Studio: AF Studio

Personal / Commissioned: Personal Project

Location: Quezon City Philippines

Finished render using V-ray Next for Sketchup

This is the midday mood of an architectural visualization that I created, titled as “The Tile House”. Midday is the middle of the day, it is 12pm or 12 noon, usually, it have strong, direct sunlight and sharp shadows. Aside from the fact that this kind of mood was suggested by my girl, Cheryl Agapito, even me, I also love creating this mood, because, I don’t see often an exterior visualization that have direct, strong sunlight and sharp shadows, instead, I usually see an exterior architectural visualization with soft shadows, maybe the reason for this is that, they really want to create realistic architectural render as possible as they can, because according to the blog that I have read, one of the reasons why 3d renders look fake is sharp shadows. According to the blog, sharp shadows are not usually sharp, it is like that the blog says that we should always make the shadows, in our 3d renders, soft, which then, 3d renderers followed, that’s why there are more exterior / interior renders that have soft shadows than sharp shadows. Anyway, that blog’s analysis about shadows is right, but I am quiet not agree to the idea that we should always make the shadows of our render works soft in order for it to look realistic, because, I believe that even the shadows are sharp, we can also do realistic renders, in fact, sharp shadows really exist in real world. Talking about natural light source, sharp shadows are coming from strong and direct sunlight. In the 24 hours of the day, it is not impossible to have a direct and strong sunlight, therefore, it is not impossible to have sharp shadows. Additionally, even if we say that that sharp shadows have some softness, with our naked eye, there will be times that we will not see the softness of it, but it will appear in our eyes as sharp shadows. So, sharp shadows are reality, and if sharp shadows are reality, it is not impossible to create realistic render with sharp shadows, because as I have said, it is reality. So, I tried to create realistic archviz with sharp shadows, which I think I have managed,and that is “The Tile House; Midday mood”.

In this archviz, I used two dome lights, one is for the sky background and the other one is for the environmental lighting. Why I used two dome lights? it is because, if I will only use one dome light, the lighting intensity and the sky background’s brightness will not match. For example, if I will set that one dome light with the lighting intensity of 28, the lighting will be very great and realistic, but the sky background will not be good, because with an intensity of 28, the sky is quiet dark, not appropriate to the environmental lighting intensity. Vice versa, If I increase the dome light intensity to higher value, to fix the brightness of the sky background, it will be very great and accurate for realism, but the environmental lighting will be too bright, not appropriate for the sky’s brightness, that’s when I decided to separate their settings through using two dome lights but with the same HDRI.

The HDRI that I used is from HDRI Haven.com, named as Abandoned tank farm 04, authored by Sergej Majboroda. For the dome light 1, for the environmental lighting / natural light source of the scene, I set the intensity value to 28, checked all the dome light’s settings such as use transform, sphere, adaptive dome light, affect diffuse, affect specular, affect shadows and invisible, and then I unchecked affect alpha and affect reflections and rotated the dome light to an angle of 140.9° to the south-east direction in sketchup. For the dome light 2, for the sky background and environmental reflections, I set the intensity value to 77 for the better brightness of the sky, and I checked the settings such as affect alpha and affect reflections then I unchecked affect diffuse, specular, shadows and invisibility and then I just let the dome light 2 to its default direction, no need to be rotated too, because default direction for this dome light 2 is good enough. That’s how I created this architectural visualization titled as “The Tile House; Midday mood”

Render mood suggested by my girl Cheryl Agapito:
-Midday

Architectural Exterior to V-ray rendering
Artwork title : THE TILE HOUSE; MIDDAY MOOD
Modeled, Visualized and Rendered by : Abraham Fajilan
Software used : SketchUpPro2018 x V-ray Next 4.10 x PScs6
Render Resolution : 1125 x 1500
Used HDRI : Abandoned Tank Farm 04 by Sergej Majboroda @ HDRI Haven