Here’s a building from a short film I’m making… It’s only in two shots… Mainly influenced by early Frank Ghery, British brutalism, Shin Takamatsu and a million and one movies/dystopias! There maybe a little Grimshaw/Rodgers, but subverted and made ugly too!
I know I should let it cook longer, but it’s not a finished thing in itself!
Oh, forgot to mention. Cycles of course!
Great design and great materials, I can see a clear display of the lighting and shading power of the Cycles engine compared to the old BI engine (even though it doesn’t have every shading feature BI has yet).
I find the top image easier to look at because the background isn’t near as bright (it also has better anti-aliasing around the edges as a result)
for sure this is nice and distingushed, allow me to give tips
1- choose a more nighty background if you still want to keep these yellow lights
2- eliminate the noise a bit
3- there’s something wrong with the rails, maybe i can’t describe it well.
ps: I like the snow, how did you make it, did you paint the textures? stencils?
Thanks Ace!
I must be crazy trying to do a big piece in cycles, but the speed (on a 560 ti) and the interactivity/quality make it really nice to work with even now!!
Last week I did an animation for a games company that sadly I can’t show yet (and I REALLY want to!) but using Cycles on that was great!
Zliauddin MK, Why change names so often? makes it hard to keep up!
1- never heard of the “magic hour”? (the architect’s favourite) the second shot just doesn’t have a “proper” sky!
2- yep… but I’m more worried about these in the context of the shot!
3-yep
The snow/rock material uses nodes to work out how “sloped” the geometry is and then blend materials accordingly.
Here’s my description from the “cycles” thread ( now buried under a heap more posts!)
Here’s the node setup on some other geometry… the trick is taking the normal and doing a dot product with the z axis (second vector input is 0,0,1) this gives a greyscale value for slope…
The “less than” node acts as a boolean so slope values less than this are snow, more than this are rock. It uses the final normal after displacement… sadly the “original normal” gives the face normal (un smoothed) so looks very blocky… I wanted to use “original” so I could drive procedural displacement with it!
Strong image! The only part that bothers me is where the sphere intersects with the rest, it is not well connected or in balance. Or is it something that crashed on the building? though it doesen’t seem a craash either.
Now I’m really intrigued to see the finished video and find out what it’s about 
good luck!
This is clever. Really clever.
Work on the lighting, because it’s making the textures look really flat… Darker sky, broodier/menacing lighting. Get the camera lower.
