So I took this photo (right) and I wanted to make something in 3ds max about it. So in a couple of hours I modeled and added materials to a set of objects I made but the scene looked empty without the snow so I spent a few more hours on that. The material for the snow was excruciatingly hard and I had nowhere to begin from except my own observations but I liked this challenge so I went head-on against it and I spent the next two days refining, rendering, refining and rendering till it was just right. Credit goes to my girlfriend for pointing out that my initial snow was not that great. Tell me what you think and I hope you at least enjoy looking at it.
Nice work.
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Try to change the autoilluminated map on snow and share you shader
It’s not auto illuminated, it just ended up that way after the glow I added in photoshop.
How do I share the shader? Should I just make a list of settings and put them here?
I don’t think there’s a shader worth sharing, to mimic snow you could make any matte material and add an additional glow in post – though since snow doesn’t reflect only a slight glow is required like the original image on the right.
Also adding a displacement map or increasing the bump would’ve given the snow more of a random appearance.
Moreover, using a black and white fall off map so that your have some of the pavement showing through would’ve given you more of the look of the original. You can do this by using a composite map through the bump or displacement slot and adding a mask and use the fall off map in junction. Hope this helps
Well yes I could’ve done so much more but considering I’ve been banned form doing 3ds max let’s just say I have limited time to do this in.
Banned for 3ds max, that must be some sort of heresy lol. Who banned you?
My dad. The wondrous man decided it was a waste of time. Anyway that’s the disadvantage of being sixteen. It is a heresy… lol
Phew! for a moment I thought you was going to say your girlfriend lol. Max a waste of time (shock and horror) lol. But hey don’t give up on it. If you can’t use Max, how about using Blender? that’s free to use.
It goes beyond that. I’m banned form anything relating to digital art except games. I have the free, educational license for 3ds max so it’s not a problem but it’s the fact I can’t do ANYTHING related to it. It’s maddening.
Rather odd. I thought the logical thing to do is to promote your creativity as opposed to suppressing it. If you look it, your dads got it back to front. If your going to ban anything, ban the games and not the digital art. That said I hope you get the chance to do some more digital art at some point, especially since you have a 3ds Max license
You should download and show this to your dad. Digital art is magic shared with the world if you work in film or animation. What could be better work then that?
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1657302/combined
Just lol at the comments. I mean those all went through my mind.
Maybe he decided that there is not enough creativity to help me get anywhere. I mean he was clearly against me going to a school to study 3d animation in greater depth as well. Gotta do chemistry now and work on 3d animation myself at home. Lots of work to do but enough time to do it in too.
You know studies show that there’s no such thing as being creative enough or born to be a natural artist. 10.000hours of practice will bring everyone to a peak weather you where born with it naturally or not you everyone has the possibility to learn almost everything if they really want to.
Of course 10.000hours is depending on the person. Why do you think all doctors and stuff have to study for so long?
If you spend that time studying 3D (that would be like 6 years in total) I can guarantee you you’d be making godlike stuff :p
Anyways, I hope you get to do what you want, in the end life is to short to not do anything you don’t want to…best of luck man
*no such thing as being creative enough
Thank you! A better explanation would be why should anyone hire me when they could outsource to india or something and get what they want.
Anyway I am going to apply to at least one university for a 3d animation or graphic design course next year.
Btw could any of you suggest a good university for studying this? I mean I would LOVE to be able to study this and then do it for the rest of my life.
Well, it all depends. I attended a school in Stockholm/Sweden since I’m Swedish and to be honest…it was my worst mistake ever.
Take CG cookie for instance. You get TONS of information here to build a really good showreel. And in the end that’s what gonna count.
Other then that…the best thing is to hang around forums…post your work and get feedback, improve and post again. People are really helpful when it comes to critiqeing work. Some will be really improffesional but it doesn’t hurt to know they excist. In the end the starting point is a starting point. You won’t create ILM stuff in the begining. And probably not in the end either because you have one computer and they have a render farm with thousands. So make small stuff really good instead of trying to do big stuff average. There’s sites like this CG cookie, there’s fxPHD that are really great as well as others. Also I would suggest subscribing to a magazine like 3D world or 3D artist is really great and why not also Cinefex (I have them all). If you really want to go to a school or university look on forums what people attended before they got hired and don’t be fooled by the schools reel or the work the students to. Alot is about contacts and having a school with alot of people who got jobs in the industry is the best. I would probably suggest you look up DAVE school, I think it’s in England but look it up. As for the Indian outsource, don’t worry about it. The CG industry is not yet as keen on outsourcing because it’s alot about prestige loyalty and trust. And you gain those by close collaboration not outsourcing.
Hope that helps!
Oh yeah if you seek the knowledge on your own, to make sure you get team work experiance, take on challanges, work with small projects with people on the net and if you have a smaller real you can probably find independet movies to work on as well.
I’m really sad about it, you have to continue studying CG related stuffs !!! I started at 14 writing my 3D scenes in C++, (because there was no software at this time
)…..and now I’m here, and you see that I had the possibility to do a lot of interesting things. Show to your father my website, say to him : “Dad, this is one of the CGCookie instructor, he was studying development software at school, but his passion was 3D and VFX, so at 14 his father bought a computer to play with CG stuffs too, at 16 he started to study 1st 3d studio DOS version, and now he had a good career…”, please fight for it !!! Hope this can help, if it doesn’t help say to your father to write me a mail or to contact me on Skype, I can talk to him about CG world 