First post! Want to improve my CGI's, one man band and need advice ....

[Mike Johnson]

Hi. I work for a very small design company here in the UK, who do a lot of property design and marketing - websites, branding, brochures. There are 6 of us here, designers and web monkeys, and I do our architectural CGI's. I am an illustrator by trade, initially old school airbrush, inkwork, watercolours ... but I've been sat behind a Mac for the last 15 years, and doing CGI's for 10 years. I model in ArchiCAD, render in Maxwell, finish in photoshop. I've learnt here on the job, so I have picked up some awful habits along the way. The less said about my early jobs, the better, as it's been a fairly painful learning process!

Because I haven't learnt from others in a big practice, or with any proper training, I need help pointing in the right direction. My bread and butter is static external views of small builds, nearly all bricks and mortar, slates and tiles, which I can cope with fine, but I struggle with internal views and fly throughs. Nearly all my CGI's are for sales brochures, a few to help get builds through the planning application process.

 

And a look through the gallery here is pretty soul destroying, as I see just how mediocre my best work is

 

So, I need to up my game. Can I do this with the tools I have to hand? Is it just my lack of training and expertise holding me back? Or do I need to look at other software to achieve better results ... C4D - VRAY - 3DS ...

 

Or after 10 years is there no hope for me and I am doomed to being just 'OK' ...

 

 

 

 

Fairly typical example of what I produce. Nothing to set the architectural world alight I'm afraid! I've posted a few more up in the gallery.

[philippelamoureux]

Hi. I work for a very small design company here in the UK, who do a lot of property design and marketing - websites, branding, brochures. There are 6 of us here, designers and web monkeys, and I do our architectural CGI's. I am an illustrator by trade, initially old school airbrush, inkwork, watercolours ... but I've been sat behind a Mac for the last 15 years, and doing CGI's for 10 years. I model in ArchiCAD, render in Maxwell, finish in photoshop. I've learnt here on the job, so I have picked up some awful habits along the way. The less said about my early jobs, the better, as it's been a fairly painful learning process!

Because I haven't learnt from others in a big practice, or with any proper training, I need help pointing in the right direction. My bread and butter is static external views of small builds, nearly all bricks and mortar, slates and tiles, which I can cope with fine, but I struggle with internal views and fly throughs. Nearly all my CGI's are for sales brochures, a few to help get builds through the planning application process.

 

And a look through the gallery here is pretty soul destroying, as I see just how mediocre my best work is

 

So, I need to up my game. Can I do this with the tools I have to hand? Is it just my lack of training and expertise holding me back? Or do I need to look at other software to achieve better results ... C4D - VRAY - 3DS ...

 

Or after 10 years is there no hope for me and I am doomed to being just 'OK' ...

 

 

 

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Fairly typical example of what I produce. Nothing to set the architectural world alight I'm afraid! I've posted a few more up in the gallery.

 

Do you guys design the buildings or just visualize it? Because, most of the time the super cool renders you'll see are displaying outstanding architecture... which helps alot.

 

I think your skills might be bottlenecked by the design of the houses here...it's quite repetitive, nothing extravagant. The color palette is a bit limited too I guess. Also, most of the time, what adds alot to realism is adding dirt/leaks/wear and stuff like that...but again, it's possible for personnal work but your clients probably don't want to see their architecture beaten up heh!!! I guess it's the bad part about working with other people's design heh!

 

I'm not a huge fan of 2d trees and vegetation neither. Maybe you could try to put 3d vegetation and try to get nice shadows out of it to make the image appear less flat. You could play with camera DoF/effects to make it more photographic. But again, imo, just adding some irregularities in the materials, a bit of dirt on the edges, etc will help !

 

Oh and technically your are using a Renderer which produce realistic results more easily than vray...vray require alot of fine tuning imo to get something very nice. I'm using Octane which is similar, but if you wanna go the vray way, prepare to have to check out alot of tutorials to get things to look as good as maxwell, as fast as maxwell...

 

Good luck!

