Improving skills

[adamopinheiro]

Hi, I would like some advice on how to improve my skills in rendering.

 

I'm an architect and have a small firm, and I have been doing all of the rendering for presentation myself. As I do a lot of stuff, I really don't have too much time to prepare my stills, hence the repetitive objects in the scenes (as they are for different clients, and for internal presentation only, its ok). I learned 3ds Max while graduating, about 6-8 years ago, all by myself. I usually do a lot of thing which I know they are not the best solutions, but as I didn't have anyone to tutor me, its doing that or doing nothing, so I have to deal with it.

 

Anyways, after such a long time now I'm deciding to invest to improve my 3D skills so I can get better images for my projects. I've recently invested in a new machine (i7 2600k, Quadro 4000) and I'm using up to date software. But I think it doesn't matter how much you invest in hardware if you don't know how to take the most of the softwares.

 

I model everything in Revit and render using Vray. I usually get the settings from evermotion exterior scenes. As I told, I learned to use the hard way.

 

please check my renders here if you will: http://www.sergiopinheiro.com/galeria-projetos.php

 

Thanks in advance.

[RyderSK]

Adamo, from quick look, what needs improvement mostly isn't 3D per se.

 

3 quick tips: Change the perspective to more relaxed, parallel type on most of your renders. Your renders have all king of crazy angles and it doesn't suit the architecture.

Lightning: Most of your renders are front-lit and therefore your scene has very little depth and look flat. Learn to light with more interesting angles.

Skies: Your renders feature horrible low-res oversaturated skies. Sky can make up 50perc. of the whol visualization look ;- ) Get some nice, high-res skies and learn how to color tweak them to suit your visualizations. Look at some architecture photographers (like FG+SG, my favourite, they know how to make brigh sunny look awesome and not kitschy ;- )

[adamopinheiro]

You are absolutely right. The sky images are terrible indeed, very old low res pictures. I'll try to take some good sky photos.

 

The crazy angles are due to the fact that I'm awful at making the landscape surrounding the buildings. So I usually have to close up so that it does'nt show much around. That's something I need to improve badly.

 

Lightning, you nailed it. I do use only one source of light to the photos.

 

Well, great feedback to guide me where to look for improvements, thanks!