I'm working on a puzzle game in which the whole thing is an animated painting hanging on a wall. (I go into more detail about it here.) I've decided to re-render the background graphic of "painting hanging on wall" in order to support 16:9 and higher res monitors. Unfortunately I did the old background with 3D Studio Max years ago, no longer have access to Max, and have the original art as a .max file. So instead I'm now trying to produce the image from scratch with Blender, and it's going pretty well but I was wondering if some 3D rendering gurus could help me get it looking even better. Basically, this is what the game used to look like. And this is how I have the background looking now, in higher res + 16:9. To say I'm a noobie at Blender does a disservice to noobies -- I'm more of a Blender tourist. To do the new one I wrote a script to generate the geometry as VRML97, imported it into Blender, bought a concrete texture off of TurboSquid and followed a tutorial on how to texture objects, setup the lights and camera, and then just fooled around with materials/shader settings for the different parts of the frame until it started looking good. Mostly just turning subsurface scattering on everything softens the shadows and gives the image a kind of wispiness. Everything I try now looks about the same as far as realisticness/mood. Tried bumpmapping the wall but it just looked overwrought. I seem to be stuck in a local maxima. What else should I do? Or does anyone know any magical shader settings for the frame parts? [Edited by - jwezorek on May 21, 2010 2:48:35 PM]

If you really want to go for photorealistic backgrounds you should take a look at yafary a raytracer which works together with blender. But I fear, that you have to invest some time to master the settings. If you want to generate some textures including normalmaps, take a look at mapzone, a free procedural texture generation tool.

to be frank, the image is just plain boring. i don't think many rendering settings will help. maybe raydiosity could though. but i do not know if blender supports that. sub-surface-scattering is something used for material that lets light through, the material you seem to be aiming for are stone and maybe steel?

however i believe you just need more interesting elements to improve the image. maybe some pipes or panels, but i guess your aiming for something like an art-gallery, leaving not much space for imagination. maybe some wallpaper :)

the link were you go into more detail doesnt leed to anything by the way. there was only a title but no text.

just noticed something. i can see your texture tiling, that always sucks. if its a high resolution texture try to get it at full resolution on your render, then you will have much more visible details and no tiling. tiling sucks.

you could use a much more interesting concrete background, maybe go and take a photo somewhere or check out google for free stuff.... at least to try it out if its copyrighted in some way.

Yeah, it's supposed to be a painting in a gallery.

This forum software mangled my link for some reason but I linked to a description of the game I'm working on. It's for a puzzle game that has a visual look inspired by the paintings of Piet Mondrian. The painting will be a collection of rectangles which are constantly in motion. The player is attempting to color them with white, blue, yellow, or red, such that no two rectangles of the same color are touching. To the extent that the player is doing a good job the painting calms down and becomes stable; too the extent he's doing a bad job it becomes unstable and rectangles spawn and so forth. Properly colored rectangles have a lifetime; they'll hang around for awhile but will eventually shrink away and die. There's an algorithm that's running periodically, sort of like a game turn, that comes up with a canonical layout based on a graph-drawing compaction algorithm and the rectangles move to the current canonical layout.

SO the background image is unimportant and is intentionally minimalistic. There will be like a control panel doohicky over part of it but I'll do that with photoshop. I just figured for such uncomplicated geometry there's no reason for it not to render and look like a photograph, but maybe I can't get there without proprietary software?

The images on yafary's site look really cool ... so yafary plugs in to blender?