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

banksy.JPG

Iain Banks AKA Banksy is a bit of a legend in arch viz, so make sure you check out his recently launched shop and blog. Looking 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.

scrapbook.jpg

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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T & S: From Bits to the Lens

Crazy that it has been 3 years already since Alex Roman released his seminal film, The Third & The Seventh. It still sets the standard for arch viz films, and arch viz stills too for that matter. Looking forward to receiving my copy of the book. Well done Alex!

www.thirdseventh-book.com/

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- http://www.thirdseventh-book.com/ --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "From Bits To The Lens" Book -- Beautiful 120+ hires imagery artwork, philosophy and processes behind the shortfilm in a 232 pages large format book. Help funding my next shortfilm through the book. All the book sales incomings will be destined to financing it. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- .Fullscreen it, please. A FULL-CG animated piece that tries to illustrate architecture art across a photographic point of view where main subjects are already-built spaces. Sometimes in an abstract way. Sometimes surreal. Credits: CG |Modelling - Texturing - Illumination - Rendering| Alex Roman POST |Postproduction & Editing| Alex Roman MUSIC Sequenced, Orchestrated & Mixed by Alex Roman (Sonar & EWQLSO Gold Pro XP) Sound Design by Alex Roman Based on original scores by: .Michael Laurence Edward Nyman. (The Departure) .Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns. (Le Carnaval des animaux) Directed by Alex Roman Done with 3dsmax, Vray, AfterEffects and Premiere.

Tind 3d print

Received a lovely little memento of the Tind project through the post this week :) Thanks everyone at Claesson Koivisto Rune!

Tind Dusk

A quick study of my favourite of the 3 Tind houses for Claesson Koivisto Rune. For me this is where making everything in 3d really pays off, being able to open an old scene up and do something completely different with it in a matter of minutes. The renderings of course, took hours!

I used sky 0902 for these dusk renders, but with a very low colour balance on the camera to make it look more blue.

Glenstone

I'd like to think that my best work is always my most recent work, but I'll freely admit that that's not always the case (you don't get to see the worst ones I'm afraid!). This is a project though that I am really proud of, and am pretty excited about being able to finally share. It's a new museum building by Thomas Phifer & Partners for the Glenstone Foundation near Washington D.C., which also features a landscape design by PWP Landscape Architecture. I'm not going to say much more about it just now, apart from that this is 3 of 22 images, the remainder of which I will publish once I get permission. I think I am also going to be doing a short talk about how I did all the landscaping, and other bits and pieces at the next State of Art Academy Day in October.

Sky used: 0902