My first render ever was made in PhotoView 360. That was also the day I fell in love with rendering applications, because seeing how good that rendered image looked like made me feel that I could also be a creative (even artistic) person after all. This is big news if you are like me and grew up with a sister that could draw incredibly realistic images with her hands by the time she was nine years old.  For years I wouldn’t dare to even doodle in front of her, in fear of her criticism!  Anyway, as I was saying, my rendered image wasn’t the big deal, certainly not as good as many others I’ve seen in blogs, websites and magazines, but it was enough to ignite the flame of curiosity inside of me. Now I had to learn how to do this rendering thing!

While PhotoView seemed really easy to use, just by clicking and dragging and that’s it, I felt that what I really needed was to learn about the process involved in creating a good rendered image, because frankly I had no idea of what I was doing back then. That new Step-by-Step guide to PhotoWorks, featured in Rob Rodriguez website, seemed just perfect for that purpose.

So I started reading, and solving the exercises, and discovered quickly that PhotoWorks isn’t as hard as I thought it would be. Yes, in general it does take a little longer than PhotoView, but there are also a few options available in PhotoWorks that I wish PhotoView had, like a feature manager to select from, and a render manager, to keep track of the appearances that have been added to faces, features and parts and to aid in the process of editing appearances and scenes.

Something else that I certainly appreciate about PhotoWorks and that I haven’t found the way to do in PhotoView just yet is the ability to edit the scene and change, among many other things, the plane or surface against which to project the shadows of the model. Both applications offer the possibility of editing the appearances, but it seems to me that PhotoWorks has a few more options available, many of them I haven’t quite figured out how to use yet.

So far, I’ve done only very basic renderings in PhotoWorks, using predefined scenery available in PhotoWorks Studio, which already includes all the necessary options like a background and a scheme of lights. I also used the Render Wizard, which guides you along every stage in the process while assigning appearances, scenes and finally rendering the model. I guess this would be the equivalent to the click and drag from PhotoView, except that it’s possible to use this render as a starting point and then edit these options  and tweak settings a little bit in order to obtain better results.

This is a rendered image of a little toy tank that I downloaded from the 3D content central.

I used PhotoWorks Studio first and then tweaked the scene a little bit, but only to specify that shadows on the floor would be visible and that the model would be considered resting on its X-Z plane; that way the shadow appears under the model in the image, instead of on a wall or any other place. This little detail adds some realism to the image, I think.

The same model, as rendered in PhotoView, using exactly the same appearances and the closest match to the scene that I could find. I could never find a way to add a shadow to the image by tweaking the scene in PhotoView, but maybe there’s an option that I didn’t see?

Anyway, I just learned that Rob Rodriguez is soon to post a series of articles dealing precisely with the differences between PhotoWorks and PhotoView 360, so make sure to visit his blog often and, while you are there, enter this month’s rendering contest. I’m planning on entering for the very first time. I know that with my less than stellar skills I’m not likely to win anything, but it would be really fun, anyway. And now back to the guide. I want to learn more advanced techniques!