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!