Lee Greatorex Photo/3D blog

Just a couple of photos I took tonight of the new instruments the Mrs bought me!

Above: A Suling - an Indonesian bamboo flute.
Below: A Mbiri or Kalimba - Thumb piano

OK so I've recently started delving in to XSI 6.01's features (after being stubborn and sticking with 5.11 for most of my final year project) and thought I'd test the Physical Sky that was added with 6.

To start off i created a simple scene with a simple poly grid for the ground (with a Lambert material added) and a poly sphere with a very simple glass setup i created. Here is the rendertree for it;

Usually i would use a shader downloaded as xsi's presets arent very good but i thought i'd make my own so I can tweak it and learn how well the glass works when using the Physical Sky.

For those that don't know how to create a physical sky go to render mode (3 on the keyboard)>Pass>edit>initialise Sky Shader (alternatively this can be done through 'edit current pass' and adding 'physical sky' in the environment section of the pass shaders tab.

Final gathering needs to be turned on and the effect is quite impressive, I played around a little with the physical sky options (the final options i used can be seen below) and also after seeing the intensity of the light used a tone mapping lens shader on the camera (select camera>lens shaders>tone mapping)

Here is the final result;


And just to test how the glass works using Final Gathering and HDRI mapping i tested it with a simple photography of mine for the environment (instead of using physical sky in the pass shader tab> environment add 'Environment instead' and apply an image, preferably a HDR image). here are the results of that. Any Questions don't hesitate to ask :)