Rug

Hi everyone, I’m Alex :slight_smile:

I’m working on something more simple than usual that shouldn’t need much feedback. It’s just a rug. I want this rug looking as realistic as possible as I intent to make a tutorial on the creation of rugs by the end of the week.

Just curious to see if you can spot anything. Please click on the image to see a full picture as the preview looks terrible:


(200,000 particles rendered in cycles.)

Things I’m not sure about:

  • Lighting (specifically the shadow the in the middle. I’m not sure if it really works or not)
  • Amount of particles
  • Length of particles
  • ‘CG’ look of the rug
  • Blown out look of the white colour in the texture

I agree about the amount of particles: there seem not to be enough of them !
I ran into that same problem my self and came to the conclusion that the limit of 200 000 is too low… At places it is possible to see the “bedding” (I don’t know the name: I mean the coat of material on which the hairs are glued)

It’s refreshing to see something different than a shag rug! I agree with Gwenouille, it definitely needs more particles. It would be interesting to see your set up on this project. Curiosity has me on how you did the pattern.

Thanks guys, I’ll get on to fixing it now :slight_smile:
Also, the pattern was just an image texture I made in Adobe Photoshop using only circles and the paint bucket tool :wink:

Here’s the latest!

Thanks for the feedback :slight_smile:


(1,000,000 particles, 250 samples, 32m 24s to render)

Changes include:

  • Lighting made less intense
  • Removed the annoying shadow
  • Particle thickness changed
  • 1,000,000 particles now being rendered

One other thing I’m now concerned about is the lack of imperfections in the rug. At the moment, the rug is just a 4-vertex elongated plane. Should I run a quick cloth simulation to get a few subtle waves and bumps in the rug or should I just leave it? I just think it’s too physically perfect to be realistic.

Thanks for all the help, if you spot anything that could do with improvements then please do share :slight_smile: I’d also like you to be as harsh as possible.

-Alex

Wow… that made a huge difference, in some ways the shadow, helped in the photo realism I think. It couldn’t hurt to try running a cloth sim or even just a little proportional editing.

Something possibly to consider is how many rugs do you see sitting in the middle of a large open floor? I wonder if you had a piece of furniture behind it or even a door, how it might change the scene. But you probably would have to move your light source in a different direction.

I intend to put this in a scene soon but for the moment I’d rather make sure the rug looks like a realistic rug. Nothing else in the scene is important at this time (other than maybe the floor as that is also going to be in the scene at the end)

I think I’ll leave playing around with the lighting for the final scene but I’ll definately run a few cloth sims to see if they make a more realistic looking image.

Thanks for the guidance :slight_smile:
-Alex

Okay so here’s the latest render.

I played around with the scene a little bit by adding in some walls and re-introducing some shadows. I also changed the scale of the scene. Originally I wasn’t bothered about the size of things, just as long as they were proportional but to cut down on render times I made everything to a realistic scale which meant I didn’t need as much particles so I chopped 10 minutes off the render time :slight_smile:


I am still yet to run a cloth simulation for the moment.

Here’s a list of every change made (from memory):

  • Sun lamp strength, angle and shadow size changed
  • Added walls with holes for windows
  • Made everything smaller and gave them realistic measurements in meters
  • Reduced number of particles to 350,000
  • Applied scale to rug
  • Adjusted brownian factor

Still to do:

  • Run rug through a cloth simulation
  • Remove all Caustic Noise

I really do think the shadows add alot to this render, but I think you should rethink your decision on lowering the particles… an additional 10 minutes of render time isn’t very much at all on a still render, I can see a pretty big difference from the 1 million render and 350K. Now if your planning on animating this, in some fashion, that would be a different story and saving 10 min per frame would be huge.

I’ll play around with the particles but there is a definate difference between the 1M and 350k renders but a lot of that would be down to the change in the brownian level. I’ll take a few more looks but I realised that there was absolutely no difference to the render until around the 500k level and 350 was tolerable. I’d also like to keep the rug animation friendly for two reasons:

  1. I intend to use it as an asset it my other projects (some of which will be animations)
  2. If I make a tutorial on the rug then it needs to be animation friendly because the viewer could use it in an animation of their own.

Maybe you can use a displace modifier on the floor so it doesn’t look so boring. The change would be subtle but it could enhance the picture to have little crevices between the wood planks. Other than that, I think this is amazing!

I’ve already got crevices in the planks :smiley:

I see them now :smiley: I was just not looking close enough. Good Job!

Looks all very good except for the wood floor. The floor looks very rough and unpolished, and it doesn’t match the style of the beautiful rug at all. I would suggest smoothing it down a bit, reduce the strength of your displacement/normal map. Wood floors are supposed to be reflective as well. Like this:
http://intersomma.com/yahoo_site_admin/assets/images/Wood-Floor-4.242130914_std.jpg

i agree about the wood, and i think you should fatten up the particles, but nice rug!

I’ll see what I can do :slight_smile: Thanks for the feedback!

Hey there guys. Did you create strands to apply to the particle system, or just hair. My problem is that the meshes I created as strands and then added to the particle system work perfect but can’t apply a texture to the whole rug, like the circles you have there.

P