FlyinHawaiian

Holy mackerel that was about as dramatic of an intro as I've seen for archvis! And I've seen dramatic. I had to watch it a couple of times to enjoy all of the little animated bits going on! Especially liked the flat screen getting slapped on the wall. LOL! Of course, whether it's too over the top is obviously debatable. I see there are a few here that have even been annoyed by it. If you are looking for specific constructive crits, here are my 2 cents: With all of the animation work that went into the home screen, board room and VIP lounge, the "contact us" module and "launch gallery" areas are a bit of a disappointment. At the least, their look and feel should be consistent with the rest of the modules, as it is, it looks as if it was kind of an afterthought. I had to dig a little to find the "launch gallery" button. I'd suggest making it softly glow and pulse the glow ever so slightly if that's the point of the VIP lounge. The theater screen with the animated text is nice, but not sure of the purpose, I'd recommend playing a reel there, or displaying the demo work there instead of another window as Kyle was kind enough to point out. Boardroom is nice, but the laptop should open of it's own accord and not make the viewer hunt. Unless you are trying to make the website a game, the viewer should not have to guess and blindly click around too much. Lastly, if you are going to leave the dramatic intro animation to each scene, I would at the very least, have some way to skip it or automatically skip it if the viewer has already seen it once. This reminds me of the early days of flash when everyone in college put a 2 minute intro animation in front of their websites and there was no way to skip past it. Once is plenty, and even then, a "skip intro" button should be handy. As Maxer mentioned, you have a pretty unique site and with a little bit of polishing, it could also be highly usable besides being highly entertaining!

Those are some nice details in the couch. In my opinion, there might be a bit too much wrinkles in the pillows and perhaps the wrinkles could be reduced in intensity by about a fourth on the seat cushions, but of course, it may look different when the lighting and shaders are applied. For speed, an Oren-Nayer shader might work for the mats, but if you really wanted to match the nuances of the couch and had some time to mess with it, I think Vray Fur might be the best bet for the couch material. (All my opinion of course... ) Kind of makes me want to do this sort of thing, but I sleep little enough as it is. Nice start, looking forward to further updates! Aloha, Joel

LOL! I was breezing through your images and took a closer look at the reference images and was seriously impressed! Then I realized that I was admiring the reference images. LOL! The thing that really stood out to me was the intense reflections on the floor, if you can replicate this well, with all of the nuances and subtle variations, this is what sold me on the quality. Also, I notice that most modeled couches don't have nearly the detail in the seams as those real couches you had up. Things to consider when going for extreme photorealism. Cool reference and nice start. Let us know how it goes! Aloha, Joel

LOL! Yes, this tool is also good. (Can find out more info on it in the 3dsMax help. The way I just posted earlier is simply another way to transform your cad. The Align Surface normals is another (possibly even more efficient way to extract the right transforms or transform directly)) -Not sure if I came up with my current scheme because I was having problems with the Align surface normals tool, or what, but it's the first thing that came to my mind and it's worked pretty consistently for me.

Whenever I have problems where something is not rotated in perfect 90 degree angles and the rotation is baked in (for instance, rotated in the sub-object level or simply imported), you can grab the rotation relative to the scene through "autogrid" and then apply that same amount of rotation except in the negative to straighten your screwy object. First you need to find how much your imported cad is rotated. Usually, when you've manually rotated an object, you can figure out it's rotation by selecting said object and right clicking on the rotate icon in your main toolbar. This will bring up the "Rotate Transform Type-In" dialogue. The "Absolute World" transforms will show you how much your object has been rotated since creating it. If you hover your mouse over the "up/down arrow buttons" that are to the right of the box that has anything other than "0" in it, and right click. It will zero out that value - automatically resetting the rotation of your object to the original rotation. However, your object has the rotation baked in, so you've got to use a little hack. First, grab your offending cad, and add an "extrude" modifier to it and type in 10ft or so to the extrude height. (You can always delete this mod from the stack after you've made use of it). Next, create an object (any object - box is fine) and before creating it in the scene, check the "autogrid" box at the top of the "standard primitives" creation menu. Rotate to a perspective view where you can see a vertical face that was created by the "extrude modifier" which was applied to the cad earlier. Now, click and drag on to that vertical face and your newly created box should now be protruding off of the side of that vertical face. (You've now captured the rotation of the cad onto your box). With your newly created box selected, do the right click thing on the rotate icon and behold, the rotation of your box and, indirectly, the rotation of your cad should be listed there. Now, simply copy that rotation amount and paste it with a "-" in front of it into the rotation of your cad (hint: use right click rotation menu). Good luck! Aloha, Joel BTW, you've double posted the same Q. Might want to kill the other one.