Edited December 12, 2014 by philippelamoureux

[Mike Johnson]

Good points Phillippe. Yep, I just visualise, I don't design buildings. Although often developers will get me to make changes to the build after seeing early stages of a model. And yes, a lot of the time I'm trying to make a silk purse from a sows ear ... I don't know what the situation is like outside the UK, but most of our CGI's are for fairly dull and traditional brick and tile residential developments. I know it's not really fair comparing them to the high end portfolio pieces that grace the gallery here.

[heni30]

Hey, your work is quite good - materials, lighting, reflections, etc. The next step would be to try emulate work or photos you like. There are a ton of "How to" tutorials and reference material. http://www.ronenbekerman.com/ is a great resource.

 

Tools wise you'll be handicapped if you're not using the industry standards - max and vray. Simply because you'll be able to much better fit into a job situation if that's what everyone's using. If you freelance, you will most probably be getting models and materials from your clients that will be Mx/Vr.

 

It seems daunting but it shouldn't be. What's that Nike slogan? "Just Do It!"

[Lupaz]

My opinion is that you may want to improve many different small things that, overall, make the difference.

 

- What you want to communicate with the image. you may want to hide certain aspects of the design that are not particularly interesting, like the wall on the forground. The composition of the image is important.

- Playing with the camera for a while is worth it. I usually find that placing the camera below eye level is better.

- the background image is a big part of the image. May be finding a really nice background?

- Mastering levels, curves and blending modes in photoshop helps a lot.

[harryhirsch]

Hi,

I agree with George,

I assume that you cant change the design n materials huh?

You could put in some interior, you could suggest your architects to change the color of the rain pipes to white/yellow and the roof rigde to black.

The lawn-area looks dead, I would try flowers,, gravel, reed

Even the design is not that interesting you could work with the sky/camera position/mood- PS filters n blur

[philippelamoureux]

Hey, your work is quite good - materials, lighting, reflections, etc. The next step would be to try emulate work or photos you like. There are a ton of "How to" tutorials and reference material. http://www.ronenbekerman.com/ is a great resource.

 

Tools wise you'll be handicapped if you're not using the industry standards - max and vray. Simply because you'll be able to much better fit into a job situation if that's what everyone's using. If you freelance, you will most probably be getting models and materials from your clients that will be Mx/Vr.

 

It seems daunting but it shouldn't be. What's that Nike slogan? "Just Do It!"

 

Working with the industry standard softwares is a plus especially for the help you can find online. Other than that I don't think it matters much...It's not that time consuming to convert some assets materials. I'm working with Octane and the lack of infos/tutorials/help is the worst part of it, so far. Thanks god most of the stuff translate well from vray to Octane, at least! I don't know how's the Maxwell community tho.

[Mike Johnson]

Thanks for all the replies guys, very useful.

 

I have been browsing through the gallery here with much interest. I note that 3DSMax and VRay are the most common programs here, with some truly stunning results, especially with photorealistic interiors. Most of my work is straightforward exterior 'shots', but on occasion I get asked if I do interiors ... I usually turn these down as I struggle to model and especially light them in ArchiCAD. I've always felt AC might not be the best choice for someone with no links to architects, and is just interested in finished visualisations.

 

Also, a new job in the pipeline has asked for fly throughs of their site. Not something I've ever attempted before ... (Never really needed on smaller residential developments) Does this also require more specialist talents and software/hardware ...

 

And how many of you use macs? It's my tool of choice being a designer, and using Photoshop/Illustrator/inDesign, but I'm guessing not the choice of modellers as a rule?

[Eliot Blenkarne]

I use Archicad for most of my building modelling, purely because it is set up pretty well to create a well-detailed 3D building, and because I haven't learned 3DS yet. Any other modelling is done through sketchup (pretty standard for a lot of the big names).

