August, 2010

Why OpenEXR?

18th August 2010
Tags: , ,
Posted in shop
15 Comments »

Better colour accuracy. All my HDRi skies were shot with a Canon 1dsmk3 so I like to keep as much as possible of that information preserved in the HDRi file. Radiance (.hdr) is limited to sRGB colour data, whereas OpenEXR (.exr) is not.

This is reflected in the file sizes:

For this skydome for example

0743 Cloudy Morning Sun

the exr file size is 160mb, the hdr version is 50mb

That said, I have decided to start including a .hdr version in the products I am selling on 3docean. I’m still updating all the files, but check back soon and if you have bought one of them you can re-download a new version for free.

Why hdr? Unfortunately some applications don’t support exr, so until they do you can use hdr (albeit in the knowledge that your colours might not be quite as lovely*)

* not scientifically tested!

The Phoenix Flowers

10th August 2010
Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in project
7 Comments »

The Phoenix Flowers is a new public realm intervention by 7N Architects in Glasgow, Scotland. I worked on the 3d visualisations in September last year and was very interested to see photos of the completed project by my ex-colleague and friend Dave Morris.

At the time I remember being happy with my work but not completely sure how ‘real’ the images looked. As it turns out, the red carpet and flowers are even more intensely coloured in reality! Take a look at the full set of Dave’s photos here, below are a selection for comparison. When I saw Dave’s photos I felt I had to go back and render a couple of extra views, so the 2 below were done to try and match his compositions.

render:
garscube view06

photo:
Phoenix Flowers

render:
garscube view01

photo:
Phoenix Flowers

For me, the interesting things to notice were the relative intensities of the highlights (how the Canon 5D dealt with them compared to vray), the colour of the lighting behind the grilles (goes towards yellow in reality despite being red) and that I was pretty lucky in getting the flower petal material looking about right.