Out with the old and in with the new! In Converted, I’m asking you to take an in-depth look at existing architecture near you or one you love worldwide and introduce something new.
The model kit of parts will be provided for you. Using this kit, but not limited to it (more details about that later), you will have to create and submit at least one image. The environment in which you set your designed model is totally up to you and the end result can be either an interior, exterior or a mix of both. You can explore several viewpoints during the duration of this challenge and submit a maximum of two final entries for the judging.
About HOVER
The challenge concept and model kit is a result of my architectural studies a long time ago that I happened to stumble upon again while browsing some old backup files. I did my best to create a robust basic set of model parts to allow you maximum freedom within the confines of the kit’s initial look & feel. By downloading and using this model kit you agree to credit ronenbekerman.com blog and the original author of the model – Ronen Bekerman. Other then that you may use it for anything you like. I will setup a special HOVER designs page once the challenge is over the showcase what can be done with it – You will be able to send your designs regardless of the HOVER challenge itself.
More detailed information will be posted here once the model kit is public… very soon now 🙂
How the Challenge will be run
This challenge will be a Work in Progress (WIP) Challenge so that everyone can learn from each other and offer feedback and critique. Each challenger is required to submit WIP images, from the initial concept sketch to wire frame models, texturing in progress continuing to the final render and post production.
Create your Challenge thread using your name for it and say hey!
Submit your WIP images as you progress with your work.
Reserve the first post of your thread for milestone images
Participate in the Challenge forum offering feedback for fellow challengers works.
Submit your final entry between 10th and 20th of October 2010.
Deliverables
You are encouraged to post on the Challenge forum as many WIP images as you can. Since this time you will also have to create your own models, it is important to show how you did them. The minimum requirement is to submit an image for each of these milestones – Concept Sketch (Your HOVER design in a location you think about), Environment Modeling, Additional objects modeling, Texturing, Lighting and Rendering, Post Effects and Composting, Final Image. You need to submit at least one final image in this challenge, but allowed to add one more to be considered in the judging (only one of them can win). Your image can be an interior, exterior or a mix of both.
Final Images Submission
Your final image dimensions should be no less then 2480×1812 or 1812×2480 depending on the proportions of your image (Portrait or Landscape). The winners will have to submit a larger version of their image no less then 3636×2657 or 2657×3636. Try to avoid resizing to achieve this minimum.
Employees of sponsors can participate but will not be eligible for prizes.
Any image deemed to be the same or similar to one currently published will be disqualified for reasons of copyright liability.
Any imaging deemed to contain content that depicts explicit acts that are overtly violent, sexual, cruel or brutal will be disqualified.
You can use any kind of software to create your project (full licenses or trial demos allowed).
You must create / model your own 3d assets for this challenge with the exception of vegetation, cars and 3d people objects.
The work you submit to this Challenge must be your own personal works, groups and companies are not allowed.
Two submissions per artist are allowed
You must not publish the work during the Challenge outside the dedicated forum, you are encouraged to link to it if you like.
The Challenge commences on 20 July 2010 and will run until 20 October 2010.
Final images submitted after 20 October 2010 will not participate in the judging stage.
To be qualified WIP (Work In Progress) images must have been submitted during the challenge.
All winners are required to write making of’ articles to be eligible for prizes.
Please follow me on twitter. I’ll use it to send out challenge news using the hash tag #rbc_HOVER so you can filter out all but the related HOVER news if you like 🙂
Terms and Conditions for Artists
The sponsors of this Challenge may use short-listed and winning artwork for marketing purposes in the context of the challenge.
The sponsors agree to clearly credit the artist if any of his artwork is used.
To be eligible for prizes, all winning contestants must provide detailed Making Of’s to be published on the blog.
ronenbekerman.com may use submitted artwork on it’s website or other media to promote or document the challenge.
All artists will be contacted prior to any hard copy publishing for final image approval.
