Happy 2021 Year! I wish everyone stay well and safe on that new stage of human kind ! :)
I will start the year posting something that I never posted here on my Profile, but worth a refreshed register. My profile has mainly "new" works from 3-4 years ago. But for those that doesn't know, I am an "old" (lets call it senior) wolf of the CGI sea. lol
This image is a landmark of my past work. And it's almost vanished from the internet. So worth reposting it on my profile, because it's part of my history, and it stills related with my work nowadays.
I made it, back in 2001-2002, challenging myself to do a "realistic" image without using any external assets in pure 3dsMax (version 5), just using the old scanline render, which is a very basic render engine.
This render engine stills present in 3DSMax as a legacy engine (And I still use it from time to time for quick tests).
At that time, there's no way to lit a scene with HDRI because it wasn't invented yet. There's no substance, or much option of procedural shaders available. No light bounce, GI, bloom, no proper area lights.
We have to learn to simulate it all, using a technique that i have named as "Fakeosity". Were for each light in the scene you create an array of lights, to mimic the effects of area lights. And you manually generate rings of lights around the scene subject to simulate the global illumination. It's a painful way of work and i don't miss it at all. lol Its a lot of work to just get to the point you have today with an hdri with one click.
I have the honor to have my image used by Mister Mike Seymour, on his legendary Article, THE ART OF RENDERING, at FXGuide website. https://www.fxguide.com/fxfeatured/the-art-of-rendering/
So, i think worth sharing this because its part of my history as a CGArtist and i have learned a LOT about procedurals with just that single challenge i made myself 19 years ago. The image has some glitches that i never retouched or revisited, because doesn't make sense anymore to fix it.
I Hope you like a that piece of my history. lol
It's dusty but it's stills cg at his best.