The devil is in the detail

 

Inspired by Bertrand Benoit I have been working on adding progressive levels of detail into materials and meshes of my visuals.  Here's an example of a fabric for the sofa in the Kensington apartment.  Future improvements will include:

• Proper UVW mapping of the cushions
• Depth of field in the camera shot
• Higher polycount for the bent glass table
• Improved material for the glass and book.
• Sunlight to match the environment background

Still Life - enhanced

I spent a bit of time working on the materials within my hotel suite project recently.  In particular I refine the subsurface scattering shader which I used for the grapes, and cleaned up the woodgrain shader.

Oldschool CGI Lighting

Modern Archviz techniques are based around complex simulations of daylight and photometric light settings.  The mentalray render engine uses Final Gather and Photon Mapping to automatically generate a distribution of light throughout a scene or a camera view but this requires a good chunk of computer resources to calculate and can take a hell of a long time.

Before all this clever software was available CGI lighting artists cleverly faked realistic lighting by using simple spotlights, omnidirectional lights and direct lights.  This is more art than science.

With modern computers being many times faster than those old machines, render times for old school lighting in these situations are tiny, so I've decided to try learning those techniques to help me generate walk-throughs which typically require many hundreds of frames.

Advanced lighting with Global Illumination, Final Gather and Ambient Occlusion

The same view with simple lighting to fake the natural daylight

Obviously my first effort at this isn't completely convincing, but it goes someway toward simulating the realistic lighting that can be achieved with a more complex approach - but with minimal rendering times.  More soon...

Happy Christmas!

Kensington Apartment updated

Lighting updated and did some major work on the chair and materials

progress...

Kensington update

Rug and updated fabrics to sofa

Sofa, so good

Slight texture seams, but getting there

Here's an update - I've refined the modelling on the sofa a little and textured it.  The diffuse has a bit of a seam, but I'm happier with the bump map and the mesh than I thought I would be.

Now to do something about that damned rug...

Kensington Apartment

Early stage of modelling

The inspiration

I found some fantastic photos of a Kensington apartment some time ago and I've been meaning to use them for inspiration on a personal project.  Here's what I've managed to sling together so far.  This is the first time I've played with the newer version of Max so I'm still torn between iRay and mentalRay for rendering.  I'll model everything up and then have a play with both.

The proportions need a lot of work and I have 3 photos to use as reference so it shouldn't be too tough to correct.

Original design was by SHH.

Back to nature

Arbaro trees with mentalray shader

I've wanted to add foliage to my scenes for some time now, but I didn't have the processing power required for rendering polygon-heavy geometry with my old laptop.  Now that I've got the desktop machine with a bit more power, I have investigated this little gem of a programme:

http://arbaro.sourceforge.net/

The procedural maths which the programme performs are very clever allowing you to make anything from a little desert tumbleweed with dried looking sticks and twigs, all the way through to an elaborate oak - when you know what you're doing.  Sadly with my tests I the sunlight seems to catch on the shape of the helix which is used within the tree, so it looks a bit unnatural from that point of view.

Low poly leaves with a very rough texture - needs improvement

I haven't delved that deeply into Arbaro yet, but I'm pleased with my results so far.  The geometry of the leaves in this example is too low quality, but that can be improved within the programme, and obviously some decent texturing wouldn't go a miss either.

Displacement rug

Mentalray Displacement

Well it took me a long time to get the settings right for this, and the render time was way beyond what I'd hoped for.  The tutorials I've seen for Vray displacement seemed to be faster with better results.  I'm not sure if there's still something I'm not doing right, but I worked the number of subdivisions carefully to give me as few as possible.

Rugs

In my ongoing efforts to learn more interior rendering skills I followed a few tutorials on the hair and fur modifier.  Here's the result:

Sheepskin rug test

...and a closeup

Hotel Suite - almost...

The modelling, texturing and lighting of the hotel suite visuals did get finished some time ago, though I have been so busy I didn't get around to finishing the post-processing work to the level I wanted. Here's a render which I quickly gave a little attention to in photoshop.  It's still not quite where I'd like it to be, but for now at least I have something to show for all that work.

Hotel Suite visuals

Here are some work in progress shots from my latest personal project.  I started this one to practice my modelling skills, so everything you see here was produced by me in 3D Studio Max.  Getting to grips with the cloth simulation tools seriously for the first time was quite rewarding, though there are some details that need refining in the images you see here.

This is also the first time I've gone through the whole modelling and assembly stage without adding anything besides plain material shaders, and it has made the process of putting the scene together significantly simpler without the distraction of adjusting diffuse values, reflectivity samples etc.

The scene is based on some gorgeous photos I found here on the Galaxy Hotel Iraklio website.  For this reason I cannot claim any copyright for the interior design or art direction in this instance.

Pretty soon I'll be adding materials and textures, so watch this space...

Cannot invert a Transformation matrix

I had a frustrating few minutes with mentalray today when i got this error message:

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/ps/dl/item?siteID=123112&id=13780301&linkID=12544120

Autodesk's pages are obviously their usual unhelpful selves and the only hint I came across was on a forum where Jeff Patton had suggested it was caused by an object scaled at 0%. On analysing my scene I found a sky portal object that was 100000x100000, probably due to snapping to scene extents by accident.

I hope this helps someone in the future who might trip over this post when they search for tech support on the same subject!

Recent renderings

Boardroom

Reception

Here are a couple of recent renderings.  I've had a bit of success with materials simulation and am getting to grips with the lighting still further, so I'm quite proud of these shots on that basis.  I also modelled the seating because the manufacturer's models weren't up to scratch. 

Interior / Exterior rendering

My interior visualisations have never successfully blended with the outside world - I never quite got the hang of adding an environment map until now.

The example above is far from perfect because there is no texture map or geometry detail on the ground, but at least now I'm getting somewhere.  The addition of real geometry trees using mrproxy objects opens up plenty of possibilities too.