wooooord.
heres a couple stillz from a job im working on/should have finished a couple months ago. its for someones masters thesis, which i think involves the history and ideas behind the Firestone House in Ottawa, which was torn down a while back.
so this is a digital reconstruction from plans/sections and some photographs.
not absolutely satisfied with them, as i could pick out several areas that id like to greatly improve, but theyre good enough for their purpose.
sorry for the small pics, will try to upload bigger ones later.
and ive got a couple more that just started cooking.
oh. rendertime was 120 hours each. i just threw each of them on a couple work machines and forgot about it for a few days.
071108 UPDATE
a couple new ones. once again, no time to go back and rerender/change stuff so im making the best of what i have.
these were “only” 70 hours for 1800x1200 (same rez as above ones).
im happy with how the wood texture came out, as its one of the first ive painted from scratch.
Very nice! I only have one crit and it’s the grass. You can give some grass particales on it if you like. In other words, I like the inside of the house very realistic. I’ll give you 4/5 stars.
I must admit however, I was more fond of the light and feel in staircase_2 (above). The light sort of make the entire image a bit flat in this new render. Maybe it’s the ambient light (i.e. not enough shadows)?
Some newbie questions:
120 hours? How fast is that machine? Do you recommend Indigo? Is it faster/better than YafRay/internal? Are the trellises modelled (using array modifiers) or just textures?
thanks everyone!
rendered with Indigo, for the extra touch of realism.
Kaos86: unfortunately Indigo doesnt support particles yet, and i wanted to keep the polycount from exploding. wouldve been nice though… i might paint some in postpro.
ID_John: naw, rendered with Indigo. i didnt have the time/patience to set up a decent light system in Blender and with Indigo its so easy.
Mats Halldin: thanks dude! different project, i was just recreating a demolished house in this one. the lighting in the photos comes out quite different, im gonna have to play around with the sun position maybe…
Indigo (www.indigorenderer.com) is generally much slower than Yafray/BI because of the algorithm it uses. despite its slowness, i think it has several advantages that make me prefer it over Yafray and BI, especially for still architectural shots (depends what youre trying to do, obviously):
it is artefact free, meaning no splotchy photons or weird shadow edges and such
the lighting is much more realistic, there are no seperate settings for caustics, GI, shadows, antialiasing. everything is calculated as if it was real. thats why its so slow.
the machines i used were dual core 2.1 GHz with 2 gigs of ram, if i remember correctly. i basically started the renders and left for a few days, hence the 120 hours.
everything is modelled, but i used the array modifier alot to save me the headache of placing each thing by hand. much more efficient.
thanks guys!
updated with a couple more.
render times were such because i went to work, started the renderings, got caught up in school deadlines and other things, finally got to come back a few days later and voila. im sure they didnt need 100 hours. and they rendered at 1800x1200 too. but yeah, unbiased=slooooowww…
thanks again for your comments/critiques!
Indigo is in actual fact quite simple to set up and use. it is different from other renderers (such as Blender Internal) in that it makes you think of a material as an actual physical material and what makes materials appear as they do in the physical world. for example, its not so much as adjusting different spec or hardness settings or reflection values and sampling depths, which are pretty abstract and far removed from reality, rather it brings it to a more real-world relevance. materials have color and materials have a certain texture and roughness to them. as well as absorption, transmittance, etc etc.
so i think to understand how to use Indigo, tutorials in photography would be more useful than a technical tutorial about a->b->c->d. follow? thinking like a photographer makes you focus on the composition, the play of light, texture and form and i think Indigo makes it much easier to do so without getting lost in a million parameters for GI or something. understanding the settings for Indigo is pretty easy, its more of a matter of pulling out a nice image from the combination of light, form and texture.
of course, im down for answering any questions about my techniques or process or workflow!
xformation: thanks man! i also thought they were pretty cool. definitely unique around these parts, too bad they knocked the house down.
