Lowfi Video Design

Good web design plays a crucial role in a good website that attracts many visitors. There are some elements that are to be added in the good web site. Some elements are interface design, layout, accessibility design and navigation design. These attributes must be there in the good website. It is high time that you need to compare these things with your website. You may miss certain things in your website. The first and foremost thing in creating the website is making the appearance of your website to be pleasant to the visitors. Color and font plays a major role in the good web design. Choose the pleasant color for your website. Your color should be the receptionist for your website. Choose the font so that it won’t confuse the reader. The size of the font must be in the range of 10 – 12 for visitors to read. Home page tells the entire story about your site. So it is better to choose the good web design for your site.

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In this internet world everything is done online, booking, purchasing and possible to access even other sort of services. Websites are the bridges between consumer and service provider. The look of websites is the face of the respective business. Good web design is the only way to reach the targeted audience and to impress the internet surfers. A good website can be identified through few characteristics. First thing is quality content, the content should give up to date information to the visitor. The pages should be focused to particular concept. Theme also plays very important role in attracting the visitor. Proper navigations and user friendly quality make the visitor to browse the website further. Unwanted and unexpected music, sounds may make the visitor to close the website immediately. Too much of advertisements and other pop ups diverts the reader from your theme of website. Above all, unreadable texts and illegible fonts would convey the information and message of yours to the reader. Hence these mistakes lead to bad website design.

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This short tutorial has been written for 3ds max and vray users, but most probably you can easily “translate” the workflow in your favorite 3d software programs.

Everybody knows that when using indirect illumination (GI), the color of the materials in a scene affects other objects as well, due to the light that “borrows” color information from a surface after having “bounced” from it.
Although it is normal and happens in real life as well, sometimes the bounced light is affecting the scene too much and it doesn’t look right.
The most common situations when this happens is when you have a wooden floor and the color ceiling and the walls becomes too red/orange (like in the example bellow).

If you use “linear workflow” that is less likely to happen, but if the deadline is knocking on your door, you need a quick way to adjust it and not lose time trying to find ways to do it directly from the render ( and completely change your workflow).

Here is a quick solution that can prove useful in situations when time is a major factor:
Make the material of the wall and ceiling a vraymtl wrapper, keeping the base material as it was.
Under “alpha contribution” type “-1”, hit render and save the resulting rendering as a tiff with alpha channel.

Open the rendering in photoshop, click on “select”, choose “load selection” and choose “alpha 1”. Now invert the selection, and you will end up with the selection of the walls and ceiling (which are the elements that are affected too much by the light bounced from the wooden floor).

With the selection active, use the hue/saturation slider from “image”, “adjustments” drop down menu until you obtain a desirable result. You can also use brightness and contrasts or level adjustments if you feel necessary.

Bellow is the result I achieved following the steps shown above.

Although this tutorial is aimed particularly at de-saturating colors on some elements of the scene, the same method can be applied in order to color correction adjustments on any particular materials you need, by making separate alpha channels for those specific materials and adjust the color and saturation from photoshop.

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I have written this tutorial following a suggestion coming from jackieteh, a frequent reader of this blog. If you have any suggestions regarding what I should write about, feel free to post a suggestion,

There are several ways to prepare a tileable texture starting from photos, but from my experience the method that I’m going to show you will work in 99% of the cases.

Preparation
Regardless of what method you will chose to create your tileable texture, there are some things that you need to keep in mind.
-the first advice that I give you is that if you have the chance to take the photos yourself,  DO IT!
-when taking the photo of the material sample, try to place the camera as perpendicular as possible, so you won’t have to work more later on it to correct the verticals.
-the light must be as uniform as possible over the entire surface of the sample. Avoid highlights or shadows because these are difficult to remove.
-if the material that you need to prepare is reflective, try to avoid placing it close to objects that might cast a reflection on it. This can be quite difficult, but try to do your best because it’s really important.

Making the texture tileable.
Here is the image that I started with (click on it to view a higher res version).

Open the photo in photoshop, click on “Filter”, “other”, and “offset”.

