Phobya water-cooled case design thread - Stage 1 - Complete - see Stage 2 thread

+1 well said

cant wait to see all the designs also.

@combatus - wow! didnt realise there were that many entries! good luck sorting that lot out
hope you got some energy drinks!!!

on a side note - Bit Tech needs an energy drink sponser lol my choice is 'Relentless'

it's goodbye to the shortcuts, hello to the grind, nobody ever said it would be an easy ride. suffer for your art

 

i have enterd too

i have send you an email

my final is on page 16 =)

 

I have sent a desgin could maybe check again ?
the email subject is Phobya water-cooled case design - Stage 1
thanks danitgeek

 

it's me) should i send e-mail too?

 

Well I can assure you that you don't have to worry about that!

 

You either, I imagine. Just means having to worry about stuff to do for stage 2 instead

 

I have emailed and posted my entry

 

I see it this way, that stage 2 is for playing around with design-thingies, like window-shapes, colours, lighting etc...

And stage 3 will be a HDRI-render-contest ofc

 

Partially agree...
But I figure it this way...

Stage 2:
* Finalizing details on cosmetics for the case
* Reviews for manufacturing requirements and tolerances.

Stage 3:
* HDRI Render contest.... And this is where I'd have to give you the advantage jrs77.... I also used C4D for my initial renders, but unfortunately my level of experience with C4D lighting is so limited that I can't get my renders to look half as good as yours... Not even used pre-build lighting studios by GSG. I guess texturing/lighting/rendering are not my strong points. I can push and pull polygons with the best of them, but giving my creations some sense of color and reality just escapes me; they either looked washed out or plastiky.


Anyway...
Good luck to all entrants... I hope to make it through stage 2 to continue with the fun. Just afraid there are some designs out there that are more advanced/original than what I came up with.

Sebastian

 

Yeah thats what I'm thinking too.

If we wanted to add a little bit of fairness we could try and have all the cases rendered in the same environments and/or views? Or if you wanted to go even further and have one person render them all. It would be fun to see a rendering of all the cases lined up too!

 

I have some nice lighting studios/setups for C4D that in knowing hands could produce good renders... I just don't have enough knowledge to be able to take them further than the default settings...
As for one person doing all the renders... I don't know... I tried a "beauty" render of my design last night and it was going on 20 mins before I stopped it because I saw a part that wasn't looking good (washed out)...
If you're all like me, it would take at least 10 or 20 render tests to get to one that I'd be willing to show publicly and that can start to take time.... Unless someone here has access to a render farm.

 

Thats true, I tend to be very picky about my renders and now that I think about it Im not sure I would trust someone else .

I use PhotoView, it isn't the best rendering program out there but its not bad. I think if we all had to use the same environment, views and floor (lighting maybe but that could be hard to reproduce in different programs) it would at least put us all on a more even playing field.

 

Rendering contest? Not a problem for me but it'd be kind of unfair for people that have good designs and ideas but don't have the software or knowledge to make good renders :/

 

I like your idea of one person -preferrably someoneone from Phobya or designed by them- doing all the renders and using the same views for everyone

 

I wish I knew how to use SolidWorks.... It would have made design of the case so much easier... SKU is good and all, but there are aspects of it that piss me off some times... Like the fact that the damn thing is hell bent on snapping to the nearest end point instead of letting me place what I need to place where I need to place it (It's ok... just a matter of zooming further in and problem solved, but still).

I think standard views would be ok... Floor and room setups, not so easy since people have different software they use... But in reality; if this ends up being a beauty contest where the best HDRI renders are going to take the win; none of this will matter since it will all come down to skill - not modeling or designing skills, but lighting skills and those are the hardest to master of the whole 3d/CAD world...
I have C4D with AR3 and a number of very good lighting studios from Greyscalegorilla and still can't manage produce renders that don't end up looking like plastic toys...
In the 3D world it is ALL in how good you are at lighting.... I can get all the metallic shaders for C4D that you can think off, but I still can't figure out how to make them look realistic when rendering them out.

I just hope this doesn't turn into a beauty contest; only because I know I'd be out then.

 

@ xXSebaSXx:

I'm using SketchUp + V-Ray so far. C4D was too expensive, so I didn't buy a retail-copy of it.
I was working with C4D before in the agency tho, and I'd like to have it at home now too, as it renders way faster then V-Ray.
Modelling some easy shapes like PC-cases is easier and faster done in SketchUp, so I guess SU + V-Ray is a rather good way in the middle.

 

Rendering good-looking metals as you say is all about reflections, specially "hilights". Get some good "chrome" HDRIs or make them yourself, they even don't have to be HDRIs as you can pump up the brightest parts of the image in rendering software (at least in 3dsmax, which I use). Also rectangular boxlights -that can be your actual lights or just pure-white objects- can get you good looking reflections as long as the angle of the view makes them appear in the object of course. Now another thing, many times we use a big white floor for the scene, so that ends up meaning that the object ends up reflecting that uninteresting white area, in some views it isn't very problematic but in others it results in the metal object showing just some crappy gray color, which looks bad (although it'd be physically realistic). To avoid this you can either use an interesting floor, or make the floor be ignored by the reflections, that way your object reflects interesting lights and patterns in all directions

 

@ jrs77

I could have sworn you were using C4D for your renders... those white renders you posted in the early stages of your design looked exactly lilke what a "clay render" would look like from C4D with some minor tweaks.

The one thing that I like about the C4D internal renderer (AR3) is rather quick and, in the right hands, can produce photo realistic renders in rather quick times... I'm just not lucky to be one of the ones that know how to make it do that kind of stuff. I've never tried VRay, but all I've seen on it points to it being the defacto renderer for high quality production in the 3D world.

@ geort45
I understand the concept of how to "light" models with HDRIs and even some plain white boxes... It's the small intricacies of it like luminance, radiosity, stochastic sampling and all those other settings that escape me at the moment.

 

Ok so here is my very first animation with SolidWorks and Photoview 2011. Its only 6 seconds and not very high quality but as a test I am quite happy.

 

wow, how long does that take to render?