landscaping in marketing

[Aaron2004]

Hello!

 

I previosly asked a question in reguards to x-card vs rpc and after further thought I feel that I need to take a step back and ask a more general question.

 

If we are looking to make our landscaping in our marketing pieces really flourish and not have that limit the prestentation of our houses, what is the best way to go about this? Is it post processing in photoshop? Do most companies drag and drop their own plants/trees in the scene or are they drawn in? I doubt the latter is true. If we do this in 3D, I take it that x-card/rpc is the best way to go...geometry seems to be too slow and clunky.

 

I am looking at a photoshop plugin called Verdant, but I'm not too happy with the results as of yet. Is there any advice out there? What is common industry practice?

 

Thanks!

 

Aaron

[Devin Johnston]

For renderings we use Marlin studio's trees and bushes because the quality is much higher than with RPC's. It's really much easier to put all of the landscaping in after the rendering is finished, plus you don't have to spend the extra power and time rendering all of that stuff. There is the occasion when I'll use RPC's in renderings but more often than not it's done in post.

[danteprojetos]

Sorry to butt in, but what technics do you use to put all of the landscaping in photoshop? just inserting, scaling and drawing soft shadows?? Or is there a easier way? I can't seen to get it right

My opinion, based on renders I see everyday is, RPC quality is awful compared to inserted photoshop foliage, but, if you can manage to use vray, and its proxies, you can have 3d vegetation in your scene with millions of polygons that aren't impossible to render. Those in my opinion (the ones with 3d vegetation) are the best quality.

 

Thanks

[Aaron2004]

Maxer,

 

I've been to Marlin Studios...I was looking at their trees/plants package. That cost a couple hundred dollars. I went to got3D.com and looked at their things and it was only 50 dollars for about a dozen trees. I don't see myself using more than a dozen. Of course, there were no flowers.

 

What package did you use? You simply render out the house in 3D Studio and then you insert landscaping in photoshop? Does that include landscaping stones and driveways as well?

 

 

Thanks!

 

Aaron

[Devin Johnston]

The techniques to insert landscaping are pretty simple, if you have the right sized images to start with. We have marlin studio's Image Cells which are images with alpha channels, this allows an easy grab and insert into your rendering. Once it's in you usually need to adjust scale and brightness and contrast to make it look correct for your scene. Shadows are pretty easy, I just duplicate the layer of the plant or tree that I want a shadow, turn down the brightness and contrast to black and then make it transparent until the image has the same transparency as the shadows in my scene.

 

As for the got3d.com content, the thing that is bothering me about them is the format they are stored in. They are stored in a jpg format which means they are already compressed, which means you are already getting something that isn't optimal. Marlin Studio's images are all tiffs or TGA's with alpha channels in them so it's much easier to get them into your images. I suspect that this difference is the reason for the price gap, I would spend the extra money and get the higher quality tiff, but that's just me. For rendering I'm using Max 7 and typically I'll render out everything except for the landscaping and just do that in Photoshop.