nParticles n' Rendering

CWATIDIDTHAR? Hurhurhurhurhurrrr.

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For the past day or so I've been playing with a few render settings and shaders in a few different render engines, including Maya Software, mental ray, and V-Ray. Maya Software was easy to use, since we use it all the time in class. I didn't particularly use it that much at all. Mental ray was easy enough, quite similar to Software actually. But V-Ray was quite a bit different, and for that matter "better" for lack of a suitable word. I like the options that are given to you, like for instance V-Ray Render Elements (for filters and effects) and Indirect Illumination (for all sorts of lighting setups) and the big bunch of cool shaders that come with V-Ray. Also stuff like bump mapping and subsurface scattering look nicer on V-Ray. It didn't take too long to get used to either. I guess that's why I was told that some people are sworn V-Ray patrons for all their work. Me personally though, I'd just use the one I feel like working with whenever.

I also tried working with nParticles. I'm now more accustomed to using RealFlow though since the workFlow (hahaaa) is straightforward and just better/more accurate for liquid simulation, as its name points out. nParticles ain't bad per se...but it isn't exactly optimized for the best water simming out there. The water (unless you try to use a ridiculous amount of small asss Ball nParticles and risk crashing Maya over and over) is all blobby when converted into to a mesh. On top of that, for some reason after the particles settle, the mesh gradually loses its resolution and eventually disappears. Quite annoying really.

Though, we don't have RealFlow at college, do we? So we gotta work with what we got. Sucks a bit, but hey, better than nothing. Anyway, here are some renders I made with the nParticles with different engines:

mental ray render:

V-Ray render:

V-Ray Depth of Field test:

So as you can see comparing the first two, the V-Ray one looks a tiny bit better, at least in my opinion. 

In the mental ray render, there are 10 little cubes in the air for the particles to flow over (as with the V-Ray one too) and I gave these a metallic shader to give them that shiny/glossy surface. I gave the floor thing a ceramic shader for it to be able to reflect the other things in the scene. 

With the floor thing on V-Ray, I used a marble bump map to give it that weird surface. I had to mess around with it a lot till it looked like smooth granite (I can't blame it. I mean, after all, I did choose marble). Before, it looked like a rough marble surface which didn't fit in this particular scene. I gave the cubes a V-Ray light material with a temperature colour mode so they kind of glowed a bit without being full-on luminescent. I wanted to see what they would look like through the water. Was not disappointed. They look pretttty damn accurate. 

That last one took forever to render just because of the DOF. Totally not worth a test render. Plus after it rendered, my CPU started to idle at around 45 degrees Celsius, which scared me for a bit.