No artwork will be used in any media without clear credit being given to the artist.
No artwork will knowingly be sold, in whole or in part without the artist’s prior consent.
Artists may to use the images created for personal promotion with mention to the challenge.
If you do not agree with any of the above terms and conditions, please do not enter the Challenge.
I’m proud to present to you the Prizes & Sponsors for this blog’s Architectural Visualization Challenge II – HOVER. I would like to thank all the sponsors who kindly joined in and donated prizes that value just a little under 23,500$28,645$ in total! Information about all the sponsors will follow the prize list below
Award
Prizes
Grand Prize
Procedural City Engine Pro (4,950 USD)
E-On Software Vue 8.5 xStream (1,495 USD)
Design Connected Store Credits (500 EURO)
VBvisual 3D Plants Complete (449 EURO)
Refractive Software Octane Render LIFE TIME LICENSE
Procedural Inc. is an innovative software company located in Zurich, Switzerland, and is creator of the worlds foremost procedural urban modeling technology. With CityEngine, Procedural Inc.s has developed a radically different 3D application that allows professional users in urban planning, architecture, GIS and entertainment to efficiently create smart 3D cities.
FELIX is new tool designed for architects, designers, engineers, and whoever needs high quality renderings in record time. With FELIX the calculations are done in a cloud computing facility dedicating 40 to 160 cores to every user. FELIX drastically reduces costs. It doesnt require any powerful hardware. FELIX works on a pre-paid credit system, so the user pays only for the completed renderings.
Key features:
Hardware independent performance.
from 40 to 160 cores per user.
Eliminates continuous hardware and software investments.
100% non-destructive workflow.
unlimited online storage.
256 bit data encryption and redundant online storage.
Easy to learn.
FELIX includes a huge constantly growing professional library of textures, materials, environments and even objects! In fact users can share 2D and 3D data from within the system at real-time. Setting up cameras and lights is extremely intuitive, just like the whole application. Another major feature is the 100% non-destructive workflow which allows for endless and well organized changes to the projects at any stage.
In the words of Hani Rashid from Asymptote Architecture:
“Felix has become an integral part of Asymptote’s design process – a game changer in fact – as renderings are no longer seen as the end result but continuously generated and therefore a vital tool in our iterative design approach. With Felix, Stack! Studios has once again raised the bar for those of us interested in advanced architectural design solutions.”
VBvisual is a software company located in Düsseldorf. 10 years ago we started developing 3d trees and other plants. coming out of an architectural group, we can work in our developement with our experience from these roots. We offer high quality 3d plants and textures for visualizations and layouts. The 3d objects are high quality, but have a very small number of polygons. Our newest product is a collection of more than 2000 high quality cut-outs of hi-res plant photographs.
Founded in 2006 and based in Gothenburg, Sweden, Craft Animations AB is a leading developer of a new era of professional real-time 3D animation technology, Craft Director Tools.
Based on cutting-edge research in artificial intelligence and autonomous control systems, Craft Director Tools simulate the complex physical behavior of cameras and 3D vehicles such as helicopters, cars, airplanes, boats and motorcycles.
Utilized by high-profile companies world-wide such as Pixar, Digital Domain, Lockheed Martin, Nasa, Digital Dimension and Toyota; Craft Director Tools streamline production, enhance realism and increase creativity for users in the visual effects, game development, forensic reconstruction and architectural design industries.
GrowFX is a system of modeling and animating plants for Autodesk 3ds Max.
Now you can recreate digitally a lifelike 3D model of any plant, from grass and trees to woodland. GrowFX lets you create broadleaf trees, conifers, palm trees, flowers, ivy and many other vegetational compositions. Its unique model building tools will help you create creeping plants, entwining scene objects, and shearing plants of any shape. Plants may bend around different objects. GrowFX is fully compatible with 3ds Max. All parameters can be animated. You can, for example, create a wind animation, plant growth animation and other kinds of animation you can imagine. There is also an opportunity to edit the parameters using MAXScript.
