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Tower - wip


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hey all, been working on this guy over the last week or so and wanted to get some fresh eyeballs on it to see if you had any comments. I haven't spent much time getting the masking done in photoshop for the exteiror so I know that still needs some work.

 

Thanks for any fresh ideas/pointers. Design wise and 3d Viz wise.

 

019Lobby.jpg

 

02017thCurtis.jpg

 

Ya, those are possible wind turbines in the tower up there. We're still experimenting with layout/design/type/sizes/etc.

 

Mike

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Guest nazcaLine

i like the tower. but, if you wanted to do a glass wall, i think it doesn't look like glass, lacks reflection and transparency (is it glass??).a second issue would be the vertical lines are just..well, too vertical. it might be my liking, of cours, it's something very subjective.

Eduardo

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I really like the exterior. The building is obviously modeled, but it's hard to tell what else is or isn't. Pretty nice.

 

The interior...those RPC's need contact shadows to ground them, but then again don't they always :rolleyes:. Seems like the interior might be brighter with all that glass. Are you using the vray with the physical camera?

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hey guys, thanks for the comments. Appreciate the time to take a look. So I think you're right with the reflectivity of the glass. I think I need to find an HDRI that more closely matches the sky, tone down the reflectiveness, and up the transparency. There are multiple types of glass going on the facade here, fritted, frosted, and transparent (not that apparent quite yet).

 

Everything besides the building is a photograph, I wish I could take credit for some of the other elements ;)

 

I did try to drop some contact shadows for the rpc's, but will try to emphasize some more (gosh those are time consuming to work with in photoshop) I would never put people in my scenes if I had a choice :cool:

 

The interior is one of my first attempts using the vray camera, phys sun, linear workflow method. It's quite a bear to break into that workflow, but am starting to see the benefits..

 

Thanks again for the response and look forward to more opinions.

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I did try to drop some contact shadows for the rpc's, but will try to emphasize some more (gosh those are time consuming to work with in photoshop) I would never put people in my scenes if I had a choice :cool:

 

I agree about adding people, seems like a necessary evil sometimes. Do you have some 3D people you can put in there just to see what shadows might look like in that environment? If you get lucky you might even be able to take it one step further and actually use the shadows of the 3d people (just hide their visibility from the camera) but use the RPC's for the actual people that you see. That can be problematic because of the shape differences...but it's worth a shot, I've done it with varying degrees of success. Posable 3D people work a lot better that static posed ones.

 

I'm also really digging the LWF techniques, I've found the Color Correct plugin to be really helpful....whole new world.

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Alright here's an update from a different angle. Thanks for the tip about the 3d people. I'll give that a shot. We've got a bunch of the axyz people here.

 

Time is running tight and I'm running about 8 hours per interior render and don't have much time to trial and error with 3d peeps.

 

PanoramadayCurtis001.jpg

 

Thanks again.

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A quick one would be to mirror the front two characters on the interior shot. That would help make the lighting on them blend more in with the lighting in your scene. That's usually the big giveaway when people are added. They are invariably studio lit and with quite strong lighting. This causes problems when we want them anywhere where they are not in direct light. They may be darkened but those distinct shadow edges reamin. Often a few minutes in photoshop taking the lightings edges off the character helps.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Hey guys, I've been working on the skin a bit more and wanted to get some get some fresh eyeballs on the matter. Any comments? I'm also having trouble deciding which sky to use.

 

I think the first is more elegant, but compositionally the second sky helps to keep the eye on the image. What do you think?

 

Thanks for the look.

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Ok, here's another update from the other angle I've been working on. I'm struggling with how much transparency to show vs. reflection in the glass. Any comments or criticism?

 

Just for curious eyes, I've attached what the render looked like before I sent it to photoshop for adjustments.

 

Thanks,

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I've done a fair amount of photoshop matte painting and adjustments on these guys to crisp them up a bit. I've tried to get a bit more reflection but I keep losing the interior detail that I think is more important, so I've kept the glass about the same.

 

The whole glass reflection/transparency is a difficult area I am definitely working to to improve.

 

http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b253/aliasmarks/panoramadusk17th004-1.jpg

 

http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b253/aliasmarks/PanoramadayCurtis008.jpg

 

http://i21.photobucket.com/albums/b253/aliasmarks/panoramanight17thColor004.jpg

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man,

 

these look great! I don't know if you posted this but could you post some of your lighting techniques? What render engine r u using? I am working on a tower and photo comp. right now as well and any tips would help. Do yo put the photo in bg and align camera that way? I am having a hard time with this? I end up noodling it in photoshop, way more than I feel I should.

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Hey Christoper, thanks for the reply. Glad you like them.

 

This project has been a bit of a discovery process so I'll try and outline some of my major steps.

 

- Site photos. This was a tight site so it was hard to get the whole view in one shot. I had to take about 9 pictures and stitch them together, thank goodness for the new photomerge command in CS3 (Alternatively, get a nice wide angle lens). I tried using that ShiftN program to straighten out the 3 point perspective to a 2 point with mild success and actually just ended up doing the perspective adjustments in Photoshop. Now the client wants to go back to a 3 point :p

 

- Import all of the surrounding buildings from google ketchup:) warehouse into sketchup. Export as a one object .3ds with all textures into Viz. This way I got the correct shadows and reflections. This only worked out really well because Denver is so well built up in the sketchup warehouse. Make this "site" object a matte object that doesn't affect the alpha. This also helps to align to buildings of the site photograph.

 

- Set the background photo in the viewport.

Untitled-1-3.jpg

 

Always turn the safe frame on to make sure the BG image when doing adjustments so it is being scaled correctly.

 

- Camera. I used a vray phys camera for this scene and begin to play with lining things up. Since I imported the 3d site from ketchup, I set the camera exactly where I was standing on the real site. Then, there's about 3 or 4 settings I tweak and play with until I get the angle right (see in the image below) Since you've placed the camera correctly on the site, you shouldn't have to move the camera at all, and just play with these specific settings.

 

Untitled-2.jpg

 

 

Take a look at the "walkthrough" part of the help file to figure out what those little footprints do. I use the over-ride shortcuts to use the ASDW keys while in walk through mode to look around and "walk" around a bit to line things up. Use the Film gate and focal length instead of the perspective button I've crossed out. Alternatively, if you're using a Regular Max camera, you can use this perspective adjustment next to the footprints in conjunction with a camera correction modifier.

 

Lighting and render: I'm using Vray obviously, One tergeted direcet light with Vray shadows with a slight yellow tint, and HDRI in environment GI and Reflection Slot that matches the photograph lighting.

 

Render out with alpha channel and drop into photoshop. About 75% of the job is done at this point and the other 25% happens with color, level, saturation, people, foliage, additions in post. Just as a reference, this post shows what one of my renders looked like before post.

 

etit: If you get things right, you shouldn't have to do any scaling or rotating in photoshop. This helps too if you need to re-render and just drop back in over top your "old" render layer in PS.

 

Hope this helps, and good luck

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  • 4 weeks later...

Looks so good. The tower looks awsome. I am by no way an expert, but the only thing is the overall image doesn't look blended. Like the 3d doesn't match the pic. I know this is silly but ....just my 2 cents. When I look again, I guess the only thing that throws it off for me is that red building to the left. I feel like it sticks out. The rest looks prety sick.;)

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