Cody’s 2015-16 Nothing But Net Field Renders
8K Full UHD (7680x4320) | 4K UHD (3840x2160) | Quad HD (2560x1440) | Full HD (1920x1080)
600 DPI (6600x6600) | 300 DPI (3300x3300)
600 DPI (6600x6600) | 300 DPI (3300x3300)
Created using Autodesk 3ds Max 2015, A&D materials and the nVidia iRay renderer
Rendered on an nVidia GeForce GTX 760
Click here for a directory of all sizes and renders
About
So, I actually considered not doing this again. I have a lot of other things going on but it was there, and getting to flex my 3D skills was just too exciting to pass up. I wanted to do even more, particularly I wanted to model a stadium and fill it with Vex stuff but without compensation, this is where I decided to draw the line. This is a fun thing I do because I like doing it and that kind of allowed me to keep it simple, which has lead to a kind of pristine kind of look once again.
And I really like it! It’s bold, no nonsense and super just there right? Like you can’t ignore it kind of there. A little less dreamy than last time, but more grounded I think.
Technical Challenges
As soon as I saw the new game, I knew those nets were going to be difficult to render correctly… and they were. Texturing them was easy, but what was really hard was getting them to feel like cloth. Not only did I have to gut the CAD geometry and literally tear it to pieces (cloth works on broken up meshes), but 3ds’s cloth modifier is touchy. I think I crashed max like 15 times over the couple of hours it took to get just the cloth stuff working correctly. To make matters worse, the sides had to be pinned, and create drag on the cloth as well as the diagonal pole which had to be added to the simulation as a rigid body so the cloth would collide with it. Which of course refused to work the first like 50 times, but eventually I got it all figured out, the effect was quite nice. If you look closely you’ll see that the nets aren’t flat, they sag inwards and drape over the pole a bit, adding a nice curvature to the nets.
The red carpet was interesting too. I noticed the giant red carpet while watching the worlds feed and found that it had a victory lane kind of feel to it. I liked it and decided our field model deserved the same treatment. It turned out to be impossibly small and probably barely noticeable but I busted the cloth and fur modifier and simulated a couple billion little fibers on the carpet but I honestly think I made them too small and they get hidden by the bump mapping and color variation I added to try and better sell the carpet look. Oh well for a first attempt it turned out pretty nice.
Lighting was interesting, there are ten lights in the scene, four underneath the field, three primary lights above (center, left and right), a red and blue light illuminating the starting tiles and a skylight for the environment lighting which includes my super custom lightmap which I’ve been using for a while now. This is actually less lights than I usually use, but I used them smarter this time, and I really like the results. Not sure if less lights made any difference in render time, but it kept things simple while still getting the result I wanted.
The logo, was harder to do than you might think. It’s actually kind of difficult to decal things in max. But I wanted to brand the field, because the real fields have at least some kind of writing on them. I decided to keep it clean and simple, and it turned out nice I think.
Rendering in 8K for the first time was interesting. So was seeing max use over 16GB of RAM for the first time ever. But iRay managed to do it in a reasonable-ish amount of time, so cool. For those of you that don’t know, this is 4x as many pixels as last years render, and also 4x as many pixels as the movie Avengers was displayed at in the movie theater I watched it at this last week (OK OK cinema 4K is a little different, but approximately that much and yes I know IMAX is 6K (didn’t see it in IMAX), you get the idea, much big picture, many pixels).
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Commercial use is granted provided the terms in said license are followed. And I don’t know about you but I think this would make a mighty fine banner for the game page.
Closing Thoughts
I hope these renders are useful to the community, in total this is probably about two days of work on my part. As always feedback / questions / comments / posts in general are welcomed, they make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.
Enjoy. -Cody