Rhino and SketchUP users in all fields depend on the ASGVIS V-Ray plug-in as a quick, easy and cost-efficient way to render their most cutting-edge images. Developed with Chaos Group, V-Ray works with Google’s SketchUP and Robert McNeel & Associate’s Rhino 4.0, two of the most popular 3D modeling tools available today.
V-Ray’s robust ray-tracing engine and vast array of materials give designers the ability to generate photo-realistic images of outstanding quality. Top studios all over the world use V-Ray because of its rendering capabilities, making it the only rendering solution that will allow them to Render in Design-time.
E-on software is the leading developer of solutions for the creation, animation, rendering and integration of natural 3D environments. Offering a wide array of Digital Nature products and applications, e-on software provides solutions adapted to every project and budget. E-on software products are used worldwide by the film, television, architecture, game, science, educational and entertainment industries.
E-on software products were used in features film such as “Pirates of the Caribbean 2”, “Indiana Jones 4”, “Australia”, “Terminator 4”, “Land Of The Lost”, “KungFu Panda”, “Monster Vs Aliens”, “The Imaginarium Of Doctor Parnassus”, “The Proposal”, “GI Joe – The Rise of The Cobra”, and TV series such as “Battlestar Gallactica”, “Stargate Atlantis” and more. Read more on these stories in e-on software’s Spotlights section: www.e-onsoftware.com/spotlight. The company has achieved worldwide reputation for its award winning 3D scenery generator Vue.
For HOVER, E-on software also adds Carbon Scatter as a prize. It is a set of plug-ins that allow the creation of complex populations using the native instancing technologies of leading DCC applications. The Carbon Scatter plug-ins integrate e-on’s patented EcoSystem algorithms directly inside your host application, allowing you to populate native scenes with millions of instances, and render them with your renderer of choice.
At Designconnected we are all about delivering the best quality 3d digital content for the interior design professionals.
It’s a shame that we can now offer only 2700+ ready-to-rock 3d models from 440 manufacturers and 815 designers but we really have just started and
it’s such a fun…
Refractive Software LTD (TM) is a New Zealand based company that develops user-friendly real-time, physically accurate rendering solutions for digital content artists.
Our main product, ‘Octane Render(TM)’ is the worlds first fully GPU based, un-biased, physically based renderer that runs entirely on the GPU using Nvidia CUDA technology, and offers the same precision and quality as other spectral un-biased render engines while offering a completely interactive scene setup interface and render speeds up to 50x faster than traditional CPU based un-biased engines depending on the GPU used.
Maxwell Render is a rendering engine based on the mathematical equations governing light transport, meaning that all elements, such as emitters, materials and cameras, are derived from physically accurate models. Maxwell Render is unbiased, so no tricks are used to calculate the lighting solution in every pixel of a scene; the result will always be a correct solution, as it would be in the real world. Maxwell Render can fully capture all light interactions between all elements in a scene, and all lighting calculations are performed using spectral information and high dynamic range data.
Due to its very nature, Maxwell Render enables users to create accurate and extremely realistic images. Maxwell Render is a recognized standard in architectural visualization, product design, jewelry, film production, scientific research and other high-end rendering markets, and the leader in render quality.
Maxwell Render is a rendering engine that accepts models and scenes created in 3D or CAD applications. Several of these applications are directly supported through a Maxwell Render plug-in; others can be used in conjunction with Maxwell Render by importing the geometry into Maxwell Studio, a component of the software.
No matter what the creative process, the first presentation of your ideas to potential clients is vitally important. Efforts to get the client to see, and ultimately approve, the concept as a whole (rather than focusing on the detail) can often result in the delivery of a loose and rather impressionistic visualization of the finished building, landscape or product.