LOL! I guess it's a good thing most of them don't frequent these forums, eh? Thanks for the laugh!

LOL! What a controversy I seem to have started! Here I thought I was helping out a noob by tossing out some very basic steps to achieve a good 3d "rendering" (Yes, I assumed 3d - it is CGarchitectect after, all, but nevertheless... My sincerest apologies to all of the under-promoted masses of napkin-sketchers out there.). By the phrasing of the question, I was assuming little to no 3d vis experience, but upon inspecting sunpapa's images, it's seems I've been set up. Apparently, sunpapa has done some decent work and contrary to my original impression, he is asking a much more broad, philosophical question as opposed to a quick "how to make my render more pretty than what I am currently doing". However, if the previous was the case, and it was a simple - "how to improve my skillz", I still believe that being able to accurately imitate reality is a strong basis for branching out in visual art. In regards to Steve's comments, I guess it's really semantics to label mood, composition, etc as basics or advanced. It all depends on who you talk to and at what level they are at. I've seen some pretty in-depth thought going into composition over on cgchannel (We're talking mathematical functions and variations of the golden mean being used to set up composition. I'll bet that most advanced artist here don't commonly take such things into account on their stills, etc.) But obviously all of these things are highly debated and controversial, judging from all of the responses. Might as well ask if modern art is really art. Perhaps our friend sunpapa just wanted to get some controversy going. LOL! In that case, bravo!

That's a good question. From a strictly technical standpoint, it should look realistic. (Compare to a picture, can you quickly spot the fake? - If so, rendering needs work.) Then, once you've got the basics down, you can move onto stuff like composition, color harmony, stylizing, etc, etc.

LOL! Got the "news flash" from Autocad, and immediately went here to see the fallout. Quite shocking, but then again, Autodesk seems to be snapping up a lot of programs lately. Still... The optimist in me thinks that perhaps the autodesk/softmirage combined forces will come out with a super program to rule them all. However, the skeptic in me thinks that this super program probably will not have any real competitors and Autodesk will begin to demand critical appendages in exchange for said software.

I've posted this before, I'm sure, but here's a survey I have up on The Area regarding other people's experiences with gaming vs specialized cards: http://area.autodesk.com/index.php/forums/viewthread/16168/ I personally run the 8800gts and an 8800gt and I'm more than happy with both.

Makes sense. I guess that would put it over the edge. And all in the same pass? I have no idea how they are interacting or what's involved, but at least in archvis, I find that if I need to use more than 4gb, the frames generally take forever and it's worth it to break stuff out into seperate passes. (This way, if just a part of it needs changing, you can render just that pass.) I'd especially assume that this would be true when calcing hair. Seems like a pretty finicky thing, and short of pro films, most of the 3d hair I've seen has been less than perfect (meaning it could have benefited from a little more tweaking by the artist and therefore, another pass). Can't imagine 12 people with cloth and hair all in the same scene! If it looks good, I'll have to give you some serious props. (Now I'm extra curious to see what you're working on.)

I've very rarely topped out my box (8gbs) though, with particles, and a lot of trees, I could see this happening. I'm really curious though, to see what sort of scenes you've worked on that have topped 12gbs. Are you able to post any images/frame grabs?

It's amazing how public perception can bring down a multi-billion dollar bank. A few people start freaking out and withdrawing all of their money, and even though it's clearly insured by the gov, everyone starts panicking and waiting in front of the bank, like it's the end of the world. Relax people! I mean, obviously, half of the problem is with the banks who decided to lend to anyone who claimed to be making money (no proof needed, just promise us you're making money ), but the other half is all the people packing money under their beds. Basically, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Fascinating times we live in. (Sorry for hijacking your thread Brian.)

LOL!

Classic! Speaking of which, just found out my bank went bankrupt yesterday. Sweet! I guess it's a good thing I don't have more than 100k... I mean... in that one bank account... you know... LOL! Fortunately, they were picked up by JPMorgan Chase, so things won't really be changing for me. Just glad I didn't have any of their stocks. Whew!