1984 - Pool Balls by indigo

[Polinalkrimizei]

... so I am tired of fiddling with motion blur and materials to give the balls some depth and call this finished.
When I was looking for references I came across this:

http://www.fxguide.com/featured/1984_-_ ... ars_later/

That's such a nice idea, if you feel like just try to do your version of the shot and post it here. I didn't want to sent them my shot cause the render times don't quite compare...
Still not 100% sure about the ball material, please comment if you are a pro at playing pool, I was drunk the few times I gave it a shot and don't remember the material properties.
What bothers me still that faces of the ball meshes are showing due to SSS, the balls look perfectly smooth when they are phong, and using a little bit of SSS makes them look like the "solid"-setting in blender. What am I doing wrong?

[EDIT: updated the image]

[Lemo]

What bothers me still that faces of the ball meshes are showing due to SSS

I had a lot of that issue with bump on my 5d Mark II project, dunno if it's the same thing with SSS though.
http://www.indigorenderer.com/forum/vie ... 74&start=0

[Polinalkrimizei]

The ball looks pretty pixelated to me, if I use plain phong it is perfectly smooth, with a tiny bit of SSS I get this. I'm almost sure it was discussed here before, is there a workaround or something I did wrong? Otherwise I will need to subdivide the faces until sub-pixel level, which is ok with a ball, but not so easy with more complex meshes.

[Soup]

The ball looks pretty pixelated to me, if I use plain phong it is perfectly smooth, with a tiny bit of SSS I get this. I'm almost sure it was discussed here before, is there a workaround or something I did wrong? Otherwise I will need to subdivide the faces until sub-pixel level, which is ok with a ball, but not so easy with more complex meshes.

Normal smoothing!

[Reinuvader]

As Soup said - Normal smoothing is name of the game. Check this under material or geometry properties. Those are not pixels. Those are polygons and smoothing is obviously turned off.

No offence but it is advisable to gather some basic knowledge about your 3D application. You don't have to read your manual from cover to cover, but the fact that you don't make difference between pixels and polygons, shows you have skipped some basics.

[Headroom]

These artifacts are likely a normal smoothing issue, but that does not mean that it's turned off either in Blender or in the actual Indigo scene file.

In Blender there is one thing that controls if a surface is rendered smooth, or faceted (Flat). You select an object and click on "Set Smooth" or "Set Solid" in the "Link and Materials" panel. This also determines if that mesh will be exported as normal_smoothing true/false. It would seem to me that has been done. Otherwise the balls would have not been rendered smooth when a phong material was applied.

Considering that polinalkrimizei tinkers around with ISL shaders I would assume that he checked in the scene file if normal_smoothing was exported as true for these meshes.

Also interesting is that the term normal smoothing despite the fact that it can lead to quite some frustration is not even mentioned in the Blendigo Manual (at least not in the PDF version).

Unfortunately I don't have any advice to offer. Even if, it would certainly not be condesceding!

[Polinalkrimizei]

Thanks guys for your replies - of course it was just a normal smoothing issue. I was confused cause all the balls were "set smooth" in blender (as seen in the testrender at the simple renderings thread), but as soon as I added some SSS, normal smoothing was set to false for some reason.
Many thanks Headroom for believing in me - but I didn't check before posting the second pic here, because I didn't change anything in blender

And when I checked I was pretty embarrassed an hoped that this thread would be forgotten soon...

But thanks for helping, it is a good thing indeed that this community is helpful even when dealing with absolutely noobish issues!
I will update the image once it is ready and don't wanna hear about normal smoothing never again