Jump to content

My First Exterior


Ken Walton
 Share

Recommended Posts

Hey everyone...

 

Rip it up... I know the design of the building sucks - these aren't exactly "high-priced" condos - but I tried to do the best I could with it. Any tips on composition (or anything else!)would be greatly appreciated. By the way - this is being used to pick the colors of the building/roof right now and these were the developer's first choices - not mine.

 

http://www.cgarchitect.com/forum/filepush.asp?file=better_grad.jpg

 

Thanks in advance,

Ken Walton

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I appreciate you taking the time to reply, but "you can do better with the illumination" and "Lighting needed some bit touch" don't really tell me anything. I realize that there is something lacking in the lighting, but this being my first exterior - I'm clueless as to where to start working on improvements. Any comments or suggestions for improvement will be greatly appreciated!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I would suggest the following:

 

Desaturated the greens by about 40%, and then add a hint of yellow and red to the image overall (just a tiny little amount) to improve the suggestion of warm sunlight.

 

Use a photographic image for the sky, what you have at the moment doesn't contain enough cyan.

 

Change the camera view to eye level, and be wary of parralax distortion! Add in some people using the space (e.g. walking up the stairs), and you should be heading towards a good image!

 

I actually think the quality of the render has a lot of potential - the grass and foliage will be very good once they're desaturated down to a more natural hue, and you actually have some quite subtle tonal variations already present in the shadows (you can set VIZ 4 to desaturate low light levels when you render).

 

Keep at it and good luck!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Ok - thanks so much for the input. With the exception of the people and the camera angle, I've tried implenting the suggestions so far with photoshop. Here are the results:

 

http://www.cgarchitect.com/forum/filepush.asp?file=planted_mod2.jpg

 

I think it looks a lot better already. The plants are all full-3D EasyNat objects from Bionatics (I'm kinda pissed about this special they've got going on - I bought $1200 worth of plants on Feb. 27th, and NOBODY I talked to at Bionatics mentioned that in five days, I could get 50% more for free...) Anyway, thanks for the advice so far. Anything else?

 

Kenny Walton

Link to comment
Share on other sites

try to add some texture in the sidewalk and the parking concrete.

move the sun a little down. if the sun touch the "interior" walls, maybe the imagen seems better.

The palms r very darks for me.

 

and post ur settings & Try with Monte Carlo , for exterior r very good.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Ray: Yes - when the easyNat objects are in 3D (even on the lowest LOD) the polygon count skyrockets, as does the render time. This image rendered in 3 hours. EasyNat does offer the feature of converting your 3D plants into hybrid 2d/3d objects or into 2D billboards, but the map generation seems very unstable to me - takes forever or doesn't finish at all sometimes.

 

DelfoZ:

I appreciate your advice, as I truly admire your work. My machine's in the middle of another render right now, but I think I can remember my settings.

 

Dual Xeon 2.4's/1GB RAM/Win2k/Max 6/finalRender-1/Photoshop

 

1 Sunlight system - Mult: 1 | fR Raytraced Shadows

 

Anit-Aliasing on - min: 0 max: 3

Consider Background on

GI On

Bounces:5

Skylight on: .6

 

Rays: 128

Sec Rays (off)

 

Density: 50

Min/max: 7

 

Forgetting anything?

 

I'll try lowering the sun - seems like a good idea. The concrete structures are textured - maybe I can increase the bump depth a little. The palms appear dark to me when I view them on my work (good) monitors, but everywhere else I've seen them (and in print) they look right. I'll try the Monte Carlo engine - but when I first attempted to render this scene, max said I didn't have enough memory to complete the raytrace (thingy)..... I closed some of the other programs I had open to get it to work, but right now it seems like it's at its max. Will the Monte Carlo kill it?

 

Thanks,

Kenny

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Looks pretty good so far Ken. My suggestion would also be to adjust the saturation of your plants. They are very dark on my screen. Especially the palms.

 

The building looks very good. The shadows and colors are nice and you can tell there is a lot of light bouncing around on your last image.

The roof material seems a bit dark, is it a shingle roof.

 

I don't agree with rpc elements being added, they are too fake looking and will ruin an otherwise good image. Maybe a car or two.

 

Keep at it, your very close to having a great image here!

 

Tony

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
 Share

×
×
  • Create New...