Welcome to Gaia! ::

click~!

from left to right,

suminja (done at our place by a friend), mechasoldier, hadyn, darkfong, penguinsuicide, and original flavor.

this has been a fun little 3d project my boyfriend and i have been doing over at mess studio, letting people come up with their own ninja texture. inspired by the custom vinyl toy culture. the 3d ninjas were done in max, the textures done in photoshop. the link below has the link for the photoshop file if anyone else is interested in making their own ninja.

here's the original thread (over at mess):
-MAKE A NINJAAAAAA

I would like to see your lighting setup if you don't mind indulging me.

I was able to recreate that nice-nice organic shadowing in truespace but it's so complex a setup that simple renders using that lighting rig are taking forever.

I need your secrets.

Here's a screenshot of the setup.



The basic setup uses photometric lights calculated with Max's radiosity solution. I used two main linear lights, which emit light in a line like a fluorescent bulb, and a skylight, which emits light in a hemisphere like the sky on a cloudy day. The linear lights are setup in sort of standard key/fill positions, with the key light at about double the intensity of the fill. They're both emitting D65White, which is a standard light bulb color. The skylight is used to give off general ambient light. Since these are physically accurate lights, I took the intensity of the skylight down to 1%, which is also emitting a pure white. The background shape is pretty self-explanatory, and is used to create that sort of studio look where a curtain is sometimes used to create a smoother transition between the floor and wall. The two linear lights are casting area shadows, which combine the accuracy of raytracing with the softness of shadow maps. They're slow to calculate, but worth it for the result.

On a more technical note, Max 8 has an option for adaptive subdivision based on lighting. Since the lighting information is based on vertices, the mesh gets subdivided where necessary to create more detail in areas where the lighting is more complex, hence the strange tesselation on the ground. I only calculated the radiosity solution to about 40% quality, because Max has a "regathering" rendering option that allows the lighting to be calculated at the pixel level at render time instead of just using the lighting information stored in the vertices

I think the whole thing takes about 12 minutes to render at that resolution, maybe 1/4 of that time to calculate the radiosity solution and 3/4 actual render time.