Architecture Fun

[neversummer]

Here's a few renderings for a flash interactive map showcasing new residential and commericial based sub divisions. Trees are relatively low poly and imported from Vue 5:

[Matt]

Not bad, but one comment, for outdoor scenes you should really only have shadows from ONE light (the sun) it appears you have shadows turned on for more than one light, which confuses the scenes.

[geothefaust]

Not bad, but one comment, for outdoor scenes you should really only have shadows from ONE light (the sun) it appears you have shadows turned on for more than one light, which confuses the scenes.


Agreed. Other then that, I love how they look. :) Very good work.

[neversummer]

Good call on the lighting, I wanted to be able to see all aspects of the architecture, so perhaps with one light source and increased global illumination, all facets of the buildings will be visible...

[Tzan]

You can have more than one light in a scene, just have only one cast a shadow.
You can turn shadow casting off on those other lights.

[loki74]

are these at all post processed? They seem to have an "ethereal glow" if you will, almost as though you took a grayscale copy, isolated the highlights, blurred, and set it to screen... (well thats what i do to get the same effect anyway:) )

At any rate, tzan is totally right; just disable shadow casting on all but one light...

Also, correct be if im wrong, but dont shadows outside have a blueish tint, caused by ambient light from the blue sky? Also, some aspects look rushed, like the asphalt and grass; the other elemets are much nicer in comparison... finally (and this is a nitpick) on the second one, the curved balcony (?) things look faceted. Is this what you were going for?

all around though, great job...

[adrian]

I think (and I could be wrong) that the blue tint on shadows is more prevalent in snow scenes rather than "normal" daylight.

[neversummer]

I've gotten rid of a few lights, removed the shadow casting on all but one, and used an hdri for this render. I've also left out the post processing fun loki74 has pointed out and I think it makes for a lot cleaner and less confusing image, (some dof would be nice but the render time is too long for animating :caffeine: )

[starbase1]

Nice. It does look to me like maybe you have 100% sharp 90 degree edges - these things can gain a huge amount of realism if you add a tiny bevel along the edges...

Nick

[neversummer]

Finished up another one, this is the Hilton Suites, each building is seen from the top down in an interactive map of the area, which is why the landscaping looks fairly rigid. Attached is the map in progress:

[Matt]

Much better lighting! :)

[loki74]

nice! I like this new one.

about dof--i think these look fine w/o it. I mean, unless you want it to look like a minature model (which would be cool to) or if you have something, oh say a tree, pass very very close to the camera.

[Stooch]

i love the soft quality of your lighting, one thing that i want to add is the importance of soft shadows, you typically get hard shadows on very sunny, bright days, these shadows also tend to be pretty contrasty.

if you want to light your scene with diffuse lighting, i suggest you use large scale area lights, you want to simulate the light as if its coming from the entire sky/atmosphere, not just the sun. Alhough there is nothing wrong with combining soft shadows AND the sun, indirect lighting happens very often, just make sure you use falloff to control it better. also, make sure you are using fresnel on the windows. (gradients on reflection/diffuse/transparency) check out the worms of art articles.

for this scene, maybe you should explore HDR environment, its fairly quick and really takes your reflective surfaces up a notch.

[neversummer]

yet another building render, stooch: i'd love to use fast fresnel on the windows but I believe FPrime does not support it yet, (each building scene is animated so I'm using FPrime to cut down on render time). Only 10 more commericial buildings to make 8/

[Gettarobox]

neversummer- you should look into a plug-in called TB-edgebevel it is great for when you don't want to go in and bevel every corner. it works nice and doesn't add noticeable rendering time to your scene.

[neversummer]

wow that plugin looks great, too bad it's only intel, I'll have to try it out when I get home.. here's the link for anyone else who hasn't heard of this plugin:

http://home.att.ne.jp/omega/tabo/3dlabo/p_lwp.html