The Phoenix Flowers

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.

Free texture - expanded metal

Not a new technique, you can find good tutorials by Bertand Benoit and Philippe Steels here and here, but it remains the best way to create displacement maps for repetitive things like roof tiles, metal panels and in this case expanded metal mesh. The great thing about doing a material like this with displacement rather than a straight opacity map is that it looks different depending on the viewing angle, which adds to the realism.

I made a quick model of expanded metal that looks something like this:

then did a quick top-down render and saved the zdepth element as a 16 bit png. Its important to save as 16 bit if you want a nice clean and smooth displacement, 8 bit often doesnt have enough grey levels so you get a stepped gradient which looks ugly when displaced.

This is what the finished displacement map looks like:

expanded metal texture

16 bit png download link

If you use vray, then the displacement settings were (units: mm) :

settings

The actual material settings were very simple, a brownish diffuse colour, slightly more pink reflect colour, ward brdf

And finally some renders (click for higher res):

Allandale Interiors

Following on from the last post, this is a selection of my favourite interior views of the Allandale House for wojr.org. Click images for high res.

The HDRi sky used for all of these shots was 1008.

Allandale Exteriors

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.

The HDRi sky used for this series of renders was 1008.

Vraysun and HDRi sky tutorial

Occasionally its nice to be able to use a HDRi environment together with a vraysun, for when you want stronger shadows than the HDRi supplies. The trick is in aligning the sun with the HDRi so that the shadows from each match up. You can do this through trial and error, but if you want to change the rotation of the HDRi then its a pain. Rather than try to explain the steps involved, I thought it would be quicker doing a video tutorial. I'm afraid it turned out to be 13 mins long, but hopefully it will help.

The code for the wired rotation is:

radToDeg(Z_Rotation/360)

 

HDRi Sky Lighting Tutorial

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Thought I should do a quick tutorial on how I use these HDRi Skydomes I'm selling. Note that this is just one of many possible workflows, and there are probably lots of tricks I'm missing and even things I do completely wrong. I should also say that I work mostly with still images, not animations.

1. Here is a typical architectural scene. It is a model I made of Waro Kishi's Fukaya house in Japan that never really went anywhere.

2. I use a gamma 2.2 workflow together with reinhard color mapping, so not strictly LWF but shares some of the advantages.  I don't want this to turn into a LWF tutorial or discussion, but this  post on cgpov.com pretty much sums up how I feel a gamma corrected workflow helps us as visualisation artists.

The reinhard color mapping helps to control burnt out (overexposed) areas. Screenshot of my color mapping set up: The burn value of the reinhard color mapping typically ranges from .75 for an exterior to 0.05 for an interior. You need to experiment with the value until you gain control over the burnt out areas. Here is an example with a camera pointing at the HDR sky:

For the final render, I use the Vray Frame Buffer, and add a slight s-curve to the output to compensate for the lack of contrast that the gamma corrected workflow introduces:

3. Add a vray dome light and load the exr/hdr using the max bitmap loader. Set the mapping type to environment/spherical. If you are using .hdr files, you can use the vrayHDRi loader instead. It makes no difference whether you use the bitmap loader or the vrayHDRi loader, the vrayHDRi adds a bit more control in that you can control the render multiplier independently from the viewport multplier. Set the output of the .exr to 1 and the vraylight multiplier to 1. If your hdr/exr has no alpha channel it seems you can save quite a bit of memory while rendering (approx 200mb in my case) if you load the exr/hdr as realpixel float rgb rather than the rgba option. (NOTE: ONLY applicable to 3dsmax 2009)

EDIT: Please don't pay too much attention to the 3dsmax 2009 realpixel hdri loading option, it just saved a little bit of memory which is why I mentioned it. I now use a later version of max and no longer have this option either.

4. To rotate the HDR you need to enter a U offset value from 0-1, so to rotate 180 degrees with would enter 0.5, 270 degrees 0.75 etc.

5. Add a vrayphysicalcamera, and set the aperture and shutter speed to something that would work for a typical outdoor scene, like F4, 1/200th & ISO 100. Remember that you are in effect using a completely manual camera, there is no 'P' or automatic mode so you need to experiment with different exposures until you get a good result.

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6. Hit render and see what you get. If it looks too dark/bright I tend to adjust the bitmap's output rather than the vraylight multiplier, so that I can have a couple of ready setup HDRi's ready to drag and drop onto the dome light. In the examples below I use an output value of 1.5.

HDRi Skies

UPDATE: My HDR Sky shop is now open, please buy my products there instead, thanks!

The first HDRi skydome is available on 3docean. It's a clear blue sky with just a few clouds. I'm hoping to be able to offer packs at a discounted price as well, but that's dependent on 3docean, so for now it's just going to be individually. Feel free to let me know what type of skies you would like to see next, the image below is just a selection from many!

Paulistano chair

Decided to finally start selling 3d models and HDR images. First up is my model of a chair by Paulo Mendes da Rocha. It's such a cool chair, I really should use it more often in my own renders! If I sell enough of these I might be able to afford a real one.

I decided to go with 3DOcean.net as they seem to be more focused towards quality than other 3d assets sites. Here's the link to my model: Paulistano on 3DOcean.net

195 Richmond Road

Slideshow of a recently completed project for Lynas Architecture in Hackney, London. 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.