Harley Bradley House

[Buggsy]

Hi Everyone,

 

I finally finished my christmas project. It's Harley Bradley House, a building by the late architect Frank Lloyd Wright. I hope you like it.

 

Michael

 

 

Some project details:

Polygons: 9,300,000

House Model: ArchiCAD

Other models: Turbo Squid

Trees: OnyxTree

Lighting: Global Illumination (including 'Sky Light' non-bounced for direct illumination)

Light 1: Parallel light (Sun)

Light 2: Area Light (Bounces Skylight using Uber Shape hemisphere)

Texturing: Mostly UV's on all plants, some shaders usage and photoshop textures.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here is a link to a photo of the real house:

[fantomaz]

WOW!

 

Is it a personal project? I mean no client, not a job, only for learning etc.?

[Buggsy]

Yeh, I wanted to explore using a hemisphere for bounced illumination (Sky Light), the UV support in EI 9.1 and to see if I could stretch myself a little further. I have kind-of lived in my office for the last 4 weeks (not really, but that's what my family would tell you).

 

I was thinking of doing internal shots but I guessed I could do them justice so I focused on the externals and there weren't too many internal photo's on the internet for me to be confident of all the details.

 

I didn't want to portray it in the dilapidated state that it has fallen into, but rather as it would have been in the prime of its life.

 

I have concluded that lots of ram is important in EI v9.1, so as soon as I can, I'm going to max out my iMac i7 with 16 GB of ram. The bottom image required 50 strips to stop 64 bit camera from crashing 60% of the way through rendering.

 

Michael

[S. Houtzager]

Sweeeeet.  I like it.  Wright would enjoy seeing it.  Wright had a way of integrating the house with nature (which you captured well) and hiding the front door somewhat.  I took a trip to Chicago about 6 years ago to tour some of his work. I noticed that his bricks and concretes and mortars all had little details to them. The bricks had a little sheen to them like a glazing. The mortar was colored and very thin. A little pick, it might look better if the concrete around the front plants and sidewalk were closer to the building color.  Just by looking at the photo I see the outside concrete is the same tint as the house, like the concrete is an extension of the house.  That tweak could be made without a rerender by doing an object ID rendering and selecting the concrete in photoshop. 

[RichardJoly]

Beautiful Michael! Outstanding personnal job.

While no actual payment will come from this job the sum of knowledge acquired has no price.

Thanks for sharing!

[Tomas Egger]

Ola Michael!!

 

AWESOME RENDER :)

Let me post them?

 

Btw: Did I show you the trick to make the SUN (Parallel light) bounce more colour / light?

 

Thanks

 

Tom

[Buggsy]

Thanks for the tip Steven, I stuffed up the concrete at the last minute by changing texture settings and not checking it before final render. Wrights approach by synchronising the wall colour and concrete colour is clever. I'm not sure though what you mean by an 'ID' rendering? Can you elaborate on what this is?

 

Yes Richard, your quite right, I learnt a lot about the new UV capabilities in EI and thoroughly enjoyed the fact that I can buy 3D models with UV's in common formats and have them work perfectly in EI.

 

Tom I'd like to fix the concrete first so I'll email you the amended renderings and no, I haven't heard about how to get more bounce from a Parallel Light, can you tell me how to do this please?

 

Michael

[Tomas Egger]

Ola Michael!

 

This is one of the cool features in the new Parallel light.

Project attached, please, do a render of each proj to compare:

 

Proj Version 1, In the Photons tab, Photons Emission area, U and V size (default 100.0) and Bouncing Area, Energy Bias value (default 0.65)

 

Proj Version 2, In the Photons tab, Photons Emission area, U and V size (800.0) and Bouncing Area, Energy Bias value (default 0.9)

 

Both Values combined make the light and the color bounce more, be careful only with U and V size, if you rise too much, it will make bad geometry which intersect in some groups “leak” some light, I loved this feature which helped me to add a extra realism.

 

My workflow now is setup the SUN first with this new trick and then work with Dome light or any other light if Im in a interior scene.

 

Hope that help you improve even more your cool work!

 

DOMElight.zip

 

Thanks a lot

 

Tom

[S. Houtzager]

Ola Mike,

 

Here is an ID Rendering http://rbcdn.polytown.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/making-gh-house-ivo-sucur-interior-wireframe_id.jpg

 

You use it to select and area that you want to tweek in PS.

