First steps in 3D visualisation

I've always been interested in 3D visualisation, and I've dabbled with several design packages over the years, but it's only recently that I've committed some serious time to learning the skills needed in this fascinating area of creativity.

Over the last few weeks I've started to get competent with basic geometry creation and manipulation in 3DS Max, and I'm even scratching the surface of material creation which turns out to be a lot harder than I expected.

I'd say it's about time that I unleashed my first render for the world to see. This is the result of a self-assigned challenge to produce a vaguely realistic diamond and light it appropriately. I took it a step further and rendered a scene with several diamonds, some basic coloured objects, all on a reflective surface with bump and displacement maps. The render was produced in mental ray.

Click to view a larger version:

Here's how the raw scene looked in 3DS:

The goal of this project was primarily to learn about creating the different materials and then light the scene using traditional photographic lighting. The scene has three key lights, all behind the objects, including two hard spotlights at either side. This was because glassy materials look better with light coming through them, rather than bouncing off them. There's one fill light in front of the objects.

Here's exactly the same scene, but with more dramatic lighting, simply by bringing the main backlight down to just above the objects. (And no lens flare! Yay!)

Same scene with the original lighting, but with the coloured shapes replaced by wooden blocks and a less-than-perfect chrome ball:

Next I want to produce something with more complicated geometry.