Help me with an exterior rendering?

[thomascoote]

Hi all,

 

Had some great advice on here before so thought I'd drop by for some more.

 

I don't usually work on exterior stills, and I've not been doing this that long, so I'm sort of at a loss for how to improve this? I'm not sure what it is, but there's something about what I've done so far that I just don't like.

 

I have to produce 8 of these shots by Friday, but I have models for most of the buildings I'm needing to show and some of the textures are shared between buildings so I should be o.k to hit the deadline, I just need to know what direction to be heading in.

 

That's meant to be brass cladding on the front, by the way.

 

Thanks

Edited March 15, 2015 by thomascoote

[dmitriyyemelianenko]

I think that you can manage a lot of things in postproduction.

But as for this image, I would recomend to try different lightning solutions, add details to the road and grass( maybe some trees, rocks or flowers, or just grass variations), change sky, use HDRI, you should add some environment to get nice reflections in the windows. Plus there is problem with people, they all have no shadows and light different. Here is a nice tutorial about adding people in post

and you can also check his blog- a lot of useful information about artistic presentation of your project.

Also check this https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBzPV2uSji-Z5-x_svnZV1w/videos the guys are definitely know what to do:)

Your work is ok, but you should do your best to archive nice mood.

Hope this will helps, good luck.

Edited March 15, 2015 by dmitriyyemelianenko

[ryannelson]

Reflections in your materials would go a long way. Everything in the real world is reflective to some extent, except black holes. Brass is a tricky one because the colour comes from reflectivity, it's not just a matter of setting a colour in the diffuse slot.

 

Your lighting is okay, but could use some highlights - where reflections really... shine.

[thomascoote]

Thank you for the comments!

 

I'm working on making changes to the people now, and have sorted the lighting out now. I'm having trouble making the materials look as good as I would like them but I'm getting there - also got one of the seniors at the office for 2 days this week to help me out so I'm sure I'll learn some good ways to tackle my problems.

 

The brass is a pain... I have a Vrayblendmtl set up with falloffs in the reflect for each sub material, adjusting the RGB reflect values based off data from refractiveindex.info to try give me as close to real a material as possible. Not had much practice with this yet though so there are some hiccups to get over.

 

Thanks again for the comments and I'll keep you updated with how the image end up coming out.

[dmitriyyemelianenko]

Have you tried to change IOR value?

Maybe you should add some texture to reflection slot and a little bit of bump?

As I understood this work is commercial, so maybe you should invest some money into tutorials? I would highly recommend this one http://viscorbel.com/shop/creating-v-ray-materials-vol-1/

Also its almost for free, and covers all the basic material creation plus some work with textures in photoshop.

If you would like to go deeper there are several more tutorials in this course, but this one is a good base.

[Francisco Penaloza]

I would recommend to review the framing of your image, or composition, Light is OK, what is missing to my eye is seance of time, what time was taken that photo, morning? mid day? afternoon? materials seems fine, I am guessing is mostly stucco and metals. Your image as over all does not feel balanced.

You should take the main street for example, and make it cross in diagonal your image, so you can see more of the left side of the building, or move the camera more to the right to see more of that side of the building. One side should be more predominant, right now it feel kind of centered but not, it is hard to read the shadows this way too, there is not much seance of flow.

search Google for architectural photography for a few minutes and try to compare similar buildings and see how photographers approach similar situations.

I would definitely take out the first light pole, even though we all know it will be there but now is not helping at all to the image, photographers also do this

http://www.davidgiralphoto.com/data/photos/197_1architecture_photography_exteriors_02.jpg

 

http://www.stewartimage.com/virginia_photographers/Va_architectural_photographer/arlington_architectural_photographer.jpg

[Umesh Raut]

For realistic materials you may view (if not already viewed) materialism by BBB3.

Also check out stuff by Grant Warwick, if you can.

[thomascoote]

Thanks for all of the replies. I'm working the weekend to get as much of this done as possible. Have until the morning to get it over to the client.

 

However, they actually want 11 of these images so obviously with the time constraints I won't be able to give each image the time it needs to take it a step further. Will update tomorrow afternoon