Architectural vizualisation

Hi everybody,

last week i produced a vizualisation for a small housing corporation in northern Germany.
The project is an apartment building with 4 floors.

It was created from an AutoCAD-Import (via FBX). However the Mesh i imported was very unclean and i had to remodel huge parts of it.
Its the first time i used particle grass for a professional vizualisation and i made excessive use of the compositing nodes since i learned that at the Advanced Blender course last weekend in Leipzig.

The picture has already been handed over to the corporation but for private purposes i am looking for comments and critics. So please don`t hesitate to say what you think.


First of all, very good model!
I think there are a couple of things that could be improved, most of all lighting and texturing.

The light don’t match very well the environment, probably a bit of blue tone would be enough. Shadows look a bit too hard in respect to the ones of the background picture, probably because it was taken in a cloudy day.

About texturing, well first of all the grass looks like painted, not real, and have a different colour from the grass of the background picture.
Then spread a bit of bumps around: tiles on the roof, noise on concrete, walls…

Keep it up! :rolleyes:

I like. The biggest improvement would be in the landscaping design surrounding the building.
A good planting scheme with more variety in hard and soft landscaping and some shrubs and trees like the scheme has bedded in for a couple of years will really help the appeal.

The composition is very “informational”. You should try some other angles that immerse you in the scene.

Much architectural rendering is at the “magic hour” when the sun is going down but there’s still a lot of skylight.

You get rich purples and blues from the sky and warm oranges and yellows from the street lights and lighting from within the building.

is it BI ? really neat. :slight_smile: I’m interested in going into Arch Viz myself actually.

http://img195.imageshack.us/img195/6787/feedbackv.jpg

I would fix these stuf with the comp nodes, doing alpha pass for the structure, grass etc.

  • tiny bit of focus blur at the end of the structure
  • match grass with photo grass in color
  • hue the structure a bit more to the blue, cooler feeling

Why don’t you use Yafaray renderer? It has a sun system and GI for better realism.

@simpo he hasn’t told yet what render engine he used.

but yafaray seems so far behind getting on the 2.5 train. is there a exporter on par with luxrenders? or v-ray for blender? They have interactive material previews, very easy settings and you can get rendering within 5mins from starting.

i’m reading on yafarays page because I would like to test it for animations since it’s supposed to be fast w/ good result. but there’s instructions for blender 2.49 :S

Bluntman to the rescue :slight_smile:
You said thats your first “professional” project, however I am uncandied as usual, not to offend you but to help you improve :slight_smile:

The main question is what the requirement of the project where.
If it was photorealism to mime a photo of the finished building it´s a fail.
If it was a technical render, just to visualize how the building would change the appereance of the area and give an indicator on what it would look like it´s cool.

But as it was a contracted work and the client obviously payed it´s a win. And it´s a good thing to build a client base, especially for architectural stuff. So be sure to improve as well, word of mouth is the best advertisement you can have in that profession. In the construction buisness is a lot of favourism, so if you impress one of them, he´ll make sure others are impressed too :slight_smile:

Things to improve (some already mentioned) and random brabbel:

Choose your weapon wisely and know how to use it. If you know your way in Blender Internal it can achive almost photo realism, however your render does not. To me it looks like a better OpenGL render. For what I see you haven´t even used AO?
You might want to consider Luxrender, Indigo, Yafaray or Octane, where latter one is not free. Try them out and use what gives you desireable results the easiest way in shortest time.

Read up on lightning. I looked on your homepage, and lighting is a huge weakness on your side. I recommend Digital lighting and rendering it is a great book about the topic and software independend.
Your render does not match up. The background image has a whole different mood than the composite model, it seems to be a cloudy day in the afternoon, with diffuse bluish light, you choose a warm sunlight with hard long shadows, something that occurs at around 10am in summer - It´s very hand to use a sunlight simulator/sun system for archviz, like Yafaray, Octane has, there is even an addon for Blender for it. Where you can set geographical longtitude and latitude, choose the day of the year and the time of the day.

With proper lighting you can start to improve material and textures. Your model looks like painted cardboard. Be careful and niggling with the materials, you can always re-use them. It´s not like concrete is to change a lot over night :wink:

Not FOSS but free, a good asset to archviz, Draftsight. It´s a free AutoCad clone from the makers of SolidEdge.

As archviz is often printed, you might want to calibrate your screen (for budget you could get a Pantone Hyue Pro or a Datacolor Spyder 3 Pro. I went with Datacolor, I like the hardware better and they offer on demand software upgrades.) Mine are calibrated to 90cd/m2 (i work in a cave :smiley: ), whitepoint at 5800Kelvin and gamma at 2.2 and it looks rather bleak and dark at the same time.
In archviz often the clients simply want to print their stuff and hand it out, not correct it before printing. Especially if you get RAL colors for the plaster. If the printing device uses a color profile it´s usually calibrated good enough and the print will not match what the client sees on his uncalibrated screen, but the print will match the original RAL colors. They´ll be happy if you tell them if they complain the colors do not match, that its the clients fault and that the print looks exactly like the house will look if they stand in front of it on 2nd July at 8am. For such stuff I often use keydates.
Like for construction plant prototypes I choose the date of the company founding, or of the start of the prototype building.
For architecture you can choose the day of the hand-over of keys. Then you can tell the the building project organizer they can tell their customers “…and thats how your flat will look like when you hold your keys in your hands if you sign now”

Help the client sell his product, your client will help you sell yourself.
Like Michael already said… informational… sell the building. Usually archviz stuff is the advertisement of the building. Exaggerate.

I´ll stop here - hope there´s some advice you can use.

Thanks for all the comments, espacially the last one (even as it was written by a follower of chaos). I really appreciate them!

I used AO and EL. Most of the problems that you saw i choose not to solve. For example the gras. I`m happy that it looks kinda like gras and as you say, for an “informational” pic it is more than enough.

I think i have to say, that “professional” in this case is relative. Mainly i am an architect doing design work, detailing, calculating, … and simply do not have the time to do “professional” archiviz. I meant this was the first one that actually is presented to the public on an open house day. It took me 3 days to get this result and it should have been 2.
The target was a for the layman “nice” looking picture that is done as quick as possible with my limited knowledge. Since i learned a lot over BI at the advanced blender course in Leipzig i prefer it to Lux, Yafaray and others. Additionally i dont often work with the other renderers and dont have the time to fight with them.

As for Draftsight: i already loaded it (because i think about switching to linux). I am a geek in AutoCAD and ArchiCAD but i can`t draw a wall or line or something useful in Draftsight. I sat there for about 15 minutes and accomplished nothing (and simply adding a cube counts as nothing). The first 5 seconds in Blender were more satisfying than 15 minutes of this. But since youre the second who recommends it i will sit down for another 15 minutes…


i edited this post and posted a new one for the new project.

Attachments


1 - looks miles better than the first image.
you seem to have improved your attention to detail - i like what you’ve done with the trees, and you’ve done some nice interlacing with the car.

the trouble with modern architecture is that it mainly consists of blocks of concrete, and due to the lack of textures, makes it hard to achieve realism. to overcome this, i might have added a few soft spots under the building to fake GI, a very, very light grungemap [intended to make it look realistic instead of dirty, as you wouldn’t want to disgust people], and then maybe colour - corrected the photo to bring out the colours to make it look happier [on the advertising side of things].

but other than that, well done :slight_smile:

edit: i also like what you’ve done to the factory windows, but maybe the rest of the windows could do with a small reflection?