Armoire

[Dave Richards]

I applied a wood grain texture to the armoire from the demo and this is what I got. This is a quick render in Kerkythea with a single light and physical sky.

I still need to do door and drawer pulls. I'm wondering whether I should make that a tutorial similar to the rest of the armoire or if everyone's finally bored with that project.

[Joe Breid]

Dave,

Keep the good work coming.

Joe

[Dave Richards]

Thanks Joe. I decided I should add some knobs. Maybe the drawer knobs need to be moved closer to the center.

[Cecil Arnold]

That looks great Dave. Thanks for all the hard work.

[Jim Becker]

Um, Dave...the only thing missing from that dresser is the haphazarly "folded" assortment of clothing that my kids would have dripping out of the drawers! Wow! Great rendering!

[Dave Richards]

Cecil, thanks.

Jim, thank you. Funny you should mention the clothes. I was thinking this morning that I should draw some clothes hanging out of that drawer. I should probably put a mismatched pair of socks on the floor, too.

[Neil Lamens]

Hey Dave:

I take that back......YOU!! are the virtual cabinetmaker!!! That last pic with the shading and oak flooring is excellent.

Jeez, I enjoy looking at your work.......Neil

[Dave Richards]

Neil, thank you. I don't seem to be able to get anything done in my real shop but I keep turning out virtual woodworking projects. I should probably sell my real tools and invest in virtual tablsaws and routers and jointers and...

Here's the latest rendering.

[Jim Becker]

That rendering tool is amazing, Dave. The "sheen" on the floor is subtle, but evident, not just the shadows! No "virtual dust bunnies", however...

[Travis Porter]

I'm wondering whether I should make that a tutorial similar to the rest of the armoire or if everyone's finally bored with that project.

I vote yes, a tutorial would be awesome!! Changing the panel and leg colors really made a big difference in the look.

It looks quite real after all of the rendering you did. How much time did it take you?

[Dave Richards]

Jim, dust bunnies are still eluding me and my SU skills.

Travis, I'll do the tutorial on the knobs pretty soon. The rendering didn't take all that long although I'm still not sure what I'm doing with that. The last image was done this morning while we were talking. I actually cranked out about 6 renderings making minor changes between. I think the longest any of those ran was about 8 minutes. The settings only took me a few seconds and most of the time we were talking I was wandering around the house.

All the texturing was done in SU but things like the reflection on the floor and the highlights on the knobs (they aren't real evident) weregenerated by Kerkythea.

I don't understand Kerkythea well enough to do a tutorial on that.

[tim rowledge]

Dust bunnies could probably be modelled (not in SU but the rendering program) as very small clouds. Similarly I'd imagine that applying a very slight fog would give the illusion of a tiny bit of dust on the surfaces.

Once cg got really good at physical realism (which took a while; when I was an IBM Research Fellow in the early 80's we dreamt of one day having machines with the power of a very ordinary mac/pc these days) it dawned on people that we needed to add in the imperfections of the real world. That turns out to be *really* hard but I have seen startlingly good dynamic simulations of hair and cloth, constrained fluid masses (think musculature, breasts etc) and skeletal animation in recent times. Dust bunnies, woodgrain, finger smudges and brushmarks cannot be far behind :-)

[John Schreiber]

I'm not quite sure what rendering means. Clearly these are more realistic and detailed that what you can get directly out of SU, but isn't SU also rendered?

Does this just mean it's produced in a specialized rendering program?

[Dave Richards]

John, yes, to point the images from SU are rendered images. A rendering apllication though basically specializes in handling things like lights, shadows, textures, and reflections. These are the applications that create the more realistic appearance of a computer generated graphic. This sort of thing isn't really required for awWoodworker using a program like SU to create usable images but imagine you're the client and I show you an image like the last one. It conveys the feel of the piece a lot better than one of those images I posted in the demo thread. Also consider the last relative to the first of these rendered images. I think there's a good feel for how the piece could look with a combination of woods.

[Dave Richards]

Tim, take a look at this: http://img207.imageshack.us/my.php?i...dicerhqlg7.jpg The limited depth of field was geberated by K and there's fingerprint. Can dust bunnies be far behind? The fingerprint was done in SU.