Piranesi 2010 excels at turning your conceptual 3D models into wonderfully atmospheric, stylish and (most importantly) persuasive visualisations. Imbued with a whole host of effects that guide the focus of the clients eye and attention to the key elements of your design, it can truly be a difference maker in the decision process.
modo 401 from Luxology (which shipped in June 2009) is the 4th major release of this modern 3D modeling, animation and rendering software for the Mac and PC. modo has been adding features to its software at a rapid clip and modo at 401 is now an end-to-end solution that encompasses modeling, sculpting, painting, animation and rendering in an artist-friendly user interface. More than just features, modo is a truly elegant integration of technology, raw horsepower and refined workflow.
The modo community is one of the most active 3D communities on the Web and is populated by many artists and designers working in design visualization and related fields. An extensive Gallery of rendered images and animations from modo users is maintained on the Luxology website and a free iPhone Gallery Viewer has recently been made available.
Chaos Group provides state of the art rendering solutions for architectural, VFX, film, media and entertainment, automotive design, television and other industries. V-Ray became rendering solution of choice for many 3D production houses due to its capability to deliver high quality photo-realistic images in the shortest time. In June 2009 Chaos Group officially released V-Ray RT – the first interactive renderer of its kind for 3ds Max. The power of this interactive ray-tracing technology changes the way 3D artists and visualization specialists approach the lighting and shading setup. Now they can use the V-Ray RT intuitive, time saving and highly interactive features to completely enjoy the creative side of the rendering process.
Our portfolio includes the following outstanding products: V-Ray for Autodesk®3ds Max®, V-Ray RT for Autodesk®3ds Max®, V-Ray for Autodesk® Maya®, SimCloth, and Pdplayer the production oriented image sequence player and viewer for the CG industry.
Thea Render is now available, after 2 years of intense research and development, as a unique rendering solution containing both biased and unbiased state-of-the-art engines and a rich feature set. Thea materials are truly physically-based, with a breakthrough layer system that supports multiple coatings/stacks/substrates, delivering all visual cues and highest realism.
Due to its advanced light simulation framework, Thea can accurately solve hard problems, such as unbiased sun-pool caustics, participating media and sub-surface scattering without resorting to tricks.
Thea Render is a versatile standalone solution for 3d rendering, animation and architectural design, product visualization and illumination analysis. It comes with a highly aesthetic all-in-one studio, integrated material editor, real time viewer and advanced tools such as interactive render and instancing brush. Plugins are available for various modeling applications.
Materialwerk was founded on October 15, 2009 and develops innovative tools for 3d artists and studios. Our passion for 3D computer graphics and our need for easy to use solutions to create better images and animations with less effort led to the first product Brix. By combining intelligent software with detailed textures, we believe that it is necessary to go the next step in texture creation for 3D computer graphics. Our goal is to provide artists and studios with tools that save time, make work life easier and improve quality of the images and animations.
BRIX is an innovative texture plugin for 3Ds Max and Maya that creates brick wall or wood parquet textures based on individual tile bitmaps. It includes a huge texture library and hundreds of brick and panel photographs for authentic and detailed walls and floors. With easy to understand parameters, each preset can be changed and adjusted in color, position, rotation and size. Though using highly detailed bitmaps for each brick, each texture is very memory efficient. And with random algorithms it is possible to create seemless and non-repeating textures of any kind.
Forest Pack is a plugin for 3d Studio Max, designed to give a complete solution for creation of vast surfaces of trees, grass and plants. Forest enables you to combine billboards, high poly meshes and proxies, and using Mental Ray and V-Ray native shaders, create scenes with virtually unlimited number of objects and polygons.
Some of its features are: camera clipping, tint maps, clusters, tree editor, falloff curves, animation support, integrated library browser and much more. Working as an advanced scattering tool, Forest can be used not only for plants, but for any scene that include vast distributions of objects as: rocks, buildings or crowds.
Forest Lite, the free version of the plugin can be used for any personal or commercial project. Download it now and take advantage on the challenge!
