These 3D images are very good and I am curious to what program ya’ll thought was used to create them. I am thinking Illustrator.
Hm, are your sure they aren’t photos? Anyhow, if I had to choose betwixt Photoshop and Illustrator, I’d say that looked more like Photoshop work.
These look like 3d renders… If you look in the first image the shadows are abnormal considering the light source.
In the open source world their is a great program called Blender which allows you to do amazing modeling, inverse kinematics, light shading, ray tracing, cell by cell animation, blurbs, image displacement maps and a whole raft of other things. Simply amazing for being completely free. Motion Picture studios are using Blender for some of their work.
These are certainly 3-d renders. Would be much harder in photoshop.
It is was probably created with a 3D CAD program similar to AutoCAD or Solidworks.
They look too mathematically precise for Blender – as impressive as blender is, when it comes to actually getting something precisely placed it’s a tinkertoy. I’d guess 3ds max or maybe even something a bit further up the ladder like full blown Autocad.
Could even be rendered from a text file containing just polar coordinates – could be something as simple as POV-RAY. I mean, you want your socks blown off, these:
http://hof.povray.org/autobahn-050501-2.html
http://hof.povray.org/pebbles.html
… are CG-renders done with a COMMAND LINE program. The latter one is all the more impressive since no modeling software was used – it’s all built from a text editor. (notice he said 5.6 days to render on a A64 5600+)
Or this one:
http://hof.povray.org/micra1_09.html
… and that’s a command line renderer.
I’ve done a decent amount of stuff in 3ds Max for a few game makers, You can see some of my non-licensed playing around with it here… and I’ve been a long-time fan of POV-RAY having used it all the way back to the 286 days (where a 320x200 render would take 8 hours).
I actually find those packages easier to use than things like photoshop, because I can just feed them exact measurements of what I want, then let it handle the rendering. But again, I’m also a “carving” sculptor (as opposed to a “soft” sculptor), so I learned VERY quickly to measure once since if you miss or mess up the measurement, you’re starting over from scratch.
We’re using computers, sometimes even creativity comes down to the numbers.
This is 3d Studio work, or a similar platform app.
The highlighted finishing work can be touched up by any graphics program like AI, FW, or Photoshop.
The objects look extruded (or should have been, to simplify whatever it was the person was trying to do). Once the block file is created, it can be exported under print-screen type functions and mastered by graphic design programs.
If this were my work (which is certainly isn’t because I can not do such niceness) I would’ve used 3d Studio, perhaps based upon a scaled AutoCAD file, then export to images for the main perspectives. For the touch up work I’d start in Photoshop to create simple shading and gradients and then use FW to vectorize anything that I could.
My opinion on this matter. This is because I don’t know how to do ambient lighting functions in 3d Studio. I would mix-match software to facilitate my shortfalls.
cool stuff deathshadow… the only problem I have with being able to cg such stuff is that I don’t know how to input all the data. It would take an insane amount of time or an amazing program to automatically render such data. The closest solution I could think of would be extreme hi-def scans of the best resolution photos broken down by pixelated data points and re-rendered. I cannot imagine someone drawing that stuff by hand or by coordinates because the pixel quality is upwards of billions for such definition, especially the pebbles… POV-Ray is cool and I’d look into it if this was my field of work.
How does POV Ray get the data? Is there a resource library for imaged files?
… and that’s the disconnect you’re having in a nutshell - you’re thinking in pixels instead of vectors and scene.
With pov-ray you just define object shapes and their positions using coordinates – to borrow from one of the better online tutorials:
http://library.thinkquest.org/3285/tutorial/simple.html
// This is a simple red sphere
// first, the camera position
camera {
location <2,5,-10>
look_at <0,0,0>
}
// now, some light
light_source {
<0,-10,0>
color rgb <1,1,1>
}
// the sphere
sphere {
<0,0,0>, 5
pigment { color rgb <1,0,0> }
}
You say where the camera is in coordinates, a point it’s looking at, set up some light sources, then add your objects (in this case a simple sphere) to the scene. You feed that text file into the renderer, and you get a nice smooth lit sphere.
http://library.thinkquest.org/3285/tutorial/images/demo1_big.gif
As above, you just make a text file describing the scene… you have some basic primative shapes you can work with and rotate, you can add shapes together, subtract one shape from another, or declare your own polygons/complex objects using flat lines or quadratic curves.
Take this example which uses subtraction of two rectangles to make a ‘doorway’.
#include "colors.inc"
camera {
location <-3, 10, 5>
look_at <5, 5, 0>
}
plane {
y, 0
pigment { checker color Black color White }
}
light_source { <-5, 10, 4> color White }
light_source { <-3, 10, 5> color White }
difference {
box { <0, 0, 0>, <10, 10, 1> }
box { <2, 0, -1>, <6, 8, 2> }
pigment { color Red }
}
Which renders thus:
http://library.thinkquest.org/3285/tutorial/images/difference2_big.gif
It’s actually pretty simple once you get a grasp of coordinate systems. Really powerful and I find once you get a hang of it, you can belt out simple scenes FAR faster than you ever could using a graphical UI.
It’s all free too – you start playing around with the tutorial examples and before you know it you’ll be thinking “If I add a cube here… and a cube here… and a cube here” until you’re making renders that would make your average minecraft freak drool in envy.
I mean, just looking at the pictures in the original post, let’s take the right-hand one. I see some cylinders, some cubes, some spheres, some combined, some cut out of each-other… some curves. If I sat down and worked at it I could belt out something like that in POV-RAY in a hour or two… for the code. No telling how long the render would take.
Though I think yer right on it being something like 3d studio… there’s something… wrong with the projection. It ALMOST looks isometric in places, but not others. Makes me think the render camera is placed really really far out and then zoomed to a narrow perspective… though the presence of at LEAST five light sources (one fullbright, one halfbright and several ambients) and ambient occlusion could be playing games with our eyes.
That’s pretty cool stuff. It’s like MatLab functions with coloring for kids 
I love math…
yeah… if I ever have to detail something I’ll check out POVRay. I’ve heard of it before and I believe that 3D Studio max has an add on for similar results. There is a “ray” add-on that fails for my rather… interesting copy of 3d studio Max…
thanks for the info~
Hi DeathShadow60
[COLOR=#464646]POV-RAY looks very interesing, as you suggested I tried a few of the tutorial examples and quite quickly able to render precise yet fairly complex models. I very much see your point about blender (and possibly other 3-d Graphical Modeling programs) as it would take longer an likely be less precise (unless using a plugin that is similar). Thanks for sharing this!
Steve[/COLOR]
I’m surprised no one mentioned Cinema 4d yet.
It’s a very popular and long-standing 3d rendering program.
~TehYoyo
That I’ve NEVER heard of anyone using to actually make 3d stuff other than benchmarks and final renders/animations. Everyone’s heard of Cinebench, but I’ve never heard of anyone using Cinema 4d to actually MAKE models.
GREAT renderer though.
I make all my models using Cinema 4d. I find it is great for creating models and animation. And like you said it is a great renderer.