19.12 2012
Pixelhunters featured in the V-ray official gallery
Pixelhunters' studio director Iliya Atanasov and his artwork called "Maldives with love" has been selected for the Chaos Group / V-ray gallery.
Chaos Group provides innovative rendering solutions for the media, entertainment, and design industries. For over a decade their flagship rendering software, V-Ray®, has set the standard for speed, quality, reliability and ease of use, and it has become the rendering engine of choice for renowned international studios.
You can see more at: http://www.chaosgroup.com/en/2/details.html?dP=5
The picture is also in the V-ray newsletter of December 2012: http://newsletters.chaosgroup.com/newsletters/preview/209
Words from the Artist:
The image was inspired by my last trip to Maldives. As they are many small islands the far away ones can be reached with the air taxi planes. From the sky I was amazed by the beauty of this place, the air is so clear that you can see far away. When is sunny you can see the small caustics, the transparency of the water, even a lot of underwater rivers and canal of the reefs. I wanted to recreate this in the 3d.
I worked with Maya for all of the modeling, objects, trees, water, bungalows.. , rendered with Vray for Maya. The clouds were made from Vue. The challenge was to render all of these millions of polygons with the usage of GI (global Illumination) and refractive caustics. I was using reference pictures, from where I can observe the colors, lighting, how the contrast and brightness is changing with the depth etc...
I started with the modeling of one house. Adding small elements, path walks, trees, pots, people, boats, flags, corals... After the whole modeling and placement was done, I started placing the lights. Vray sun and sky was used for the lighting model. Also physical camera attribute was attached to the normal camera. I chose cylinder lens distortion to make more Grande and far away angle for the shot. The vray sun (directional light) was casting the refractive caustics. Then I realized that the rendering time went way too far, so I decided to separate the scene in 2 parts: 1st is the water with the water bungalows. The second is the all the trees, huts, props over the islands. In that case I could render the 2nd part without the caustics turned on (because they didn't need them), which came out pretty fast. Later all of the rendered passes were composed together in Fusion with the sky from Vue.