Motiva is a small spanish company that makes 3D content and 3D related software for 4 different markets: architecture, civil works, advertising and simulation. Motiva works were nominated in the 2009 and 2010 editions of the Architectural 3D Awards.
Motiva COLIMO is a GPU based realtime postproduction tool that allows the changing of materials and lights over pre-rendered images, taking in account physical accurate reflections, refractions and GI bleeding.
ArtVPS leads the way in the development of photorealistic rendering solutions. Its revolutionary flagship rendering technology, Shaderlight, is a physically based, progressive ray-tracer that enables interactive changes to be made at any stage of the rendering process. Shaderlight has been developed as a plug-in for both 3ds Max and now Google SketchUp and is set to transform 3D visualisation workflows in 3D design, architecture and education.
Shaderlight for 3ds Max ($450) – Shaderlight for 3ds Max redefines traditional rendering workflows, giving artists the creative freedom to change every detail, right up to deadline.
Shaderlight for SketchUp ($199) – As an interactive, photorealistic renderer for Google SketchUp, Shaderlight lets you render great images quickly and simply.
The American Society of Architectural Illustrators (ASAI), is a non-profit international professional organization of architectural illustrators, whose goals are to foster communication among architectural illustrators, to raise the standards of architectural illustration and to acquaint the public with the importance of such drawing as integral to the practice of architecture.
I’m proud to present to you the winners of the first Architectural Visualization Challenge – The GH House. It was a joy to host this event on my blog & forums and I hope that the next challenge will not take long to arrive. I’ll remind you that the challengers were asked to visualize a given private house and granted full freedom in the creation of the environment. The entries were judged according to overall accepted standards of architectural visualization: composition; lighting; materials and textures, concept (original approach), addressing the architectural nature of the house, technical skill, emotive value and participation in WIP threads.
The Challenge was sponsored by…
E-On Software, Luxology, Next Limit, Chaosgroup, Informatix, ASGVIS, Itoo Software, Exlevel, Epictor, Premium3DModels, LAUBlab and Film Vault Studios.
I take this opportunity to send a warm thank you to all of the sponsors for taking part in this event!
Grand Prize Winner, Bertrand Benoit
GH House Exterior by Bertrand Benoit
Bertrands decision to move the house up north, introducing a traditional Scandinavian treatment to the house actually worked very well on the GH House design. The combination of vertical wood planks cladding and cast in wood concrete played very well together.
The cliffs edge positioning of the house and panoramic exterior view was a very good choice and created a big sense of drama and focus on the house. Seeing the amount of work in the WIP thread it might have been even better if more of the environment was visible in the image both foreground and background allowing more sky above, approach road at the bottom and lake to the left.
The interior image POV choice was most interesting, as well as the interior re-organization choice and winter treatment of the exterior parts in the image.
Both exterior and interior images are a technical masterpiece, showcasing perfect lighting and materials… as a matter of fact we were able to see in Bertrands WIP thread that he handled almost every corner of the house and a vast chunk of landscape to a point of being able to make macro photography. The scope of his work is astounding!
Kostas was referencing Castel Meur as an inspiration for his entry. Its a good thing that in the end only one side of the house got that rock siding. Kostas created a superb environment and mood for this house, with great attention to detail overall (apart from a little displacement glitch in the stone cladding).
Though it is clearly a great image, it would have been perfect if flipped so that the enclosed parts of the house faced the rock, as if growing out of it, and the public areas were open to the lake which is missing in the final image.
The interior image was masterfully crafted with great attention to detail, materials and lighting, though the fact Kostas decided to close the view out with curtains works against the concept and would have been better left out to allow us to see the pivotal rock.
GH House Interior by Kostas Anninos
Kostas will get these prizes
Chaosgroup V-Ray 1.5 (3dsmax or Maya)
Informatix Piranesi 2010
Itoo Software Forest Pack Pro 3
Exlevel GrowFX 1.3
Epictor Tourist I Entourage People Pack
Premium3DModels office furniture or office clutter
Ivo Sucur delivered a brilliant story backed by an amazing amount of details and props in both his images. In our professional work we are being asked to show the house at its best and it was very refreshing to see Ivos WIP thread showcasing a WIP house.
