New church facility

[John Martin]

Hi all,

 

Here is my first attempt at a V-Ray exterior since I bought it. It is a potential new church hall facility in NC that is far from finished. C&C are welcome. I am taking some photos today of some nice sky backgrounds locally and will be adding a nice background this evening. I also just purchased Onyx Tree Broadleaf and conifer and will be working tonight and tomorrow evening on gettting a nice planting scheme done. Not a lot of time to work on things as this is an after hours job and the family needs attention too LOL

 

Regards,

 

John

[aaron-cds]

Hello John,

I think there are a few things you could improve.

 

- the asphalt is too dark

- the foreground grass should be a photo composited in photoshop

- the sun is not bright enough / shadows look good though

- the trees are too repetative

- the glass in the large structure doesn't look realistic

- the cropping of the building on the left is bad

- there is too much asphalt in the foreground. It would be nice if there was a landscape island in the left corner

- add landscaping at the base of the building in a few key places

- put a car and some people under the canopy for scale and a few cars at the right side of the parking lot.

 

I photograph my own skies too, but if that doesn't work out you could try these sites for free sky images.

 

www.1000skies.com

www.imageafter.com

[John Martin]

Aaron,

 

Thanks for the remarks. Since I am fairly new to the Viz side of the house I do not have a very large selection of images and textures and this is my 1st real attempt at anything outside of Viz Render. Much of what you have noticed will be fixed over the course of this week. The foreground grass will be V-Ray fur most likely with a displacement mod for the stuff in the background. I do not as of yet own photoshop so I can not do any post yet as I need to save up some money to get it since my bank account has been depleted with my recent purchases LOL This mage was done quickly in an effort to get the congregation excited about the project with the intention to get it finalized later. I will also be doing some interiors and most likely a 3D floor plan type image.

 

As far as asphalt goes, the entire parking lot is going to be new and the client wants to see things looking that way. I will probably get some fresnel on it and lighten it a bit to make it much more realistic. Right now it is a standard asphalt map from Civil 3D. I am not sure how I am going to minimize the amount of foreground asphalt as that is the design of the parking lot. Maybe adding a coar to this area would help but I think that would take the focus off the building. I may add some landscaping in this area and maybe frame the building with a couple nice Onyx 3d trees in the foreground. I may try a couple differnet versions and post for comments.

 

The trees are freebie RPC and will be replaced with Onyx proxies this week. I just bought Onyx last week and have yet to do anything with it do to lack of time to learn it.

 

The glass defintely needs a lot of love. Right now it is just a V-Ray material with a reflection map on it since I have not had the chance to learn how to do glass properly. I need to read up on the forums to get a good starting point.

 

Cropping of the structure on the left is definitely bad. With out a goo d background that was done on purpose to minimize what I had to do with that rear corner. There is an existing church behind the new structure that I plan on photographing and possibly doing a camera match but until I can get out there I will have to keep that area trimmed off.

 

Landscaping will be done tonight and tomorrow evening. Right now this is just a 35% design so I have a lot of license on what to do per the architect to mkae the image look good and using onyx I will be able to do a lot of nice stuff.

 

Cars, cars, cars. I have NONE!!!!! Only the freebie RPC VW and Peugot which I DO NOT like. I think I am going to have to break down and get some ASAP. I like the ones in the Dosch library but they are pricey, although they look fantastic, even up close.

 

I really appreciate the time you took to make suggestions. Right now I have the desire to do fantastic images and I think the talent is there, but I am feeling that I need to spend some time and money on materials, which to me is my biggest letdown. Having only a couple hours in the evenings to work on stuff makes it hard since I have to start and stop a lot and can never devote enough time to get on a roll with anything. I never realize how much money you have to spend at the beginning to get a lot of the stuff you need. But in the end it is money well spent as it can make you a decent amount of money. The hardest thing for me so far has been trying to learn new software and produce work at the same time. My company has recently seen this image, and although it is nowhere near complete, they want to know if this is something we should be doing and I told them YES!!! That would completely rock since I would be able to use the software at work and learn it a LOT faster. They just put the cost into the budget and we will probably be purchasing Viz or Max within the month.

 

Thanks again Aaron, and BTW, the images on your site look very nice.

 

John

[aaron-cds]

John,

Thank you for the compliment.

 

Drop what your doing right now and get over to Bestbuy and pick up Photoshop Elements for $99. It has all of the basic tools to do post production work. You can pick up CS2 when you have more money. Photoshop Elements is the same as CS2 without some of the features. Once you learn PE you can transition easily into CS2. In the mean time, you'll have a very valuable tool to use for $100. It really is essential. You'll spend far less time photoshoping the grass in rather than using displacement. That approach is only good for animations.

 

I agree about the parking lot. Just make it lighter in the background to give it some variation. Don't worry about the cars. I downloaded some free cars from accustudio.com a long time ago and rescaled them and formatted them for use in viz. You're welcome to the max files if you want. I don't use them anymore. I'm using sugar3d.com cars. There is a sample sugar3d car with vray materials you can download from there site. Although it's a Chrysler Crossfire (I think it's an ugly car). It's worth trying. There cars are $69 each.

 

If you want the max files of the accustudio cars just shoot me an email. It's on my website.

[John Martin]

Here is a file that is quite a bit brighter. I think it makes a big difference. i will work on the other problems tonight.

 

John