Art Under The Bridge
I’m still thinking about what to put in the foreground. A ladder with some cans surrounding it where the artist was working until he or she decided to take the picture that you see? A cyclist going by on the cycle path. I need some traffic still. I’m not sure about the buildings on the right hand side, they don’t have the authenticity of the ones on the left. I am really happy with the way the scaffolding has turned out on the left.
Final Street Scene
This is the final street scene with an appropriate level of DOF, masked AO and the odd touch up.
I am really happy with the results now.
Final touches to street scene
I have closed the ground floor curtains to reflect the fact that there is reduced privacy at this level. I’ve added graffiti which adds to the feel of the scene. Volume light has been used to add atmosphere at the windows. This really works and has significantly reduced the flat feeling that I was getting from the main brick wall. I’ve modified the galvanized materials. The balconies now have slight rusting and the main rails are significantly aged, possibly too much. I’ve reduced the bump level of the brick material. I’ve added moss to the main window texture and it looks far more aged now. I have also used an ambient occlusion pass to dirty up the scene and the results are pretty cool. I am really happy. The only thing I need to do is sort out the Depth of Field settings with the vRay Physical Camera. I’ve read up on it a few minutes ago and I have been mixing up Focal Length and Film Gate; resulting in slight DOF effect and long render times of a couple of hours, disappointing but I know what I need to do next to fix it.
Current street scene. This is the composite of the render and the ambient occlusion pass with a bit of Photoshop masking to reveal some details that the AO pass was hiding.
Sun Fuels
As I have read a lot about non-places, modeling a petrol station seems appropriate. I am having difficulty with lighting, specifically the lighting in the petrol station shop. I want it to flow through the glass illuminating the vinyl advertising upon it. Its kind of working. Getting a working sky seems to be hit and miss too. Using a skydome stops the HDRI working and getting a cyclorama to self-illuminate seems to be hard going to. I have gradually increased the brightness of the HDR Image to brighten things up. I’m currently adding materials to the scene; there’s much to do with this yet, but this is what it currently looks like.
I have just changed the car wash brushes to VrayFur and they aren’t looking so translucent now. I think my problem with lighting is to do with the lack of lights rather than the lights themselves. I need road lighting and floodlighting to light up the branding of the station. I’m going to go and investigate and take some shots of the lighting that’s used at petrol stations this evening.
Enter Mutability
Using the photo montage of an earlier post as a guide post I am developing the scene further so it illustrates the change that the old Victorian factory has gone through to become a dwelling place.
Shadows on Flats
This morning I used a High Dynamic Range image to light a scene, it was just simple coloured primitives on a plane but it looked really nice. The HDR image was providing luminance information to the scene through Global Illumination.
After this I altered two of my old materials in PS using a simple Drop Shadow effect on a selection to create the effect that some of the bricks were further forward than others. I then painted a shadow line using the Luminosity blending mode on the material used here as the floor. I have observed this technique used in game engines where poly counts need to be kept low but without sacrificing effect. I think it works well. I can imagine using this technique to provide depth to building features that aren’t the main focus of the scene but still need shadows to give them believability in the scene such as drainpipe detail, shutters, fencing etc.
The Image above are the HDR image (7/Feb/2010, Paul Debevec Home Page, http://www.debevec.org) that I plan to use in my street scene and an example of the materials with shading (rather too quickly) applied to them. Rendered with VRay.
I have the Demo of VRay installed and I am going to use it throughout this last project. The quality of the output that it creates is high and this will aid believabilty in my scenes. With the techniques I have learnt and the promise of high quality output I am really excited.
Hotel Balcony Composite
This render is a final render of this balcony. I have adjusted the camera height so that the focalisation of the scene is from an occupants point of view. This creates the feeling of presence in the viewer and a sense of implicit involvement in the scene. The items in the scene have been re-arranged so that they are used to better effect.
Pop-up book city
I have loaded last nights renders & opacity maps onto planes and uses the Orientation Constraint to get the planes to follow the camera as it turns. This is really useful as the planes don’t actually move position, but rotate on the spot to face the camera as it moves.
These are the results from this evenings investigation into using this technique in my scene composition.
I have realised that using entire rows of buildings isn’t going to cut it, so I have rendered a set of individual buildings to use instead (see above gallery). I have found that while the Orientation Constraint is great, my opacity maps aren’t and need to hide everything but the building itself. I initially thought that I should leave the ground in view (not sure why, it just felt right) and leaving the buildings shadow in view seemed the right decision too.
