Brandon Saiz vs. John Clayton...

My brother, the football coach, wrote a cool article about my AFC West Champion San Diego Super Chargers. It won't be published because he pretty much calls John Clayton an idiot. However, it's a great read if you have a team in the playoffs.

Speaking of the AFC West Champion San Diego Super Chargers (of soon to be Oceanside), what a great late season charge! I went to work Sunday night with the biggest grin on my face. No pats on the back because they're all fans of that college team, the Oakland Raiders. Aside from that, what a great game against the Broncos. That revenge was so satisfying.

Ornament Material quick tutorial...

After many hours of tweaking around in the material browser, I have finally figured out how to simulate christmas ornaments using the mental ray engine.

Using a standard materail, I set up the diffuse to black RGB(0,0,0). Specular Level:80, Glossiness: 40. Use a fresnel falloff map in the reflection with an intensity between 50 and 65. The falloff mix curve should be set up as shown below.



The second color on the falloff is set as "raytrace" map with your favorite HDR image as the background map. The first color of the falloff will be a "mix" map.

The first mix map color will be another raytrace map with the environment settings as the background map. the second mix map color should be set to whatever color you want the Christmas ornament to look like... except you'll want to drop each RGB channel by about 10 to 15.

The mix level should be set whichever way looks best. The ball on the left is set to 15. The red ball is set at 40 and the green ball is set at 50.

Setup the mental ray for final gather (set to around 40 or 50). Also, I use the Lanczos filter with pixel sampling setup at 4 min. and 16 max.

There you go. Rendering time will take a long time. You can kill the fresnel level raytrace for faster rendering times but you will lose quality. Add it to your favorite ornament model and you're done.

More 3d Logos...

America's Team

Brandon's Team

2009 Superbowl winners

Chargers 3d Logo...

I spent a lot of last week learning how to make realistic materials for 3DS Max. This image was made using a chrome-like material and a couple of high gloss materials.

It took me just a couple of hours to model. It took another hour to figure out the lighting. A couple of tweaks to the rendering engine and this is what I got. It took 4 minutes to render this one image. I also rendered a high resolution (1440 x 900) for my new desktop wallpaper. If you want one for yourself, email me.