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.
Exterior renders of Allandale House by William O’Brien Jr. who is Assistant Professor of Architecture at MIT School of Architecture and Planning as well as running his own design practice.
I’m planning a making-of tutorial, but first I wanted to show some high res versions of the exteriors (interiors to follow) as they really should be viewed big for best effect! The following renders are my particular favourites of the exterior set, click for a high res version.
Slideshow of a recently completed project for Lynas Architecture in Hackney, London.
(Should be high enough resolution to work well in fullscreen mode)
Everything in this scene was 3d, so making the day/cloudy/dusk shots was simply a case of changing the HDR used to light the scene, and turn on/off lights.
A project from earlier this year that I reworked a bit. Added some more props and lighting and other things I didn’t get time to do previously. The photos are some of my favourite ones from my Dad’s portfolio, and winter themed as the first snow has just started to fall here in Sweden.
As usual, the renders are more or less as they were directly from vray, just added some glows to the lights.
A detailed Sketchup model with low res textures. Go to pushpullbar for more images and to download. Or you can download it from drop.io but I don’t know how long that link will last.
Something I’ve been working on for the best part of the last year (I previously blogged about the trees in… May, and the grass even before that!). Unfortunately paid work keeps getting in the way, I’m yet to figure out a solution to that problem.
I’m planning a tutorial on how I did the fog, (another) grass tutorial on how I did the mowed lawn and a making-of post summing up the whole process. Can also do one on optimizing the trees and making the tree materials if there is interest. The sketchup model of the house itself will be available on pushpullbar - details to follow in a separate post.
Technical Info:
Grass (short, medium & long), clover and plantago major all scattered with vrayscatter as per previous tutorials.
Trees are all made with Onyxtree. Species as per previous blog post.
The total poly count comes to approx. 10 billion. 1.34 billion for trees, 8.4 billion for grasses, 270k for house, 550k for furniture.
Renders took roughly 6 hrs each @ 2200px
Rendered with vrayphysicalcamera, vraysun, HDRi environment
VRayenvironmentfog was rendered as a separate pass and screened over in photoshop
A new project in my vizualisation gallery: Chelsea Square by Wilkinson King Architects. These images were for marketing purposes and were lots of fun to work on. The building was modeled in Sketchup and all textures were made from scratch from photographs. As usual with my projects, there wasn’t much post work in photoshop (apart from the cross section).
The caustics in the pool were calculated with all the glass hidden, saved and then the glass was turned back on for the final render. The actual water surface was modeled by dropping a ball into some reactor water, totally over the top I know!
I wanted the brick texture to match the existing building as closely as possible so I took photos of the end gable brick (in the shade) and then painted over every brick in photoshop. This was so that the displacement map worked correctly in displacing the bricks outwards while recessing the grout slightly, and also helped in the reflection map to make the grout less reflective. The traced bricks layer was used as a mask to lighten a greyscale copy of the diffuse layer. Painting over bricks in photoshop is as about as boring as it gets, but worth the effort.
- compare all bracketed exposures in Adobe Lightroom, flag the most likely ones, eventually end up with the best one
- adjust exposure, white balance
- remove chromatic aberration, vignetting
- remove sensor dust spots with spotting tool
- export tiff to ptlens, correct any distortion & perspective
- back to Lightroom, final crop
Thankfully Lightroom takes most of the pain out of doing this to 250 odd shots, I just wish it was possible to do distortion correction on a dng without converting to a tiff.
