I loved GBA’s Casa Kike when I first saw it, so this was a very exciting commission for me.
As usual I started by building a very detailed sketchup model (thanks for your help Bojana!). It’s quite a simple building, but with a lot of thought in the details:
I try to do as much as I can these days in sketchup, even roughly positioning textures which then get replaced by vray materials in 3dsmax.
The external terracotta louvres were given a cg-source.com multi-texture map to randomise the colour of each louvres very slightly, this really helped in adding some realism. (Maybe I could have used the new vray multi subtexture map? haven’t figured it out yet)
All the furniture was chosen by the architect, the main items were:
- Drop table, Living Divani. Designed by Junya Ishigami
- Garden plate, Living Divani. Designed by Junya Ishigami
- Family Chairs, Living Divani. Designed by Junya Ishigami
- Loop Chair designed by Willy Guhl
- Extrasoft sofa by Living Divani
The principle HDR skies were 2003 for the night time shots and 1739 for the sunlight ones.
I just have to share these amazing interior renders by Bertrand Benoit - easily two of the best interiors I have seen. Click through to flickr to see them bigger and for the rest of the series.
This was a fun 1 day job I did for Norkay, the people I share an office with. It’s an advert for Dalarna Business to show (with a sense of humour) how local businesses might grow in the future.
Norkay came up with the concept and the idea for this image, I then designed and modeled an airport, rendered it and montaged it into a photo of the existing Mora airport. Oh, and I added some reindeer and a sleigh for good measure.
Double page spread in the local newspaper, Falu Kuriren.
Don’t let anyone tell you sketchup is not a ’serious’ modeling program and that it produces untidy geometry, like any program its how you use it that counts. The genuis of sketchup lies in it’s tidy interface, brilliant snapping, and ease of use. Sketchup has it’s limits of course, but for architectural visualisation I think it is the perfect tool for modeling. Every single project in my portfolio started life in sketchup.
The start of any project for me is understanding the building and modeling it - as quickly and as efficiently as possible. This timelapse screen recording shows the whole process, speeded up 10x. The whole thing took about a day (3 hrs 46mins, excluding all the coffee breaks). I like to get the overall form of the building done first, but identifying and making components for any repeating elements (windows, doors, whole apartments) as I go. You can then go back and add detail later on.
A little personal project inspired by Jown Pawson’s recent Plain Space exhibition at the Design Museum in London. These renders take a lot of inspiration from Gilbert McCarragher’s beautiful photos of the exhibition. My main interest in doing this was to capture the same quality of light as in the photos, I love the blue light from the sky in contrast to the warm concealed lighting under the benches.
You can view the renders at a bigger size on Flickr
In case you haven’t seen it, Ronen has wrapped up the latest arch viz challenge on his site, Hover. I really enjoyed following everyone’s progress, and just wanted to share my favourites here (along with some commentary on each!).
My personal favourite entry was Tolgahan Güngör’s imaginative interpretation of the brief. I know this wasn’t his final entry but they were all very good. I loved the design, composition and lighting. There were maybe some technical things that could have been better, but for me they aren’t so important when the overall mood is right.
Next up is Micael Dillner’s entry. A strong concept, the environment here really appealed to me, and I liked the composition a lot too (I know the judges disagree with me here!).
Finally Benjamin Brosdau’s sleek modern house. It was fascinating following the development on his thread, if you haven’t looked through it you really should. Great attention to detail, incredible modeling and texturing, there’s lots to learn there for everyone. Considering the promise shown though, I felt the final 2 images needed a bit more work in terms of lighting and composition. The final exterior shown here seems to be a bit in between an exciting dynamic view and a stiffer straight on view (like Micael’s above). I’d like to have seen some more experimentation in composition and lighting before settling on the final entries. Here is an example of the stunning attention to detail shown on Benjamin’s WIP thread:
Congratulations to everyone who took part, and well done Ronen for another great challenge!
Seeing as its almost that time of year again, I thought I’d share some progress on an exciting new project I’m working on.
The snow is mostly done with the brilliant snowflow plugin, some of the trees are from the winter trees collection at rendering.ru and some are made with onyxtree and have snow applied using snowflow. I still haven’t decided on the mood and haven’t even begun to think about views.
Let me know what you think, and if you have any ideas!