In the fields next to “horizontal” and “vertical” type a positive value equal to half of the dimension of the photo. For example, if your photo has a dimension of 900×900, make an offset of +450 on both dimensions.

If you take a close look, you will notice that there is a visible separation both on vertical middle and horizontal middle of the image

This can be adjusted easily using the clone stamp tool, with various parameters under “hardness” and “master diameter”.
Here is the final result (click on the image to view a higher resolution texture)

Although this tutorial has been written especially for 3d artists, I think it can be useful for webdesigners and graphic designers in general, that need to create seamless textures for backgrounds, wallpapers or other similar stuff.

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If you are one of the loyal readers, you most probably already know that I keep this blog as hobby, and whenever I have some spare time, I write a tutorial related to cg, or post some free 3d model.

As you have noticed by reading the “about the author” page, I run a studio that provides architectural renderings, and I have been doing this since 2004.

For about 4 years the design of the website has remained unchanged. Although at the beginning it was ok for what we needed, within time we found out that it was quite difficult to update it, due to the fact that the portfolio section was based on flash. Furthermore, with the browsers evolving so fast, we have noticed that some latest versions weren’t showing the content properly. So it was definitely time for a change.

We have therefore decided to skip all the bells and whistles (flash animations, intro, etc.) and go for a wordpress based platform. We intend to keep it like this for a while and see what kind of feedback we receive, and think about a re-design in a few months if we consider it necessary.

I would appreciate it very much if you could let me know what you think about it (from the navigation point of view, design, color scheme, and the renderings shown in the portfolio section).

Bellow are a few examples of renderings, that are directly linked to the appropiate category of our site.

Photomontage Renderings

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For some time I’ve been experiencing a lot of problems with 3ds max design 2009; 8 out of 10 times when I was panning or zooming, max was crashing and I was losing more time waiting for it to restart than I was spending on the actual work.

The first thing that crossed my mind was that it might have been a hardware problem; either the ram memory or the video card. However, it couldn’t have been a hardware malfunction since I had the same problem with all the 5 workstations (identical configurations) in our office. I have updated the drivers with the latest versions, but nothing seemed to solve the problem.

Today when I was talking to a friend of mine this subject came up and he told me that he had been having the same problem, but unlike me he managed to solve it. Apparently it all had to do with the “view cube” and after disabling it, max doesn’t crash every 15 seconds.
I checked this out first thing when I got back to the office, and to my surprise, it did the trick.

Therefore if you are using 3ds max 2009 and the software crashes when zooming or panning in the viewports, than the solution to your problem is to disable the viewcube.
You can do this by renaming the file called “AutoCamMax.gup” located in “program files, autodesk, 3ds max 2009, stdplugs”. (You can delete it as well, but just in case for some reason you decide you want this back, renaming it is the way to go).

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Brief introduction
Depth of field can prove to be a very effective way to add a “special” touch to an architectural rendering, or simply to focus the composition on a specific element.

Technically speaking, there are several possibilities to add dof to an image.
One way to do this is to add it from the vray camera rollout (if you are using vray), but keep in mind that the rendering times can go through the roof, so unless you have a render farm you may not want to consider this option.

Another way to achieve this type of effect is by adding it from the “effects” tab in 3d max. Even if this is way faster (being just a post-processing effect) I always feel the need to have more control over it regardless of the camera position or direction.

Rendering a separate zdepth pass
So here’s the way I do it.
Under “Render Elements” click “add” and choose “vrayZdepth” (if you not with vray you can chose Zdepth instead of vray z depth, or the equivalent of your rendering software).

After hitting “render” you will notice that you end up with 2 rendered images, the main image and another one in gray scale. If you look closer at the gray scale rendering you realize that objects that are close to the camera are light gray, and they get darker as the distance between them and the camera increases.

Post processing the zdepth pass
Open both renderings in photoshop.
Select the main rendering and duplicate the “background” layer. With the newly created layer active, click on “layer” drop down menu (at the top, between “select” and “image”), click “layer mask” and select “reveal all”.

