If you go to your  Adobe® Photoshop® preferences (ctrl+k) and pick the Units and Rulers tab you’ll see a box that reads Screen Resolution. You’ll more than likely, unless someone has changed it, see a 72 in the box.  You need to change the setting, one time, on each of your production monitors.

measure your screen real estate

Take out a tape measure and measure your screen, but don’t include your monitor frame. When measuring don’t measure diagonally; measure either horizontally or vertically. In my case my screen measures 20.5 inches horizontally.

Windows Screen Resolution Setting

Go to your computers display settings and choose Screen Resolution. When you choose Screen Resolution from your desktop you’ll see a box labeled Resolution. In my case my screen resolution is 1920.

Divide screen resolution by screen dimension

Divide Screen Resolution by screen dimension, in my case I get 93.658.

Paste my new Screen Resolution in

Paste the number you get by dividing your screen resolution by your horizontal viewable space, in my case I get 93.658.

The render was accomplished using V-Ray 1.50.SP5 for Autodesk® 3ds Max® Design. Post production was done using Adobe® Photoshop® CS5.

In V-Ray you have hundreds of little toggles and spinners that control your render. V-Ray uses a very advanced algorithm and I would suggest, to help maintain your sanity, to learn what all the settings do.

Below you’ll find some screen grabs of my workflow:

3ds max preference - gamma settings

V-Ray Color Mapping

 Leave “clamp output” unchecked so you can access all that 32-bit floating point pixel information in Photoshop. 

sRGB color space

V-Ray raw image file

More to come!

I make strategic decisions before I ever begin a drawing – one which is how much detail to put into it. LOD can be categorized as having minimal, moderate and maximum detail.

http://cs5.org/?p=900

Composition is one of the most misunderstood concepts in any form of artwork. It has been said that you can be the greatest painter in the world, but if you don’t know how to compose properly, your painting will fall apart and the same goes for digital art/illustrations/renders.

Like all illustrations of mine, this one started off in my head.  First I decide what would make this image special and I decide on a focal point.  These cabins are on a lake, very close to the water, and have windows and a deck facing the South.  I like to play with contrast so I typically place my camera about 45 degrees from my light source (in plan), with the focal point being in the light.  Since the cabins are on the lake facing South I know that you would see the sunrise so I took advantage of the glass on the sliding windows.  I chose the sunrise in the reflection as my focal point.

To bring the viewers eye to my focal point (composition is really about moving the viewer’s eye) I placed the boat in the foreground, pointing towards my focal point.  The boat was tipped slightly away from the camera so it wouldn’t bring so much attention to itself. I used yellow on the boat to help the viewer up into the image knowing the eye associates colors and the sunrise in the reflection is yellow too.  The focal point is also 1/3 to the left of center and about 1/3 below center, which is were the eye is naturally drawn to in an image.  I usually have my horizon lower, but I wanted at least as much blue water as blue sky (the water and sky are blue, which are complementary colors to my focal so it brings the illustration into balance).

Below are some screen grabs of my V-Ray settings: 

VFB Frame Buffer

Global Switches

Antialising

Image Sampler

Environment

Color Mapping

Camera Type

GI

Brute Force

Light Cache

Caustics

DMC

Displacement

Systems

Elements

V-Ray Camera

HDRI

Gamma

I can comfortably say that I have never used the same settings for any 2 scenes so these settings might not work for you, but it might be a good starting point. I am running a render farm with 90Gb of RAM and 24 processors so unless you have an equivalent farm these settings might be to high for you.

Below find some Photoshop CS5 post screen grabs:

(coming soon…)

Diffuses = Light

An Ambient Occlusion pass returns a gray scale image with intersecting geometry darker. This technique allows you to do some post production using layer manipulation. Revit 2011 has some built in Ambient Occlusion capabilities so be on a lookout in the next release.

The below image was created via a script and I use this technique on almost all of my work.  It gives your illustration a more realistic feel. This is also how I create the museum board stills and animation.