
by admin on November 16, 2009
Vue comes with a sample scene called “Product Showcase”. This is just a simple basic scene with a white floor and a white sky with a Ferrari racing car. e-on Software included this scene to provide you with a generic setting where you can do sample render of objects or plants that you created in order to sell them or give them away.
Of course you can also use this sample scene to render anything you want if you need a white background.
Floor reflections
The writing is a standard text object. I chose “Eurostile Bold” with rounded bevel and 2.5 extrusion. The floor is slightly reflective, but the reflections look better if the reflectivity is increased a bit. The floor material is transparent with the “Turn reflective with angle” option checked. This is used to simulate some kind of milky glass. Here is the trick: Increasing the “Global transparency” value will increase reflectivity. This is something not very obvious for those not familiar with the physical laws of reflection and refraction.
Text Material
First, the surface of the text object will get a slight shinyness:
The coloring is done with the formula editor inside the material editor. What makes the coloring special is that there is a gradual color change across the whole object. For this to work, you need the AdvancedGraph module or a version of Vue where it is included. To bring up the function editor, choose the “Color & Alpha” tab, right klick on the “Color production” preview and select “Edit Function”
The x value of the “Position on Picture” input node is used to select a color from the default rainbow color map. This colors each pixel of the object according to its x coordnate on the final picture. The multiplier is used to squeeze the gradient a little because there is a bit of margin left and right of text object. Here I used a value of 1.17 for the multiplier.
This is just a fairly simple demonstration what a powerful tool the combination of the function editor with the material editor can be.
Download the Rainbow Material
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download: Rainbow Material for Vue (6.56KB)
added: 16/11/2009
clicks: 106
description: Colors an object according to its x coordinate on the final picture
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