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Honest opinion of Digital Content Creator, 3D Artist and CG Generalist, about how good a regular 4K TV is for professional CG purposes. Conclusions based on 4 years of experience using TV as PC monitor for 3D modeling, 3D rendering, video and image editing, reading and programing. Contains a step-by-step guide on how to make a smart choice of 4K TV for graphic design. You will be able to understand a theory underlying the following record: 4K @ 60Hz @ Y′CBCR 4:4:4 @ 8-bpc and much more.
How to create so-called equirectangular or simply the spherical interactive 360 panoramas using 3ds Max and V-Ray. How to render, assemble and view them later. If you use other 3D rendering software, such as Blender, Cinema 4D, Maya, SketchUp or even CAD, this tutorial will still be useful to you, as 3ds Max is used as an example and the methodology for rendering and assembling a spherical panoramas is quite universal.
Free high-performance secure and easy-to-use online viewer for 360° spherical panoramas. It works directly from the page and leverages the power of WebGL engine built into all modern browsers. No additional plug-ins required. Simply drag and drop the panoramic image with an equirectangular projection directly into the viewer rectangle on a page, and it will instantly prepare and show you a ready-made panorama, which you can rotate, zoom in and out, go in full screen. The panorama viewer software runs only in your browser and works offline (server independent), the images you use remain completely confidential.
What is HDRI and how it differs from LDRI. How to visualize, store and edit HDR images. What are the advantages of using 32-bit formats over standard 8-bit. How to deal with overexposure or underexposure of 3D visualization only with post-production tools, without having to re-adjust scene lighting and re-render whole image again. How to fine-tune brightness and contrast in a very deep range of an already rendered image directly in a 2D editor without losing any details.
What is Ray casting and why data organizing into BSP tree speeds up rendering. Why 3D visualization requires a lot of memory. Why a memory allocation failure causes V-Ray crash, and how to prevent it by not buying extra RAM, but using a batch geometry loading technique, to render heavy scenes. What's the difference between static and dynamic geometry types for mesh objects. Why dynamic raycaster slows down rendering and how to define dynamic memory limit.
Balancing visualization speed and quality with just a few global settings. An explanation of what DMC Sampler is, its deterministic nature during blurred effects sampling, and how it affects rendering accuracy. What is the samples difference threshold and why does adaptive renderer utilize an early termination technique to stop the sampling process. How to speed up rendering and visualize drafts without having to adjust each effect individually.
A final overview (based on three previous tutorials) of pros and cons of GI engines available in V-Ray with accompany GI artifacts explained. You will learn why Irradiance Map is a great default choice for Primary bounces, Light Cache for the Secondary bounces and what are the benefits this GI Engine's have from working together. As well as justification for not using Brute force without need. You will also understand how to avoid noise and blotchiness of GI.
Photon map and Light cache GI Engine's review. It explains their limitations and advantages. Here you will learn what Light cache cells are and what they look like on clear examples. How Light cache stores direct light and calculates diffuse reflections. Why do Light cache need filters and what's the difference between pre-filtering and filtering? And of course, tutorial will explain an optimal settings for fast and realistic rendering with Light cache.
An detailed explanation of how adaptive (biased) Irradiance map GI engine works and its advantage over unbiased Brute force. Here you will see exactly how IM samples cloud look like in three-dimensional space and it view-dependant nature. How it is built using different resolution pre-passes and how to control their resolution with Min rate: and Max rate: parameters. What should be the optimal values for fast, clear and detailed renderings.
The difference between direct and indirect illumination is explained. It will give you an understanding of global illumination nature and its role in computer graphics. It will show what is hemispherical diffuse reflection of light and the phenomenon of colored bleeding. What are primary and secondary bounces and why realistic 3D rendering requires special GI engines. How secondary lighting affects overall brightness of rendered images.
The biggest secret of V-Ray 3D renderer is revealed: are there such things as universal settings for photorealistic visualization of interiors, exteriors or for the studio rendering? It will recommend specific values for better visual results. Explain the general concept of anti-aliasing and how V-Ray deals with the aliasing - unwanted phenomenon for any 3d renderer. It will also help you understand what is the color mapping in rendering process and how you can control it.
4K PBR seamless texture set of heavily cut wooden surface. The set consists of Diffuse, Glossiness, Roughness, Specular and Normal maps. Diffuse map is created by scanning a real life kitchen cutting board, which is literally used to chop vegetables in a real kitchen. Scanning of the original texture was performed using a high-precision flatbed scanner with a high resolution setting. Later, the original scanned texture of resolution over 20k pixels was color corrected, made seamless in a square proportion, and the resolution was shrunk to an optimal size of 4K. All other PBR maps are manually reproduced from the the diffuse texture. The last tweaks on the textures were made on material in calibrated studio lighting. You can see the final visualization of material, created using only this set of PBR textures, in this 2D asset details down below.