Strip Mall

[glorybound]

Any comments and/or suggestions would be appreciated. I had no luch with reflections in the storefront. I tried everything.. even having a plane with a map applied to it in front of the windows. Any tips on that would be great.

http://www.whitebirchstudios.com/sha...%20-%20web.jpg

[jophus14]

Great image, but the cars have to go. Place newer, more expensive vehicles in the image and it'll make the plaza look a whole lot better. Just my 2 cents.

[Nek]

I think that the trees are a little bit over saturated and the texture of the highway could be improved.
Great work!

[glorybound]

reply

I was going to add more cars (more expensive) and more people.... put more work into the pavement and change the trees. You guys hit it right on the head. Any tip for the glass?

[ShaunDon]

Agreed on the cars. Too many old-style cars, doesn't really reflect what I'm used to seeing on the highway these days... Fewer cars is good. Also they wouldn't be spread out over the lot -- when it's this empty, folks will park at the end of the rows closest to the building. This looks unnatural.

Nice feeling with the lighting, though. Trees are tough. I go back and forth on hue/saturation levels quite often in my renders.

Shaun

[dejaVu]

Strange that no one tried to answer his question on the glass...

I would say the problem with your glass is that it has nothing to reflection.
If all you have is a solid colour in the Env>Reflection Override slot then you are seeing what you should be seeing.

There are a few things to try:
1. Check your material to make sure your glass is setup properly.
If you are using a VRay Material, use a falloff map in the reflection slot or change the reflection swatch to something besides Black.

2. Use a HDR in the Env Override slot.

3. Increase your Env. Override Multiplier

Otherwise, a bit more info would help to solve your reflection problem.

[Clifton Santiago]

I second what dejaVu says. Put an appropriate HDRI in your vray reflection environement slot and turn it up. Also try increasing the IOR of your glass fresnel settings to maybe 2.2 (1.6 is default).

I think the cars are appropriate for a low-budget strip mall. In fact they look a lot better than you would expect. Ever been to a strip mall in a small town in Georgia (U.S.)? The parking lot would be comprised of rusty, dirty pickups, and dinged up minivans.

[glorybound]

cars

that was my goal with the cars. Upper MN after all the vacationers have gone back to the cities. I agree with the cars being spread out. I'll populate the lot with more cars... a little nicer.

I'll try the HDRI. It has never done anything for me, but I have never increased the multiplier.

I'll tweek and repost. Thanks for the help.

[glorybound]

How much would you increase the Env. Override Multiplier ?

[Clifton Santiago]

I turn it up to 2 or 3x the brightness of the HDRI I am using for the environment lighting.

[glorybound]

HDRI

Are you increasing your multiplier in the material editor or in the VRAY roll out, or does it matter?

[jonahhawk]

I second most of the comments above. esp saturation. Real life is pretty desaturated usually.

I think Clifton meant to set the multiplier in the VRay Environment settings. Although it may not apply here, this is better than setting it in the ME because you can instance the HDR map elsewere in the scene without taking the multiplier with it.

For glass in this situation where ther is no interior, reflection is all you have. So I wouldn't set any refraction. Sometimes I don't like the results of Fresnel so I use a Falloff map to have more control. Once you have an HDR in place and it is showing up in the reflections, play with the colors of the Falloff map, adjusting the white down a bit and the black up a bit toward gray. Sometimes Fresnel will have no reflection whatsoever at certain angles. While this may be realistic, I like to have more artistic control over things.

My two bits on cars: if it is a low income area, I would put "middle class" cars in there. I imagine the object of the image is to sell the building in some way. Old beater cars don't attract anyone's patronage IMO.

In addition to the other comments above, some signage would really spruce things up. To me, the downspouts are really distracting being so far away from the wall. I would turn them back to the wall right after they come out of the gutter. A lot of times they will paint the downspouts the same color as what is behind them to hide them a bit.

Is that a ridge/hip cap on the left there? Valley flashing can really help a roof for realism too...

It looks great, keep it up.

[Clifton Santiago]

No, I meant turn up the Vray HDRI map multiplier. When a Vray HDRI map is in a vray environment slot, the environment slot multiplier does nothing.

[glorybound]

HDRI

I am having no luck with HDRI's. My glass reflects my cars, my people, other parts of the building, but not the HDRI. I have my HDRI in the VRAY environment overide slot, but nothing. When I put a chrome sphere in the center of my scene it works, but not on my glass. What am I doing wrong?

[joconnell]

Heya!

One of the problems with glass and reflection maps is the angles they're viewing things at. An environment map is pretty much like a very large sphere around your scene with your texture mapped to it. If you have a flat glass surface, the reflections on the glass will shoot rays out straight ahead in parallel lines until it hits the enveironment map. The problem is though that because of the parallel direction, the rays will only hit a small rectangular section of the environment map. This would be fine if we had a massive resolution environment map but most of the time we dont. The end result is that you get sod all of the pixels in your env map showing in the reflections thus very little detail or just bad looking detail. With a rounded surface, the rays shot from the normals of the polygons go out in every direction (or more directions anyway) so they hit a much bigger portion of the env map, get more pixels and thus way more detail.



In the amazing diagram above, the green lines in the centre are your windows. They are shooting rays along their normals represented by the lighter green lines. The blue circle is your environment map. As you can see the rays only hit a small portion of it. The red sphere on the other hand has polygons pointing every way and shoots rays in every direction, shown with the pink lines. They hit a much larger portion of the environment map and pick up a lot more detail so you get better results from your env map.

What can you do about it? One way is to make a plane that directly faces your windows with a copy of the env map on it, and have the plane turned off to camera / gi and so on. You can pretty much plonk your plane at the same scale as the windows and they'll pick up a lot more detail - do one of these for each of your sets of windows.

Now you may run into issues where your reflections look off since they're reflecting things that should possibly be visible in your scene but that's a different story - if it looks like it roughly fits, you should be okay.