Well I started this late night at about 11:30. I found an exacto knife laying around so I decided I'd open TrueSpace and do a little modeling exercise. Took about 30mins to model it. Then I opened up Bryce and decided to see how photorealistic I could make it look. Took me about a couple hours to tweak all the materials, etc. Had to make a few of my own bumpmaps. Anyway I may expand this image to a fullblown workbench. For now I would just like critiques on improving the level of photorealism. I'll post updates as I finish them. Thx ;)

Looks pretty real to me! Really very good.

First of all...WOW! Outstanding photorealism. Very, very nice. The only thing that I can think of that would make it even more realistic is to dirty them up a little bit. Dirt that has collected in the gaps on the knurled part of the handle near the blade; greasy fingerprints on the handle; stains on the blades; maybe a little bit of rust starting to form where the blade meets the handle; scratches, nicks, and dents on the handle and blade. I think that that would push this one from "Outstanding photoreal CG" to "Outstanding photo". My .02 Mike

Great suggetion Mike, I've already redone the blade after scanning the blade from my reference knife. I'll see if I can do some deformations on the handle and paint on some dirt, etc. I wish you could use displacement maps in Bryce because I really think that would help this look less flat along grips.

You can use bump maps to achieve the same thing. Just add a bead to the bump channel and load the alpha map into that channel.

No, Aldaron, I am already using bump maps, but the effect I wish to achieve can only be done with a displacement map or by actually incorporating the detail into the model. The polycount would be through the roof if I were to model in all of the detail so that is not an option for me and unfortunately Bryce dosen't support displacement maps.

It may just be me, or my screen settings, but the lower knife seems to be rather blurred and too dark in the shadows. I'm not sure, but maybe if you enlarge the depth-of-field a little? An add a very subtle light at "bench"-level, somewhere near the bottom-right corner (shodows, off - just to give a hint of "presence" to the lower knife. Of course, I might be talking complete bllcks, but it might be worth a try:-)) Cheers, Diolma

Thanks for the suggestion Diolma, my monitor is very bright so I didn't notice the darkness issue, thanks for pointing it out. As for the blurriness, currently I have the lens radius set as low as possible, but I only rendered at 16rpp, when I do a final render I will likely kick it up to 64rpp which will help reduce this blur. If I finish taking this image in the direction I wish to then the composure will be totally different anyway regardless.

Excellent start i dont find it dark at all actually. I would keep lighting the same. I agree with the dirtying up of the knife. Other than that, there arent many improvements I can think of. Great job! P.S I actually felt that the grips had a lot of depth. I didnt notice that it wasnt part of the mesh until you mentioned it. Kinda like doing tire treads, I dont think it would be worth while to actually model it...the effect created by the bump map is very nice.

My only comment was to increase the oversample rate to at least 64rpp. There is a graininess to the DOF that is not quite right. well done.