 

It's a real advantage when I work with architects with Archicad - they send me their file, I set up materials/layers as I like and then export each layer out to a sketchup file. Then I simply combine these skp files together inside sketchup, run some cleaning plugins and I have a very accurate, clean and organised file ready to texture (which is also very simple as I made sure every object was separately textured inside Archicad, which is obviously a lot easier to manage individual parts vs sketchup). If they aren't using Archicad, I just get a dwg of what I need and model it up which is simple, if a little boring at times.

 

From sketchup, I either stay there and use Vray for still shots (Maxwell in your case), or export to Artlantis (probably a dirty word around here) for animations. The latter may be a viable option for animations - despite what people day and despite the bulk of what I've seen, some decent results can be achieved, and most importantly, reasonably quickly. I'm working on an animation now for a lot of townhouses, and each frame renders out in between 2 and 4 minutes, and look alright, in my opinion. May be worth getting the demo and looking at some of the better work out there.

 

I know that this workflow of using separate programs may seem strange or cumbersome, but I don't have the resources for Vray-quality animations. Also, once you have the sketchup file sorted and a decent library, it's all pretty easy!

 

I've had a decent play with Archicad's new internal renderer, but it needs work until it's viable - like you say, it's dependent on your Archicad library and the quality of these, and the various shaders. It's fairly slow also, I understand it doesn't utilise multicore systems? Could be wrong on that last point though.

[keithhill]

Hello,

 

 

I also use Archicad 18 for modelling the building structure / details, I find it to be a lot quicker than other 3D / Bim programs but that is probably down to me using it for 15 years. However I always export my Archicad models to 3D max and render with Vray. Although the new Archicad has the Cinerender plugin, I feel it still doesn't achieve the visual appeal that Vray has.

 

 

As with all things in the 3D world there isn't a correct way in doing things, there is just the way you are most comfortable doing whilst achieving the results you require. Your renders look very good and I agree with a lot of the comments mentioned above. Camera position and more post work will definitely help. However If you feel you are still not getting the results you want. I would recommend Archicad / Max / Vray workflow, we use this and are achieving some really good results. It is quite expensive in terms of licensing but it does allow you to use some great plugins built for 3d Max. Forest Pack Pro and Laubwerk trees are amazing and definitely improve exterior landscaping renderings.

 

 

This workflow does require a bit of management within the archicad program ( i.e. building the archicad model with materials in mind, as when your export from archicad, you export by materials, and this groups similar materials within the max model). We take it a little further and save out individual 3DS files for structures, flooring, partitions, ceiling, roofs, and landscaping. This is only because I like nice tidy max files and the flexibility to turn building objects on and off.

 

 

I hope this helps...

[douglasfenton]

The image is good. Perhaps it needs a bit more contrast, a little extra reflection, as mentioned some interiors and interior lighting but you can even use an image of an interior on a plane within the buildings for that to keep poly-count low.

 

I used to work in a similar small firm in the South West of England and was trying to introduce 3dsmax and vray visualisations into their workflow. We were doing almost exactly the same type of work - small residential developments.

 

I find that a lot of the time it is the camera angle that makes an image. If the camera angle matches a physically possible position then you can sometimes trick the brain into interpreting the render as a photograph. Forgive me if I am wrong, but yours looks a little bit high. I also find that 1 point perspectives can be very impressive.

[M V]

Study Architectural Photography, composition, and post work (where all the magic happens). This render seems odd to me because the view is too high. The model seems great and lighting is good.

[M V]

Try this resource first http://www.ronenbekerman.com/photographic-approach-in-architectural-visualisation/

[TomasEsperanza]

Hi Mike,

 

I'm in West Sussex, doing similar work to yourself. I've a degree, but less realworld CG experience than you, as this is my second career.

 

However (looking at this one image) it strikes me that you've done the basic stuff really bloody well here! After all, it's one thing to use all the physical camera settings, add high quality assets, and do loads of post processing, but quite another to answer the brief and produce such quality. I like your work, and figure that if you're interested in achieving a different look, you've got a great place to develop from.

 

I note that your post is from December, so will check out your more recent posts too.

 

Cheers,

 

Tom