Select the grayscale rendering and invert it (image>adjustments>invert). Now using the “rectangular marquee tool” drag a selection over the entire image than press “ctrl+c” in order to copy it to the clipboard.

Select the first image again and click the “channels” tab. Activate the previously created mask (under RGB, red, green and blue channels) and press “ctrl+v” in order to copy the zdepth mask.

Click the “layers” tab and select “background copy” layer to make sure you have the layer itself activated (and not the mask).

Go to “filters” and apply a lens blur filter.
As you will notice, thanks to the zdepth mask, the lens blur is affecting more the objects that are further away, and has less effect to the ones closer to the camera.

The big advantage of using this method is that you can control the depth of field anyway you want, simply by editing (painting) the zdepth rendered pass.
Here are 2 examples that show the flexibility of this method.
Click the renderings to view higher res ones:

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UVW mapping a 3d model can be either very easy or very difficult, depending on the complexity of the 3d model and the final purpose of the computer generated image. If you have basic knowledge of texturing you know that if you have a “box like” model you apply a uvw map modifier with a box gizmo, for a bowling ball a spherical gizmo and so on…
But what happens if a client sends you a sample of a wood texture and ask you to apply that on a furniture element? One way to do it is to use tilling, but in order to do it correctly (keep the real dimensions) you need to do quite a few calculations to see how many times that texture should be tiled horizontally and vertically.

Fortunately there is another way to do it by using “real world scale” and that is the process I will try to explain in the following tutorial.

Download the 3d model
Download the wood textures that you will apply on the model

Before you begin, make sure that you have set your units to centimeters (or the units that you usually work with, except “generic units”) As you will see, for this type of approach to uvw mapping, the units are very important.

The model that we will be working with, will be mapped with 2 different materials, so the first step is to select the polygons that will have one of the textures assigned to it and set an id like in the pictures bellow.

With the selection still active, click on “edit”, “select invert” and you will end up with the other polygons selected; under “set material id”, type “2” in order to assign a new id to the second material.

At this moment you have the material ids set, so whenever you need to select the polygons that correspond to a specific material just click on “select id” and type the number that corresponds to the desired material.

http://www.cgdigest.com/material-settings/uvwmap/uvw.rar

Open the material editor, and assign a material for each of the polygon selection sets of your model.
Select the material slot of the first material that you want to work with and apply a checker map in the diffuse slot.
Under “coordinates” rollout make sure you check “Use Real World Scale” and type in the desired dimensions of your texture (in this case 5cm x 5cm).

Now apply a uvw map modifier to the object, select “box” and check “real world map size”. As you can see, every square of the pattern has 2.5 x 2.5 centimeters (the checker map is 2×2 squares with 5×5cm dimensions)

At this point, you can replace the checker map (that was just a placeholder to understand better how real world scale uvw works) with a desired wood texture, in this case a red oak. The important thing is to know exactly the size of the photo sample. This one is 35×52 cm, so you just need to type this dimensions in under the “size” parameter of the texture.

Click the image to view a higher resolution picture

Since we have completed uvw mapping the first material on our model, we can start working on the other one. In the diffuse channel select the desired texture, check “use real world scale” and type the dimensions like you did for the previous one.

As you can see from the photo above, the grain of the texture of the second material is vertical and you probably want it to be horizontal. The first thing that may cross your mind would probably be to change the axis of the uvw gizmo from “z” to “x”. This is only partially correct because even if it places the new texture correctly, it messes up the old one.

What you need to do is to collapse the uvw mapping modifier, select the polygons that correspond to the material you need to tweak and with the selection active, add a new uvw mapping modifier. By keeping the selection active, the new uvw mapping material will affect only the selected polygons.
Click again on real world map size and change the axis from “z” to “x”.

Click the image to view a higher res rendering

That’s about it; if you need to add more materials, just repeat the last steps; collapse the stack, selected again the polygons that you want to correspond to a new material, and add a uvw mapping modifier with the new selection set active.

If you have any questions feel free to ask.

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