Page 1 of 1

Filip Hodas-style renders in LW - Where to begin!!!

Posted: Fri Feb 19, 2016 2:06 pm
by ThomasVandenAbeele
Hi all,

I've been using LightWave 3D for 20 years now, first with the native render engine, then with fPrime and Kray, and now I've started using this wonderful new render engine Octane!

I'm having a bit of trouble starting out though. Technically I understand most of the node stuff and lighting, but I can not for the love of god see how I could go about making renders like Filip Hodas:

https://www.behance.net/gallery/3004753 ... Renders-04

I'm seeing this style of work allover Behance, and I'd love to get started doing some similar work (at a much lower level of course) to sharpen my skillset. Unfortunately I can't seem to find any tutorials for this type of work. Also, I'm really struggling to set up subsurface scattering in Octane, even reading a lot of the posts on the forum. Any LW users out there that make this type of stuff, or know how to do it, or learn doing it? All help is welcome and much appreciated!

Thanks!
Thomas

Re: Filip Hodas-style renders in LW - Where to begin!!!

Posted: Fri Feb 19, 2016 3:39 pm
by FrankPooleFloating
:? Thomas, my god man, you've had Octane for five years!... just now starting to use it?.... With the exception of just a couple HV renders that I composited into my Octane renders, I have not touched native render engine in LW since buying Octane. You have missed out on quite a lot, these five years... I'm almost a little sad for you.

Quite a broad spectrum of different styles, elements etc in his portfolio. Perhaps you should pick one image that you want to replicate, and fire away questions of how to achieve it... That is where to begin, imho.

There are definitely some things in Octane that are not straightforward, at all, like enabling Fake Shadows for Specular (water drops etc)... maybe things like this are presenting problems for you?...

Re: Filip Hodas-style renders in LW - Where to begin!!!

Posted: Fri Feb 19, 2016 5:29 pm
by ThomasVandenAbeele
Heheh, you caught me! :D Yeah, I bought the beta before version 1 a couple of years ago, but Octane was a very different (and buggy) beast back then, and our biggest need at the time was interior lighting (for Arch Viz), so Kray or V-ray was the better option at that time. Haven't really used the native LW render engine since then either, besides for some very simple jobs where the absence of tonemapping is actually a plus.

So, the past few years have been about interior lighting, and for that there is no brute force engine that even comes close to a good photon mapping engine when it comes to speed vs. quality. The last few months we're doing a lot of packaging design at our studio ( www.pinkeye.be if you're interested) and I thought "Hey, I still have this Octane license, and my new graphics card is pretty spiffy" and gave it another try. Things have changed a lot - for starters, there was no LW plugin when Octance just came out - and I'm happy to add another renderer to my toolbelt!

Good idea, I'm going to try tackling a single image an see if I can get some friendly help and advice here on the forum!

Cheers!
Thomas