Tonight’s work has shown me that the opacity sillhouette of the buildings cast good shadows – even from a plane. I have also learnt that having the ground in view on the background buildings just doesn’t work. I’m going to have to change that.
Shanty scene now ready for composition.
I have managed to get the corrugated roofing completed now and it looks just as good as the first high poly version. I have also created a set of backgrounds that I am going to mount on planes in the background to create the illusion of extra buildings without the polygon costs of actually putting them into the scene directly.
These are the backgrounds from tonights work. The last image is an example of the opacity map I am using with each of these so that I can show the scenes “real” sky and so I can cast reasonably realistic shadows:
Optimisation (aka: Poly gone!)
I have looked carefully around the scene and reduced the poly count of many of the items in the scene.
- Telegraph wire lofts (each): 2400 faces to 428 (this is still high but allows for a smooth curve in the wires).
- Scaffolding frame cylinders (each): 216 faces to 20.
- Corrugated paneling (each): 8784 faces to 8.
The scene has gone from over 900,000 faces to only 130,000 without the replacement paneling in place, but luckily this won’t take it back up to what it was.
I think that these are great. Getting the materials to align was easier than I thought but getting the curves on the edges to look even half decent took a few hours of experimenting in Photoshop.
Replacement corrugated panels
I have tested two low poly methods of making corrugated panels. The two are reasonable in their appearance. I have chosen to use the single plane (left) as it looks more convincing than having a visable join of the other method (right). The only thing that I will have to remember with this is that the other side of this panel is transparent. This won’t be too much of a bother – wherever this issue arises I will clone a duplicate and spin it around 180degrees and use it as the reverse side.
Material Scales / Memory Use
I’ve been wanting to get my head straight about materials. Knowing that they need to be square and in binary incremental sizes eg 64×64 / 128×128 / 256×256 / 512×512 / 1024×1024 2048×2048 etc. I decided to do an experiment with a soft drink can that I’m currently using. I knew that this object would be small in the scene so I made the material 512×512 instead of 1024×1024 or 2048×2048 that I have previously been using.
As you can see from the picture I began with the 512 map and reduced it in increments, initially without reloading the image which is why the first 4 on the top row (from the left) get increasingly worse in quality. Realising that this was happening I reopened the original file and scaled it to 64×64 with the Nearest Neighbour Interpolation switched on so that the image would retain its sharpness at the smaller size, this it did but as you can see it also made the map blocky. So finally I chose to reopen the original file and make a 128×128 map using BiCubic Sharper Interpolation, this has resulted in an image quality closer to the 256×256 image size but with half the data file size, so less memory used at rendertime. This is an important find when you consider that I am using CM as the units in this file and can measures 62x67metres! So I can transfer this knowledge to buildings and objects that should be this large.
In conclusion, my question about whether the size of an object in max bares any relationship to the print size of the materials applied to it has been answered: No, not at all! In Max you can use a first class stamp to material the side of a skyscraper. It could be argued that I still don’t understand whats actually going on, however frankly, knowing that I can save memory without losing render quality completely makes up for any fracture in understanding. (As I am regularly reminded I am doing an MA not an MSc.)
1 hour very well spent!
I welcome all comments on this post especially tips on saving memory when creating high poly count scenes.
Memory issue solved
After going through all the materials used in the most recent file that I thought was corrupt and altering them to either 1024² or 2048² as appropriate; the scene renders like a dream. It looks like buying the additional RAM was still a good idea, but at least the file actually renders instead of crashing out.
Lesson learnt.
Occupancy & believability test.
A few months ago I went to the NTU Architecture final year degree show in London “Nott to scale” with a colleague of mine. The one thing that I brought back with me is the way that they superimpose people into their scenery. Initially I thought that hardly any of the students had put any time into this particular part and in some cases it actually took away the effect of some of their amazing work, which obviously is a shame. However I have just spent the last hour and a half or so superimposing and here are the results.
Blimey! not bad at this size, if I do say so myself !
Questioning & Considering…
Looking at the picture in the previous post, I have had to ask myself: would there be walls of a different shade/type of concrete in the structure of a hotel?
