The Hidden View – Gorski Residence by César Morales Hin

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Gorski Residence is a high-end beach house designed for a french family in Santa Teresa Beach, Puntarenas, Costa Rica by Saxe Studio.

It’s a private 8000 sq feet residence designed under the concept of directing the project towards the ocean view (that’s just 100 ft away) in between two linear visual boundaries.

The project different programmatic areas are located in several modules around the site, achieving with these a mazy kind of feeling when walking around the project, passing through different levels and alternating dense nature with white and gray bright spaces.

An interesting and very characteristic fact from Saxe Studio, the firm behind the design, is that the whole project has folding perforated doors facing the exterior perimeter of it. In this way the people living it will have the capability to manage the amount of light and heat in a natural and practical way, at the same time that the house transforms itself while its interiors are being being totally, partially or nothing exposed.

About my process as visualizer

I had just begun working as the first full time visualizer in the office, when they assigned me with these huge residential project, with the catch that they only wanted to experiment with exterior shots, feeling the material palette they had chosen for the project (and eventually changed throughout the visualization process) and giving me the task of recreating the natural environment as close to the landscaping design as I could.

Long story short, it was a huge deal for me since I had never worked with a landscaping design reference and it was my first project at this office, but I took it as a personal challenge and took the most out of it.

I worked with Laubwerk Plants Kit 3 and Laubwerk Plants Kit 7 for populating the project with tropical trees, scattered them using SurfaceSpread and also used VP Grass, VP Ground Textures and VP Skies for the natural lighting.

The materials took a long time, since they didn’t wanted simple/same color wood planks for the internal walls but wanted variations in color and shade in them, so I created a lot of customized layered C4D materials for this project, which actually ended up looking pretty good. Also a huge part of the projects look is the white glossy ceilings and almost white concrete floors, which also were created specially for this projects since the architect wanted the project to reflect the sky’s natural light inside the project through its materials at different hours of the day.

Once I finished modeling some constructive details for the project to looked more close to real life, I started experimenting with natural lighting since the project was designed facing the coast and the dawn and sunset would play a huge role in how the project would look. After a lot of progress shots we chose the morning light as our principal choice for the images, and I also worked on a dusk scene with some artificial lighting making the master bedroom stand out in the dense natural environment that surrounds it.

Since I hadn’t worked with Corona Renderer yet (the engine I work with now), I went with C4D’s native physical renderer for this project, overexposing a bit the HDRI lighting so we could get more enlightened exterior scenes.

Finally, the post work was pretty simple since we aimed to recreate as much as environment as I could, so curves; tweaking exposure in some spots; playing with levels; adding some volumetric sun rays and it was done.

Crematorium at Kahlenberg by Daniel Mikolajcak

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The Project of Crematorium is my first undertaking into photorealistic archviz. This means very few people in the shot (in comparison to the overcrowded competition imagery) and so more focus on actual detail, materials, light and space.

What architecture really should be about.

I will write more detail to each image separately.

1. (Project Featured Image) This frontal image was the first camera position. I have suggested my friend Miguel to go for portrait format, which shows better the main chapel , which is quite high but not that spacious area wise. Additionally the shadow looked more playful in portrait format. Cross is gold painted wood of which you only see the metallic reflection while Jesus sculpture is made of raw polished massive wood. This is my hidden artistic interpretation as usually in catholic ornaments, Jesus is golden and cross has more modest material.

Even though you do not see the sky, the skylight is very present light source and suggests the immediate proximity of sky. To add more dynamics to the image the glass has a noise opacity map which creates moderate shadow “caustics” in the top of the image.

As for auxiliary artificial lights I have suggested to use concrete pendant lights Foscarini Aplomb. Additional backlight plane is seen as a reflection in the concrete and wooden pult on the right lower part of the picture.

For textures I used the highest available resolution from textures.com. Each image has unique concrete texture.

2. By the second image I have slowly fallen in love with portrait format for interior images. Here you can see the side of the chapel. The railing has copper material, of which again you see some backlight plane metallic reflections. Ramp has some hidden lights inside that illuminate the wall a little und thus creating more dynamic large concrete wall.

The godray is rendered using fog cube, there have been some dust particles added to it in Photoshop.

3. Again, portrait format. This time without direct sunlight only with some overcast environment and four artificial ies lights that throw interesting light cone onto the concrete walls. Luckily you do not see the light source so I did not have to think about the right light design.

Background photo comes from flyingarchitecture.com

4. This is the main entrance to the crematorium. I have to be ashamed of the quality of the plants because I have only used one type of grass blade and one tree type from laubwerk. I think black and white filter makes it still look half decent, so I am lucky to give up colour on this one :).

As far as lighting, I wished to recreate half cloudy/sunny atmosphere with patches of landscape that are covered by clouds and parts are exposed to sunlight.

Background image is courtesy of flyingarchitecture.com

5. Here, same applies as in the image #1.

6. Finally some landscape format! This is place where urns are placed. This is the only image with some slight DOF effect as I was unsure about the quality of formwork concrete texture. The gravel is scanned texture from real-displacement-textures.com. This was the first time I used scanned texture and difference between using only bump was immense.

MLS STADIUM by Pictury

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The proposed stadium, which would feature views of downtown St. Louis, would be located just west of St. Louis Union Station, about a mile from the Gateway Arch and Busch Stadium. The site encompasses over 24 acres.

This is a project that sets a benchmark in the architecture of the site for its exceptional design.

Working time: 4 days

Vacation House by Uzoka Chukwuemeka Melvis

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This was an exercise for me to work with certain limitations and focus on achieving good quality work and photorealism. I used Viewport Canvas that comes with 3dsmax for all the texture painting. Scene is lit with Corona sun and sky and a couple of lights to achieve good lighting.

Everything was done using just 3dsmax only and Corona Renderer A6.