[Buggsy]

Not sure how to do this in EI? Any resources that I can use to get this happening, or are we just talking about using the 'Layer Shader'?

 

Michael

[Diego]

Hi Michael, Excellent work, I like the model and the natural cool environment , a well done job.

 

Tom, thanks for the Parallel light tip, share your light workflow and attached files, I love bounced colors!

 

Cheers

Diego

 

 

 

 

 

 

[S. Houtzager]

Hey Mike,

 

The layers shader would work, but this ID material is faster. I will break it down.

 

- Make a copy of your file and use it.

- Set the material setting for your concrete a flat solid bright color.  This is done by turning up the luminance to 100% and then turn down diffuse and specular. 

- Set the materail for everything else a different bright solid color.  Render it out the size of the rendering.  it will render very fast.

- Stack the ID Material and the regular rendering in a Photoshop file.

- With the ID Material layer on, use the magic wand tool to select the concrete.

- Turn off the ID material layer and select the final rendering.  You have now selected just the concrete.

[Buggsy]

Thanks Diego, I enjoy watching your animations!

 

Thanks Steven for your explanation of the ID rendering, good technique to have up my sleeve. I'll do the ID rendering and update the images.

 

Michael

[Thomo]

Hi Michael,

These look really good. Pretty cool to do it in your ''spare'' time!

Are you using HDRI maps on the sphere and / or raytrace tab? sIBL's?

I can see you are getting that ''dirty'' effect under the eaves, is that a map.? That is difficult to control if it is not. I have had some success with using the sphere just as luminance and any diffuse map. Not as an object light!

Still get the parallel light bounce etc and it renders much faster (and handles more polys). Same set up but different balance between sphere and para light. (without the calcs of the area plane lights for the sphere) of which there can be a lot.

Granted it is a ''cheat'' but setting layer shader for masking gives you back what you lose! Especially in PS or AE. With much faster output. I am still a believer in Ambient Occlusion pass as well but that's me.

I hate to say it but you do need 3D grass. One way or another. Proxy or placer make a huge difference for this. Nice transmission on the trees though, looks good. Now we need some shadow colour control on the para lights. :-)

Very nice work though I must say. I must have missed this post while on a break.

[Buggsy]

Hi Thomo,

 

I was thinking of using HDRI's but I have never used them and I guessed they would clash with the bounced skylight effect I was looking to explore. Image based lighting is my next project...when I get some spare time, if I can find some spare time.

 

The bounced skylight is done by using an Uber Shape hemisphere applied to a 'Set' then linking it to an 'Area Light'.

 

I totally agree about the 3D grass. I explored this with a number of users here who use placer deposit and Zbrush for their grass but in the end I didn't have the dollars or the confidence in the support associated with the plug-ins to incorporate 3D grass. It would have improved the final image no-end but I had to draw the line somewhere. I like the way you've used grass in your scenes. I had hoped you would have chimed in on my previous post here (http://www.eias3d.com/forums/topic/5935-best-plug-in-for-grass/) so you could give your insight. What do you use? How do you do grass?

 

In the end I thoroughly explored the UV support in EI and got a good handle on the limitations of RAM when using 64 bits Camera. 

 

Thanks for your encouraging comments.

 

Many Thanks

Michael

[Thomo]

Hi Michael,

Sorry I missed that topic on grass!

I use 3D models (their is heaps on the web). Basically they are either a square or circle of actual modelled grass. I then proxy that around. It does increase render time for sure so you have to be a bit choosy how you do it.

You can put higher poly stuff close to the camera and I use either polytrans or mesh lab to generate lower poly models for using further away from the camera.

Or you can do displacement mapping further away from the camera. Sometimes I combine both model and displacement.

I have also tried using random strips that are curved. They look good but EIAS has difficulty sometimes with overlapping clip maps that then produce black ''spots'' everywhere so you have to up the raytrace recursion and it kills render time. This would be really good to do if it worked well as it can make it really easy to make really good looking grass.

I am yet to use placer for grass and I suspect it may be even better. I'll let you know soon as i am going to do that for a project I'm working on now.

Hope that helps.

[Mark Johnston]

Hi  Michael

Great project  WOW about says it all !

Mark

[Buggsy]

HI Mark,

 

Thanks for your comments.

 

Michael

[Buggsy]

Hi Everyone,

 

I finally got round to amending the driveway material and its colour.

 

Michael