Massing study-montage

[Tim Saunders]

I hesitate putting this in the WIP forum just because I won't be making any changes for a while. However, If the design concept gets apprved, I will develope a more complete version so in a sense it is a WIP. This is a conceptual massing design. Attached are the concept sketches I was given, then I had pretty much full liberty to come up with whatever for the design. I took some inspiratin from the new RadioShack Riverfront Campus buildings I saw in a magazine.

[Tim Saunders]

I'm just starting to do more Photo montage work lately, and am still trying to get the hang of it. I think one of my legs is linger than the other, because stitching the background images together was quite a chore and that may show in the perspective.

 

The models are not even close to fully developed as it is a massing study so there are no posts in the balcony railings, no windows on the towers, no doors on the balconies, etc.

 

I just wanted to get some feedback on the overall design and the photo montage.

[chuck]

Tim,

 

They seem to fit into the backgrounds just fine. Your renderings are a little sharper than the photo's, but that can be worked out later.

 

The second shot has a lot of potential, but my eye bounces down to the roofs in the foreground. This shot would be great at dusk/night i think. You'd have a nice glowing set of buildings, a long string of headlights/tail lights, and the roofs wouldn't be an issue.

 

I wish I had a view like that in Detroit.

 

Chuck

[Tim Saunders]

Thanks Chuck. I for sure want to do a night scene when I do the final renderings (is there such thing?). I too think the roof tops are a bit much on the second image. I kept them In this phase only to show the buildings' relationship to the surrounding. Later that will for sure be cropped out.

[TRANSPARENT]

These images look great. Are there good tutorials for this process?

[Tim Saunders]

These images look great. Are there good tutorials for this process?

There may be, but I am not aware of any. Here was my proccess.

 

1- Satalite image. I got a high resolution image of the neighborhood (not a google earth image).

2- Photos, photos, photos. I took a crap load of photos of the surrounding 3 block radius and studied the buildings quite a bit.

3-Then I modeled some very primitive masses of the surrounding buildings and scaled them the best I could with the satalite image assigned to a plane.

4-Camera matching. After having the mass buildings done and the satalite image to as close to scale as I could to match my photos, I started placing cameras in my scene trying to match them to the camera angles I had when taking photos. It is very helpful to have the photo on one monitor and your 3d scene on the other to try to adjust the camera as close as you can.

5-Test renders. I did some quick test renders at like 800px wide. Even though this produced crappy resolution, this is only for adjusting the camera angle.

6-Photoshop testing. I just coppied the test render image on top of the photo in photoshop and scaled it so the mass buildings fit on the corrosponding buildings in the photo. I just decreased the opacity of the rendered image so I could see it lining up with the photo. I then made the adjustments I needed to make to the camera in the 3d scene to get the camera angle to line up better.

7-Final rendering. Once I got the angle figured out with the test renders, I rendered my full resolution version with the surrounding mass buildings and the ground plane turned off, so the only thing that rendered was the building(s). Then just go through the same scaling process as before only without having to bother with matching the surrounding buildings. By this time you should be familiar with how close the base of the building is with other buildings and sidewalks etc. Now just erase the areas of the rendering that are behind other elements.

 

If this was going to be a finished product of the final design I would spend more time putting trees in front of the rendered buildings to make it look more naturally in place, but we're still super early in the design phase, so I didn't take the time to do that.

 

So there you go.

[TRANSPARENT]

Very cool...I book marked this page as tutorial. Thanks alot.

[gfa2]

Very nice Tim. These are going to look great. I've never had the opportunity to do a project like this. I may have to do one just for myself...for the learning experience.