Colour correcting HDRi skies

Photo by Brigida Gonzalez also on my scrapbook

Photo by Brigida Gonzalez also on my scrapbook

I quite often reference images I see on the internet when I am interested in achieving a particular mood or more often colour balance. This usually happens well into a project and quite often by accident rather than by design, but that's the subject of another, future post..

I liked the colour of the sky in the above photo, especially in combination with the pale yellow interior lighting. From looking through my HDR sky collection, I went for 0902 which was pretty close but not the right colour:

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I'm hoping chaosgroup will eventually grant my wish of adding some colour temp/tint controls to the vrayHDRi map, but in the meantime you can adjust the colour using the color map in the output roll up. I simply took some red out of the sky by unchecking G and B and dragging down the red curve.

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Which results in a much closer match:

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You might be able to achieve the same thing with either the native max color correction map or colorcorrect but I think this is a neater solution. You could also colour correct the camera, but then you would have to compensate the temp of all of your lights as well.

Work-in-progress: a new project done in collaboration with Henry Goss for Ström Architects.

Work-in-progress: a new project done in collaboration with Henry Goss for Ström Architects.

Nordiska Akvarellmuseet

Happy new 2014!

I'm starting the new year off with a rare architectural photography post. This is the Nordiska Akvarellmuseet, Nordic Watercolour museum, on the island of Tjörn north of Gothenburg, Sweden. 

The photos concentrate on the artist's studios which were designed by Niels Bruun & Henrik Corfitsen, arkitekter MAA in 2004.

Free HDR Sky!

An early Christmas present for readers of this blog. You're welcome. :)

EDIT: It is no longer Christmas I'm afraid... If you want to try this sky, it will shortly be available in the shop at a discounted price (reprocessed & with backplates and scene file!)

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Merry Christmas - God Jul!

(click for lightbox)

Wishing all readers of this blog a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

'God Jul' is Swedish for Merry Christmas and is also much easier to write when cutting down trees with a virtual chainsaw.

quick technical stuff: 3dsmax, vray 2.4, forest pro, fog in vray, lit by 1912, terrain from the free version of world machine and some smoke and silly things added in photoshop.

La Maison de Verre à la Bertrand Benoit

Bertrand's flair with materials and modeling seemed such a good fit with this architectural masterpiece that I had to put aside my own ambitions to do a visualisation study of it and see what he would come up with. Not disappointed! Really must find some time to do a personal project again!

This is just a small selection of images, have a look at Bertrand's blog for the full set, and if you are interested in the building, Ronen found a couple of nice videos about it.

(love this one as I've never seen photos of this stair, the timber floor material is very cool)

Playing around with corona..

An old personal project reworked slightly for corona renderer. Corona is a new rendering plugin which is still in the alpha release phase and currently free to download and use. I haven't had much time with it yet but I already like the way it works, the simplicity and the excellent material previews. With the standard 3dmax material previews I always felt like I was making materials in the dark and had to render them to actually see what has happening.

corona materials in 3dsmax

The forum is currently the best source of info and help on using corona, and by signing up for an account there you can then download the alpha and test it yourself.

Icelandic Coastal House - Talcik Demovicova Studio

Juraj Talcik from Talcik | Demovicova Studio just published a new set of renders of an Icelandic Coastal House, have a look at the full set on Behance.

Apart from them being beautiful to look at, I'm especially interested in them as he uses Corona Renderer - something I've been playing around with recently. Juraj has agreed to share some tips & tricks for corona beginners here on my blog so keep an eye out for that over the next couple of days.

Banksy

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Iain Banks AKA Banksy is a bit of a legend in arch viz, so make sure you check out his recently launched shop and blogLooking forward to reading his blog, and am sure there will be loads of great tips and tricks. 

New Website! New Blog!

New Website!

Designed by Mattias Forsberg from Humblebrag, a digital design agency based in Borlänge, Sweden. It runs on Squarespace which means it should work nicely whether you are looking at it on a browser, smartphone or tablet. I'm very happy with it, and hope you like it too!

Mattias has also helped with my branding (woo!), so if you are a facebook user, feel free to check out my updated page there, and expect to see a new logos/profile pics appearing on twitter, flickr, vimeo etc.

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New blog! - Scrapbook

Ever since I started using google reader (RIP) I've been keeping a visual collection of images that inspire me and give me ideas for composition, colours, mood etc. and also as a way of remembering cool projects.  The name, concept and probably a large part of the content is of course is inspired by Andy Matthew's Architecture Pastebook. Thanks Andy, hope you don't mind! I'll try to be strict with my tagging so that it's easy to find images, and am also going to make sure that the photographer in question is credited and if possible a link to their website or portfolio. If you want to know more about the project or architect, you'll have to dig a bit deeper, by clicking the image itself.

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Old blog

I think I have successfully ported over all of the content and comments from the old wordpress blog, and the new layout means that images can now be bigger and clearer.  I hope to find a bit more time over the next few months to do some more tutorials and other new content.

I also want to thank Johnnie for his fine work on the original website and 6 years of brilliant support, zero downtime and all round excellence.

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