Old Aberdeen

Getting away from my keyboard for a bit and some long-overdue practise with watercolours.  This is a view of Old Aberdeen about 15 minutes walk from my house.

Amazing how much I have been leaning on software to handle straight lines and perspective.  More old-school practise definately needed. 

Architecture Academy - Amsterdam Building

Completing module 7 in the Architecture Academy.  Putting my columns to good work.

Lots of arrays in use,  especially on the roof. Good practice at UV unwrapping too.  New techniquie learned this module was using a temporary cylinder to snap vertices to a curve,  this was used to curve the balcony railing.

Edit:  Adding the wireframe view (before rendered as above).

Columns

Some columns,  this one a composite of Ionic and Corinthian styles,  complete with acanthus leaves.  The range of styles is actually quite interesting,  I can now tell my Doric order from Corinthians.  I am creating a Blender file with a model of each so I can link/append then to future models.

Composite Corinthian / Ionic Column

Edit:  So I got a bit carried away,  and modelled a full set of classical columns:

Acanthus

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.