When I look at the images of the shanty buildings I see different shades of concrete all over the place as the building has been modified and built upon or maintained with what is currently available rather than a duplicate of the original material that might be too difficult or costly to source.
When making a new building like a hotel the concrete will probably be mixed either on site and poured into plywood mouldings or created elsewhere and shipped in, in either case the mixture and type of materials should remain reasonably consistant.
Therefore, I think that to create a realistic looking building, I will need to use a wide variety of textures, BUT have them colour matched to a single image so that they all look like they belong to the same set. This will give the image the consistant look and feel that I want yet retain the natural randomness of the texture of the concrete that would be found in the real world.
Having looked into just using a variety of bump materials, this creates the finish that I want. Painted uniformly, but with a different concrete texture to create a real world effect. The other textures are good and look good, but are too dirty for use with the hotel.
The wall moved forward shows the style of bump texture that I intend to use. I will use a range of different textures to minimise the perception of pattern repetition in the final render.
Building Materials In India
During a tutorial a while ago and more recently in my last presentation I was reminded that the most common building materials used in construction are the ones that are easily made and found locally. Which makes natural sense once you realise. I found myself choosing materials for the hotel that I am building and I was about to add some decking to the balcony floor and I stopped. Is decking found in India? Does India use wood in this way? Would it be found in a hotel? Would it be found in the locality of Banares/Varanasi? The brief answer is no! All the images that I have of the Varanasi and Calcutta show that concrete and stone are the most common forms of building materials in this region. To support this I found a book about the subject and this supports my assertion. The book also showed me the common materials used generally.
Common Building Materials Of India
Burn’t clay brick & tile
Stone
Building lime
Gypsum – Plaster & Plasterboard
Glass
Ceramics
Steel (Door and window frames / reinforcing brick concrete and stonework)
Aluminium (Bad for environment due to common waste products of red mud, fluoride emmissions and spent pot lining or SPL)
Cement
Concrete
Vegetable fibre composite boards
Wood and other lignocellulosic products including:
General purpose plywood
Marine plywood
Shutter plywood
Structural plywood
Particleboard & Fibreboard
Insulation board
Laminate Veneer
Bamboo mat board
Common Flooring Materials Of India
Concrete in the form of:
Portland cement concrete
High alumina cement concrete
Rubber latex cement concrete
Bitumen mastic
Polymer concrete
Decorative marble floor tiles
Granite floor tiles
Agglomerated marble
Gypsum marble
Cork tiles and sheet flooring
Vinyl tiles and sheet flooring
Gupta.T.N., 1998, “Building Materials In India: 50 years”, Building Materials and Technology Promotion Council, New Delhi, India.
Choosing appropriate materials
The centre and left partition walls show the concrete material the flat yellow of the remaining structure is the original stucco render that only shows its texture when the camera is close up, which is unlikely to be the view in the final renders. So the concrete texture is an improvement. I am going to need to scale up the texture a little to enable me to prevent patterning in the texture on each successive wall. This was clearly evident in the first project and I want to prevent it this time. This will help bring a more realistic feel out of the final renders which was absent in past.
Friday Night Live
I set myself the goal of modelling everything by tonight so that I could concentrate on the animation from now on. I didn’t hit that target, I went out for a meal last night which was well deserved as I have spent virtually all my non working time since my last tutorial on this. I’ve clocked up 13.25 hrs so far and this is the result at this point. I’m mentioning time because of the large amount of time that this seems to take to create. If I was charging £30/hr this would come to £405 already and the model is unfinished. This tells me that the models for sale on Turbosquid.com are either not up to scratch which doesn’t seem likely or I am spending too much time labouring on trying to get things to look and be right. Maybe its lack of experience?
Anyhow, the following pictures are the current state of play and show the various models that I have wrestled with over this last week or so.
(Hurray for Bank Holiday weekends just before presentations!)
Bob the builder is back !
This is a render of the house that I am planning to animate. I have got to get this all built pretty quickly as the presentation deadline is looming on the 27th which is just over a week away. I think that once the house is done the rest will take just as long, but I am currently planning on having the modelling done by the end of Friday evening. (Just done a mental reality check and yep, thats pretty mental.) I want to push myself to see exactly how fast I can bash this all together without causing RSI and more importantly its got to look the biz. Now that I know more about how to get things to look appropriate I’m not going to slack. I seem to be spending my time: 60% on modelling and aligning things and 40% on getting the materials set up ok.
