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My final image is a night render viewed from the lake with the museum reflecting on the water. All the process was explained in the previous posts. I realy enjoyed participating on this contest and I wish everyone good luck!
For post production I had to do more than I initialy intended to, I like to render as much as I can the final image and just tweak some colors in the end but this was not the case, mostly because I didn´t have much free time.
First thing after opening the file was to control all the multipasses from the render. With this I can control some details seperatly and fast: reflections, light, shadows, etc… After that I corrected the overall colors of the image, removing some of the exagerated blue of the hdri. I also darkened the trees in the background and added some dirt to the wall of the lake. Finaly just made a vignette and placed some people inside the building and outside. One important detail was to increase the reflections of the sky in the water to create a better mood and impact in the final image.
I had a very simple Lighting setup, the base is a Skydome with a sunset/night map on it and all the other lights are rectangle light.
The hdri used was very blue and it makes the final render also blue. For this, instead of correcting directly the hdri, I decided to correct it in post production. The positioning of the brightest point directly in front of the camera was to make the clouds contrast in the water reflection, giving a very nice atmosphere on the image.
The rectangle lights on the first level of the museum are placed as seen in the pictures of the place so they give this nice effect on the side walls. All other lights are a simple big rectangle near the ceiling of every floor, facing down.
One big element, although in doesn’t have a big presence is the painting inside the showroom. I knew my camera was going to be far so I wanted to pick only one painting but big. The first one that came to mind was the Guernica, by Picasso, and so it remained.
All the vegetation was spreaded using the plugin Forest Pack that makes this process very fast.
As for render settings, I chose a very simple light cache with brute force from v-ray. This offers an amazing image quality and detail, although it took me 8 hours+ to render, the amout of noise was not so big and the reflections were perfect. Ready for post production.
Some materials where very simple, because I knew the detail was not going to be seen, the objects where just to far away from the camera. Because of this I had to make a strong water material.
I first started to use Houdini Ocean plugin which is free, but the result was a very agitated water, and so I just went for the simple bump map and it turned out to be just enough. To replicate the bottom of the lake, I tryed to find a texture of ocean deep with some sea plants but they are hard to find and I didn’t have time to create one on my own. So I decided to add a simple layer of pebble stones (in 2D was good enough) and you may not see them at first time but they add a nice detail in the end.
The software I chose to build the model was sketchup. It is an underestimated 3d software because its potential is huge. But mostly, I chose this because of Speed.
Sketchup is by far the fastest 3d modeling tool you can find. Of course it has some limits because of its simplicity but you can finish the model in 3DS Max for the most organic shapes.
For this model, because I didn’t have much time I did only the front facades of the building and this proved to be bad when I was picking the camera because I was conditioned to this. Still the idea was to have a front facing camera to the building and for that, was good enough!
First of all I would like to thank both Ronen Bekerman and Tomorrow team for creating such an oportunity for us beginners in this art of Rendering.
I was very excited from the first minute I read the contest as Tham and Vidergård are one of my favourite architects of the moment and one of the reasons I tryed to study abroad in Sweden; the Treehotel is absolutely amazing!
This makes it the perfect project for me to evolve my CG techniques and learn new methods and solutions.
While I was reading the page of the Challenge I imediatly had an image on my mind. It came as soon as I saw that there was a lake in front of the Museum. It was also imediate that some reference images came to mind both for the inicial idea as for a color and light mood. Some of this renders are well know by you because they are part of the Ronen Bekerman Blog, others I had in my favourites list.
The main idea is to create a evening/night environment with some warm interior lightning, some trees as background, trying to recreate a realistic scenario and all of this reflected in the water of the lake. For this I know I don’t need to spend so much time on small details of the building because they will be to small to see and should focus more on the environment and the quality of the water surface and its reflections. Let’s get to work!
