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:
photo:
render:
photo:
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.
Tags: 7narchitects, davemorris, dusk, hdr, HDRi, vray
It was a fun project to shoot, and thanks for mentioning me!
Certainly the comparisons here are very interesting, and I feel I should perhaps send you a few RAW files for a more ‘pure’ comparison. The relative highlight intensities are particularly interesting, for instance… I wouldn’t want to give too many details away on how much phudging went into my shots, of course, but it’s probably fair to say the clients were a little nervous that the flowers might end up looking too white in the middle in any photographs.
Also, that red paving: reddest thing I’ve ever seen. White balance wasn’t TOO much of an issue on the shoot, but what with the red ground combined with low pressure sodium streetlights nearby, the whole place WAS pretty warm, and I had to keep checking the histograms to make sure my eye wasn’t fooling me!
Must go back some time. I’d love to see it on a foggy day.
Interesting, maybe all this proves is that we have similar taste!
I can see that there is a lot of light coming from the sodium lamps and that you’ve had to battle against it. I chose not to include the sodium street lamps, made it much easier!
Would be cool to see it on a foggy grey day (readers of this blog know how much i like fog!). I bet the intense colour of the flowers would work very well against a grey glaswegian background.
Great stuff Pete. This is fascinating to see how vray (in the right hands) can actually be more than a render engine & become a light simulator
Great post Pete. We were really happy with both the visuals and the photos as they both capture the experience of actually being in the space very well. Photos we took ourselves tended to bleach out the flowers so that you didn’t get the intensity of the colours. Both renders and photos take creative licence (balanced of course!) to ensure that the overall story is told; it is not just a literal representation. That’s why you guys are the best!
Are the camera settings of the 5D the same as for the V-Ray physical cam? If not, it would explain the higher intensities, because of the 5D’s lower shutter speed maybe?
The exposure on the real or virtual camera is a bit immaterial as the brightness of my lighting set up has nothing to do with real world values.
When lighting the scene, I had to guess how bright the lights on the flowers should be compared to the ambient lighting (HDR) compared to the lights in the boxes on the ground. I should have had the lights in the boxes on the ground brighter, but it was important at the time that those lights looked red, not orange.
Thanks Chris!