Cody's Skyrise Field Render

Cody’s 2014-15 Skyrise Field Render

Ultra HD (3840x2160) | Quad HD (2560x1440) | Full HD (1920x1080) | HD (1280x720)

Created using Autodesk 3ds max 2014, A&D materials and the iRay renderer

About

It’s become a bit of a thing for me to render the field each year. Obviously I used to create the animations for VEX but since then, rendering the field has become more of a personal challenge for me. The field really is a neat thing, something that people spend a lot of time thinking about and certainly something at the center of a lot of peoples attention given the size of the VEX Robotics Completion these days.

So basically every year I try to throw everything I have at a very nice still render but the story really isn’t what I do, it’s more how I do it. What special effects do I use, what’s my design goal here, etc. This year a lot of things changed with the render. So let’s talk about that.

Hello iRay

For the first time ever I finally decided to switch over to nVidia’s iRay renderer. iRay is made by the same people who made Mental Ray, but it’s a completely new renderer. The renderer has actually been around for years now, but it’s just now gotten to a point where I feel it’s workable for production.

iRay is cool for a couple of reasons, first it’s a hybrid CPU/GPU renderer. That means it can use both the CPU and GPU to get work done, which is obviously faster than just using the CPU. Now the biggest bang comes from the GPU side, but you may as well put that CPU to work as well. iRay also doesn’t seem to suffer from the light leak issues that plagued Mental Ray. For example, the lights underneath the field in this render would magically light the top side in odd places, the issue drove me utterly mad for months, but with iRay it just doesn’t happen, cool. iRay also offers a much faster preview of what something is going to look like, this is because after two or three iterations (of the 2000 used to create this image) a very close to final image is produced. It takes the other 1998 iterations for the various different rays to settle, until then the image remains noisy.

Keep It Simple, Stupid

So last year I doused the render with effects. Depth of field, volumetric lighting, etc. Yeah the picture looked cool, but those effects kind of subtracted from the usefulness of the image. I mean DOF is essentially a blur that takes detail out of the frame, I mean sure it’s pretty, but that doesn’t sound useful for a still.

So I decided to take this train in a slightly different direction this year. Simple, sweet and elegant. This render is a story of less. In fact not only did I use less effects, but I actually made the field less realistic. I went for a more stylized look, which I honestly like quite a lot.

License

Non-commercial use of this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License..

Commercial use of this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

I’ll put out top-down renders again sometime soon. They’ll be posted further down this thread.

As always feedback / questions are welcomed.

Enjoy. -Cody

Really awesome Cody! I really like the lighting effects, especially where it transitions color.

This picture set to desktop background & the Windows “Frost” theme go together very well, and looks very nice.

Excellent job!

The only thing I see missing are the usual pieces of hardware that fall from the robots during the matches. :slight_smile: Beautiful work.

This looks simply Amazing!!!
Just wow. The field looks really cool how its slightly weathered whilst still super sleek. It looks so… real in a way that other all the other pictures out there don’t. :smiley:

This is by far one of the best renders I have seen on here. Cody, you have done an amazing job again! internet hi-five

First of the top-downs is on deck, 0.8% complete.

It’ll be a 3300x2550 11x8.5" with the field angled at a 45, maintaining the .5" / 1’ ratio. I’m keeping the field skirt so that the field keeps the cool blue / red glow from underneath.

600 DPI (6600x5100) | 300 DPI (3300x2550) | 150 DPI (1650x1275)

Ultra HD (3840x2160) | Quad HD (2560x1440) | Full HD (1920x1080)

Created using Autodesk 3ds max 2014, A&D materials and the iRay renderer

Usage

This orthographic render has been designed to be printed out as an 8.5" x 11" with no margin, no bleed, no edge, in landscape orientation. When printed in this way the field will measure exactly 6" x 6" on paper giving a scale of 1/2" to 1’.

If your printer cannot print a full page without margins then it would be advisable to print this render at full scale with a crop.

