Tomorrow Challenge 2018 entry by User-19587775

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“Cropped” high-contrast image which shows from bottom to top both night and day, both shadow and sun, both illuminated interior and reflective exterior, both corten in the dark and corten under the sun, both life inside the architecture school and outside on the tight streets. It also hints the curvilinear circular form of the building. The focus was on the facade frames which talk a lot about the character and identity of the project. Made with 3DMax, Vray and Photoshop. As usual for me a big emphasis was given to the post production part. I have to find time and will to improve my technical Vray skills so that my raw renders would give me the chance to get to world-class level. That’s my goal and I am pretty sure I can reach it through hard work. Thank you Ronen and Tomorrow for the opportunity to participate in a creative personal challenge.

Tomorrow Challenge 2018 entry by User-16180394

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This challenge was a huge learning experience for me. There are a lot of personal firsts in this image. Having no client breathing down my neck allowed me to experiment, but it also meant that it made me take longer to get the image done. That’s something that I would do differently if I were to redo the project: I would have given myself a bit of a stricter timeline. One of the main problems I faced in the beginning was the fact that I got bogged down on the corten material for the two first days. After getting bogged down for a while, I decided to work on the project as I would if I were constantly showing it to a client for progress updates. Instead of starting from the details, I tried to finish the scene overall little by little. By the time I was almost done and it was time for me to get back to the corten I was refreshed and I knew exactly what I needed to do to get it done.

I want to thank the people at Tomorrow and Ronen for putting up this challenge! I imagine this challenge is quite a risk for you guys at Tomorrow (what if no contestant is good enough?). So I applaud you for taking that risk. I hope you find the right people to join your team. To join Tomorrow in Sweden would be a dream-come-true to me and a challenge I’m eager to take.

Thanks again!

Tomorrow Challenge 2018 entry by User-16180394

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As you can probably tell already, the corten material is quite a challenging one. I had to do some reading on corten and look at some reference images. What I found out was that the steel actually comes “unweathered” or “unrusted” and it gets that rust look over time by exposure to the elements. So what we see in the ArchDaily reference photos are parts of the building weathering and aging at different stages due to each panel’s different exposure to the sun and rain. I thought the best way to show that the purple-ish and greyish parts of the panel were actually “unweathered” was to show that those parts were more reflective than their weathered counterparts.

In my earlier attempts I tried to come up with a procedural process that would emulate this weathering pattern, but to no avail. After what it felt like hitting my head against the wall for a couple of days I realized: there’s no other way, I have to unwrap the UVW. It wasn’t a big deal, as I had already unwrapped the building to create the joint between the panels as displacement. And after just one afternoon creating the diffuse and reflection UVs in photoshop I realized that I should have decided to do that way earlier. Lesson learned for me.

In a better reference photo I saw that the guardrail on the roof is actually made up of perforated panels, not glass. So I “unshelled” the existing glass model and applied a simple opacity map to the rail’s planes.

Tomorrow Challenge 2018 entry by User-16180394

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My idea was to insert a person with typical architecture student items to help the viewer instantly understand that the proposed building has something to do with architecture. That, coupled with the surrounding buildings, now any viewer from Stockholm should instantly understand that this is a building for the architecture school without it having to be explained to them verbally. The narrative should be self-evident by now. It’s about a young architecture student going to school, earlier than most of everyone, to finish her project. Projects in architecture school are notorious for taking a long time to finish, so it’s common for students to pull all-nighters or come earlier to class to finish projects.

To make that idea work I set up a makeshift “studio” and asked my girlfriend to borrow her mom’s architectural things from her time as a student. Luckily it was overcast while we were shooting, otherwise I would have had to do the photoshoot inside. I added colored gels to the lights in the same direction as the sun to simulate the light from the early morning. The lights served just as an additional highlight, with the ambient light from the overcast day doing most of the lighting.

In order to blend in the photo I shot of my girlfriend as an arch student, I took a free 3D model from Renderpeople and used it as a placeholder to cast the correct shadow. I edited the model so there were no high heels and to include both the folder and the tube props.