Ivo comes out as a technical and organizational master (even if organizing a mess) choosing good POVs and laying it all out in a balanced way.
The final images turned out a little too dark and the far background might have deserved more attention but that didnt hurt the overall impression.
GH House Interior by Ivo Sucur
Ivo will get these prizes
Next Limit Maxwell Render 2
Informatix Piranesi 2010
Itoo Software Forest Pack Pro 3
Exlevel GrowFX 1.3
Epictor Travelers I Entourage People Pack
Premium3DModels office furniture or office clutter
Anton was among the few exploring the curved walls part of GH House and the only one among the finalist to showcase that side of the house.
The final exterior is a joy to look at! Anton managed to take an almost fully closed concrete wall façade and tell us a story that works architecturally and also evokes feelings while watching by q very pleasing use of colors and light.
The interior image did not deliver the same impact as the exterior one did. The composition could have been improved but the mood was very good and since both images were judged as one the exterior really pushed it all upwards.
Kostas was also selected as you favorite by a public poll among the forum members getting 54 votes out of a total of 179 votes (30.17%)
Kostas will also get these prizes
ASGVIS V-Ray for SketchUP or Rhino (second pick)
Film Vault Studios 25 credits
Judges Favorites
I would like to thank all the finalists and entrants for taking part in this challenge, and also point out two more finalists… sort of the judges favorites. Both picks are among the most unique and interesting entries of this challenge that if worked on more might have been one of the winners.
Cool concept, completely out of the Archviz realm and yet, Chris managed to deliver images that do have merits. The interior in particular, though too minimal in structure treatment, has a very good composition and the lighting was very well done. Those teddies deserve a mention for sure!
Weird and very original concept and image treatment, Seems more like a renaissance ‘Chiaroscuro’ painting then rendering as Tom mentioned in his WIP thread. All Tom needed was more time to make this a complete work of art. I would love to see Tom keep working at it and hand in something new on the blog!
Welcome to my PureLIGHT HDRi Help & Feedback page. Here you will find all the information needed to use the HDRi Skydomes in your own projects.
About the PureLIGHT HDRi’s
PureLIGHT HDRi’s are a collection of virtually created High Dynamic Range skydome images saved to the .HDR format for use as a spherical environment in 3d scenes. The high dynamic nature of these images will ensure great looking realistic shadows from the sun!
The HDR’s are provided at 6000×3000 pixels resolution, and in most cases are good enough to be used as the actual background. You may also use the provided .JPG versions of the images that were filtered with a natural film response algorithm for a much nicer overall look.
How to use the PureLIGHT HDRi’s
The following description is based on the use of 3dsmax and VRay, but the same idea can be implemented on other platforms and render engines as well.
With VRay I use the special VRayHDRI Map to load the HDRi provided. You can also opt to use the 3dsmax built in bitmap loader (that is what you will have to use with other render engines)
Set the projection to spherical and you must remember to set the Gamma value to 0.454545 or you will get a washed out and incorrect coloring renderes!
The sun is always centered in the image (though it’s pitch may vray) to make it easy to control the shadows direction. To change the suns position, change the Horiz. Rotation value in the VRayHDRI settings or enter a value from 0-1 in the standard bitmap offset input slot.
You may use this HDRI in the max environment map slot or with a VRayDomeLight.
You can get the MS House scene (Though setup with a different LDR image) by subscribing to my blog newsletter at at the right side of this page on top of the sidebar area.
October 1, 2011 : Since this page was first published, I posted an article about HDR Image Based Lighting 3D Scene Setup that has 2 videos and a bunch of valuable followers comments that can help you a lot in getting your setup just right… do check it out 😉
