My first WIP on Blenderartists

Hey all, this is my first WIP i’m posting on Blenderartists. After following the Blender Guru Architecture Academy I felt confident enough to start my own architectural project.

I’m now recreating an old city gate from drawings made back around 1750. The gate was demolished in 1824, so there are no pictures or even construction plans from this gate. My goal is to create a photorealistic render, would be awesome to have a ‘picture’ of a building that was long gone before photography was invented.

Please give as much feedback as you can/want. I really want to learn more from this project, even more then I already learned from Andrew Price’s Architecture Academy ; )

Last render:


http://i.cubeupload.com/iIarcQ.png

http://i.cubeupload.com/NfFMbl.png

http://i.cubeupload.com/zsB0A2.png

http://i.cubeupload.com/bD7wCm.png


Last render:


Things I want to add

Modeling

  • More foliage which will cover all the visible dirt on the left
  • Wood planks at the waterside (to keep the ground from collapsing)
  • Another Ivy on the wall on the right
  • Fences and a garden section in front of the building on the right (also someone lifting goods into a boat)
  • Boats, people and a lot of goods to make the scene come to life. (but don’t have a good feeling about making characters yet… :stuck_out_tongue: )

Materials

  • Imperfections on all materials, scratches, dents, wheel tracks, weather effects, etc.

The model look great and if You add those things it will be a good result.

Looks great. I’m two-weeks-new to Blender and have leaned a lot from Andrews tuts. Keep up the good work. You have me impressed.

Great project. You’re doing well so far. I like the idea of wanting to recreate something and showing how it would have been so long ago.

Thanks, I live in a really old city (Haarlem, The Netherlands), so my final goal is to recreate this city like it was around 1750. I also want to make models that are optimized for use in UDK so it’s possible to do a real time walk trough the city.

New render:


Its a good start. Look at reference photos of tiled roofs to see where they weather / wear the most. Some ambient occlusion will help in places too. The edges are noticeably sharp on the corner towers at the front of the image, a small bevel here will make a big difference. The lighting runs the risk of making your image quite dull, a bit more contrast and saturation will help in my opinion (i’m talking about on whatever lights you are using, not as a post process to the image).
Your modelling is really nice and the image looks great. Good job with the wall and grass on the left hand side of the image it looks really good! :slight_smile:

I agree with Words, your modeling is great. Just tweak the lighting a bit…perhaps make it softer and add contrast. And you might take a look at the lower set of windows. Something looks ‘off’ there.

Otherwise, very nicely done :slight_smile:

Thank you for the good feedback! Some good points to work on :slight_smile: I also want to bring the scene to life, but I’m looking for a way to do this without using people or animals, as I’m really bad at modeling those. Any idea how I could tell a story with only objects? I don’t want to tell the “everyone is gone and left their stuff” story. :stuck_out_tongue:

What would any of you advise for the ambient occlusion? I tried adding it to the render, but my render ends up lighter and the lighting is more ‘flat’. I also tried rendering a seperate occlusion pass and combined it with the render in photoshop. This gave a much better result, lighter in some places, darker in others, but overall more contrast and shadows.

How could I achieve this directly in the render, would be nice if I don’t have to do the post process everytime I do a render.

The proportions seem to be a little off. I would make the windows a little bit smaller - right now they are more sized like doors. It gets obvious when you compare them with the railing (railing should be 1/2 height of a human). As you already said the materials need some work. Right now they seem very much like paper. Maybe you should add some imperfections to the geometries aswell to go for a more realistic look.

You maybe have already seen this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W07H7xeUnGE

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