[Intuition]

Since Irinikus posted the pen renders I had been waiting for time to do something tricky with SGI era rendering.

So I set out on a mission to create a scene and model, shade, lights and render it all in Maya 6.5.

I looked at a few pictures of sinks and picked a bathroom sink.

Modeled it from scratch using only Maya 6.5 tools.

Then shaded, lit, and rendered it.

There is no Global Illumination or Final Gather.

The goal was to try and make it look like a modern linear workflow physically correct energy conserving (meaning lights and materials) shader render.

So this uses no GI or Final Gather. Only a carefully balanced ambient light. You can also use the directional light to create sunlight looking shadows that start super sharp and then fall off gradually by using the light angle. I think 0.45 is correct but I ramped it up to 0.65 to make sure it came across a little bit more.

I also use reflection blurring on the tiles and it made the render time shoot up.

Sadly it is still very CGI to me because I didn't spend enough time adding imperfection scratches and details to everything.

I will upload the scene file if anyone is interested. Should have made it a tutorial. Maybe I will with another similar scene.

[Irinikus]

Very nice!

[uunix]

Wow.. that looks pretty awesome chap. Looks better than my sink at home.

[jpstewart]

I'll never figure out how you guys have the patience to painstakingly make such detailed models.  Then work out all the textures, lighting, etc.  It looks like a lot of work goes into something like that.

[Intuition]

This entire faucet, sink, and windowframe + tiles is far easier than the Irinikus' pen models.

I have been doing 3d since 1995 so the modeling part is pretty quick now.

Once you understand quad (four sided) polygon flow you can get to most shapes pretty quick. You start with very basic shapes and primitives and cut and shape them into the more complex shapes. Like the inner sink basin was a sphere that I cut in half then edge extruded a couple times out from the upper lip edges to create the top surface. Then moving the second row of polygons upwards in the back vs the front to create that back ridge that keeps the water from rolling off. Then extruded downwards from that entire edge set to create the outside of the basin and scaled the bottom inwards to match the roundness. Finally when I have that basic very blocky shape I convert it to a subdivision and it is able to smooth out and be round.

I will likely do a tutorial on how to assemble a scene like this. Showing the older school methods.

Today we have GPU render engines like Redshift that I use a lot and it makes viewing the render near realtime so you can adjust and not have to wait for renders by getting pretty good feedback right away. This kind of scene is tricky on old equipment because you have to have some insight on how you are expecting it to turn out and make small choices one at a time and test them out with low render settings otherwise your iterations will take hours to adjust lights and reflections.

I was actually surprised how well I could adapt the old tools to match a more modern workflow. Still need to find an edgeloop tool for Maya 6.5, using the older cut is much slower.

[Irinikus]

You achieved a very nice result!

---

I still need to finish up my pen model, as the piston filling mechanism still needs to be completed, I will then move on to making a nice desktop environment for it.

I may get to it sometime this weekend, but I think I need to take a break from computers for the next few days, as I’ve been working on them too much lately!

[def13]

Great mod and great render !

[Jacques]

I thought I'd found and saved an edgeloop mel script from Simplymaya, but alas I can't find it again.

[Intuition]

There was an edgeloop tool in MJ polytools. Though I noticed Highend 3d is not showing up for me today.

If I install the Maya Bonus tools with the marking menus AND the mjPolytools together it really speeds up modeling workflow.

I have the bonus tools still on My Octane and also in my mediafire ftp but need to find one good copy of mjPolytools to go with it.

Thanks for looking.

---EDIT---

Highend3D is back online. I am going to attach the mjpolytools here so I can download them to my Octane easier.

[sunray]

Very nice indead, wish I could manage to create something like that!