When used digitally, the listed DPI of the image will translate to 2’. IE, for the 600 DPI image 600 pixels will translate to 2’.

License

Non-commercial use of this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License..

Commercial use of this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

I’ll post another version without the playing elements soon. It’s currently rendering. -Cody

Excellent render, with a top view render of the field I can start autonomous and skills planning.
Great job.

Absolutely beautiful, as always. Your field renders get better and better every year. Loving the high quality images and the beautiful red/blue lights under the field. I’m glad you enjoy doing these every year, because I know we all love seeing them.

Again, great job on these, Cody.

~Jordan

EDIT: i was wrong :stuck_out_tongue: after looking closely at a higher quality image i saw that they were two separate pieces

Amazing render! one think i just noticed was that one of the sky rise sections in the blue pile is messed up. If you look close you can see that the skinny, bottom most part of the section has the hole in it where is should closed. The hole should be in the topmost, widest part.

here is a picture:
http://puu.sh/alkgO/69bb71bff0.png
Higher quality image: [http://puu.sh/all52/bf1bf3b991.png

hope i explained this well enough :stuck_out_tongue: just nitpicking](http://puu.sh/all52/bf1bf3b991.png)

I see no problem with this. Maybe you’re not seeing the sections underneath the top ones?

yeah my edited my post said that :smiley: I didn’t see the section underneath.

I think you’re mistaken, I laid those elements out in a strange way I have to admit. The goal was to make it look like a human stacked them in a way in which they might not roll, or something like that.

Here’s a better look at that part of the field…

http://polynomic3d.com/user/smith/bluecubes.PNG

The other top-down render, without the elements has finished…

600 DPI (6600x5100) | 300 DPI (3300x2550) | 150 DPI (1650x1275)

Ultra HD (3840x2160) | Quad HD (2560x1440) | Full HD (1920x1080)

Created using Autodesk 3ds max 2014, A&D materials and the iRay renderer

Usage

This orthographic render has been designed to be printed out as an 8.5" x 11" with no margin, no bleed, no edge, in landscape orientation. When printed in this way the field will measure exactly 6" x 6" on paper giving a scale of 1/2" to 1’.

If your printer cannot print a full page without margins then it would be advisable to print this render at full scale with a crop.

When used digitally, the listed DPI of the image will translate to 2’. IE, for the 600 DPI image 600 pixels will translate to 2’.

License

Non-commercial use of this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License..

Commercial use of this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

This render is slightly different, I found that a setting I had applied enabled a more complex raytracing process that not only took substantially longer, but also produced a few barely noticeable artifacts on the last top-down render. Needless to say, I disabled said setting for this render. It was produced almost 4x faster, and if you compare the tape on each image you’ll notice that there is less noise on this render even though it went through 500 less iterations.

I may rerender the other top-down sometime, but not for now (it’s way good enough).

As always it’s been a joy to create good useful imagery for this community. Please let me know if you want other views. I’ll entertain requests that have a decent amount of demand or that make sense to me.

Also I’d love to see some of this make it to the Toss Up wiki page, I’ve modified my licensing terms this year to allow it, given that the images aren’t modified (this is mostly to stop anyone from putting their logo on my work, if that’s desired I need to be contacted). If you guys want to see that happen, please voice your opinion below. It would mean a lot to me.

For now, that’s it. -Cody

It might be useful to get a view from the driver stations so drive teams without full fields can get used to this point of view. It may also reveal a few blind spots and hard to score areas for drivers

As a team without access to a field, I second this. I have always wondered what you can’t see because of the pyramid an what the posts look like from that angle.

Higher quality image: [http://puu.sh/all52/bf1bf3b991.png

hope i explained this well enough :stuck_out_tongue: just nitpicking](http://puu.sh/all52/bf1bf3b991.png)

Yeah I thought that to begin with, had to do a double take. Once again excellent job

I haven’t noticed many visibility problems on the field except for a driver standing on the side of the station close to the skyrise and start tiles, a fully built skyrise can block some view.