What if you can't fudge it?

[benjaminbourgoin]

So, I have my own strategy for achieving this, but I'm curious to hear about other people's solutions. I'm currently working on a very large urban project, with massive context, many of the renderings involve dozens of other enormous sky scrapers bounding the site, in such a dense urban context that it is impossible to get a good and clear photo for backgrounds or hdri environments. Its also highly impractical to try to model and texture this amount of context, (10 square miles of dense urban fabric). Furthermore, no one is being fooled by fake skylines, if you've lived in Seattle for any period of time. This isn't the type of project where you can montage several photos into the horizon from other cities and fudge the background. So what do you do? My strategy thus far has been to use a massing model around my own model, the model of the actual project is highly detailed, the rest is a clay rendering model with the correct building heights, locations, massing, and curb detail with the topography and streets. then in post production I can add a softened background, photographing the facades of each of the buildings, fixing their perspective, and face by face painting them in. Laborious, yes, photo-realistic, no, but it has a sort of atmospheric effect that can be interesting to play with light. So riddle me this ye old CG community, what if yo you can't fudge it? what if your scene is much to large for scattering trees and grass, and placing some boats in the harbor, and your clients are not star struck home-builders, and your design review board is made up entirely of experienced architects? THINK FAST haha

 

Best,

Ben.

 

Also, any other Seattleites hanging around? I'm in the process of applying to grad school for my Masters of Architecture, I'd love for another visualizer to take a look at my portfolio from a graphic and layout standpoint.

[Chris MacDonald]

I think you're probably on the right track with photographing building facades and such, especially for ground level views. I don't see why things that are photo-mapped can't look realistic? Could you not just focus on landmark buildings to begin with and model them with a low to medium amount of detail, UV unwrap them and do a really good job painting Hi-Res (4K+) textures? Most office blocks/skyscrapers repeat the same fenestration/details on every floor, or at least every couple of floors.

 

I recently needed some industrial units in the background of a few shots, and managed to make them look very convincing using this technique - though the texturing in photoshop can be a tad time consuming. I'll post some examples in a min, albeit that the buildings aren't exactly what you'd call skyscrapers.

[Chris MacDonald]

 

As you can see from the Screenshot, they're all very low poly and whilst they aren't likely to set the world alight from a design point of view, they do look very convincing when used in the background of shots. I'm pretty sure I sourced all of my textures from cg-textures and texturepilot, and each took anything from half a day to a whole day to do from start to finish.

 

I think as long as you get the buildings immediately outside of your site looking right, everything else will just fade into insignificance, the eye is automatically drawn to where there is most detail, and as long as you have the key buildings looking right, the brain will fill in the rest.