Pool Deck

This module from the Architecture Academy, introduces EIS lighting.  I had not used this before and it is a really powerful way of creating realistic light patterns from lamps in a scene.  Blender has an add-on to import EIS files from lighting manufacturers,  detailed in this Blender Artists thread.

 Another painful lesson is the amount of additional rendering time needed in dark scenes to get rid of noise.  The image below is still noticably noisy in areas,  yet was rendering for a whopping 3,000 cycles over 10 hours to get this far.  The long render time partially due to despite turning down all the subsurf levels on the furniture to zero,  the scene was still too heavy to fit within my GPU memory and  needed to be rendered using CPU.

On composition,  I tried to use lines within the wall art on each side of the upper floor to bring the eye to the middle bottom and then a defocussed fern in the foreground to guide over to the lillies.

Guggenheim

Back from vacation,  in catch-up mode now.  This is my render of the foyer of the Guggenheim museum in New York.

Not the Guggenheim

This week's module for the Architecture Academy was released late.  It was supposed to be the interior of the Guggenheim Museum in New York.   A bit frustrating, as I am on vacation this week and would have had time to give to it.  I'm off to Barcelona at the weekend for some R&R,  some relief from my keyboard for a change,  so not much prospect of rendering the Guggenheim anytime soon.

However,  not to waste time waiting,  I had another run through of the external building module.  This time working from a glossy brochure from a local builder.

I was quite a way into the modelling before I realised that the image in the brochure was also computer generated.  Some of the garden plants are repeated, and the reflections in the car are all wrong for the environment.  The image is too perfect,  the grass edges at cut with a ruler (and pasted in-place) and no grunge on the building whatsoever.

That upped the ante,  I wanted to do a better job at representing the building than whoever did the photoshopping in the original.  I don't think I have quite done that,  the original artist did a professional job.

Edit:  As is becoming traditional,  an update.  Improved on the garage door, main door, environment lighting and a couple of textures.

And the orignal for comparison:

Skirting Board factory

I created a blend file with a bunch (x45) of skirting board profiles to make it fast and easy to add skirting boards to a room. 

The .blend file is available >>here<<

While many of these profiles are standard across the building industry,  some are registered designs.  We are grateful to SkirtingBoards.com for allowing us to include some of their designs in the set.

Each profile is created as a curve in blender,  each curve sits in a group named to make it easy to link/append the curve to your main scene.   In your main scene,  create your own curve that follows the edge of the room  (tip:  make sure you use vector handles for sharp corners).   Now in the settings for your main curve,  add one of the profile curves provided as a Bevel Object.   You should see the skirting board appear in your room.

It might be necessary to add an edge-split modifier to your main curve to create nice sharp corners.

Enjoy. 

Architecture Academy - Week 2 House

Week 2 of the Architecture Academy stepped through creating an exterior view of a house from a groundplan.

Some early frustrations with Mr Price on the plans provided,  there was no way to make the side view and the top views match up,  and no front view provided at all,  so it was necessary to fill in some gaps and imagine what the front looked like without a front elevation to go on.

With the modelling out of the way, the topic moved onto texturing,  I learned quite a few tips and tricks for UV unwrapping and layering textures to get the right effect,  even for the bits I did know,  some useful guided practice.

Then adding foliage,  straightforward.

Finally adding grass - what a nightmare.  My trusty workstation, which is a couple of years old now,  my  fairly recently upgraded Nvidia 580  GPU rendered useless as it didn't have enough RAM to hold the scene,  really stuggled to handle the  particle systems.

There really needed to be around 250,000 x 20 child particles to make the grass look convincing.  Max I could handle was 100,000 x 20. 

After a lot of messing around,  simplifying the scene wherever possible,  loading lower res texture files, dialling back a few subsurf levels and bevel amounts, I managed to get a render going that would not crash my system.  Then,  tweaking was painful,  two hours to see the result of any adjustment and a further hour each time to get back in balance where my system would not crash.   Time to get really precise on the adjustments,  it just took too long to be thrashing about in the dark.

I ended up making the ground texture look as much like moss as possible with heavy "bump" applied, colour matching the ground with the grass, and weighting the secondary clover particle system to the area immediately infront of the camera as much as possible.  Even with that,  I needed to add additional vignetting to the bottom of the image in post-processing with a box mask to take the eye away from the close-up areas of lawn. 

The final render took 4 hours to get 500 passes.  Although it was a struggle,  I am quite pleased with it.

Edit:  I should know better by now.  Every time I rush to post a result,  and say I am pleased with it,  I look at it next day and I'm no longer pleased with it.

At the very least, you should, time permitting, let your images rest and cast a fresh look on them before pressing the "send" button. {Bertrand Benoit}

 Here is the better version:

Furniture and plants scaled down to 75%,  re-did the grass and daisys,  lowered the environmental lighting for stronger shadows, dropped the over-done bottom-half vingnette,  desaturated the sunflowers, and rendered for another 4 hours.   

I've kept the original below for comparison.
 

Architecture Academy - Week 1 Lounge

So,  just completed week 1 of the Architecture Academy,  a modern lounge.  Took quite a long render time @ 800 passes = 2hrs 47mins.  Andrew's rig apparently took 20 mins. 

Blender 2.68 was released just as I was completing the scene,  so I was able to render out using GPU for the particle systems,  although I needed to upgrage my NVIDIA drivers to handle the scene as I was getting errors when trying to render with GPU.

My PC specs:

Quad core Intel @ 2.66GHz
8Gb Ram
Win7 64bit
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580  (512 CUDA cores) 3Gb RAM

I've been making some cushions