Black Duck

[glorybound]

Colors

Hmmm.... these are they colors the picked. Or are you talking about the mood?

[Dynedain]

The mood, the sky is more gray than before, the grass darker and with solid shadows. It makes it look like a rainy winter day, whereas the first one looked like a sunny day that had a quick shower.

[hassearo]

My suggestion is:

-go back to the original render, its nice lit and comped, cars are fine!
Maby take down the blownout carlights slightly..

-try to fix the textures on the roof to more real using some dirt or real phototextures,
Its too regular right now and computerich, saturation could have some randomness.

-same with the bricks/wood/greenmetal.

-blur the shadows comming from the roof with arealights.

Done!

//

[paulison]

I've struggled with similar jobs in the past and my first reaction is that the camera is too far away. I know there isnt much to see in terms of the Architecture so you may be looking to add a few distractions in there such as some high quality foregroud trees that break things up a bit without blocking out the buildings

The other thing that I would personally change is to reduce the saturation on the green on the windows/roof. Try to find some actual photo examples of what this colour should look like - it currently looks a bit artificial even though the saturation ties in the background/foreground. Maybe brighten the whole thing up a bit like others have suggested?. Also maybe needs an army of old people walking around to help take the focus off the boring buildings.

I've worked on a few retirement homes as well and its just funny when you see them being designed with lower ceilings and roof pitches - trying to keep cost at a minimum and hoping that nobody will notice that they are being forced to settle for something that was cheaper to build than the cheapest possible residence. I

I think you have done a good job with what you have though - I just cant see this job looking good from this camera angle and its a problem when clients want to capture the whole thing sometimes

[glorybound]

Old Folks

Thanks for the word of encouragement. I am redoing this tonight and I'll repost tomorrow.

[glorybound]

Black Duck

OK, regardless... I am done!

[tct70]

Much better!

[simmsimaging]

Great final result - the effort really shows.

b

[glorybound]

Results

Thanks. I worked all weekend on this. Plain Jane, but OK I guess.

[Jonferimonic]

Much better mr glorybound.

[Jonferimonic]

PS you asked about Fresnel reflections. I dont know if you wanted to know how they work or how you should apply them to your scene but here is some info i found for you on the world wide web.

How they work:

Fresnel Effect (pronounced "fre-nel," the "s" is silent) - the observation that the amount of reflectance you see on a surface depends on the viewing angle. As shown in the renders above, if you look straight down from above at a pool of water, you will not see very much reflected light on the surface of the pool, and can see down through the surface to the bottom of the pool. At a glancing angle (looking with your eye level with the water, from the edge of the water surface), you will see much more specularity and reflections on the water surface, and might not be able to see what's under the water.

Fresnel Shaders in general allow reflection, specularity, and other attributes to vary according to the viewing angle of a 3D surface. A Fresnel shader will let you specify a specular color for parts of a surface directly facing the camera, and another specular color to be seen on parts of a surface that are perpendicular to the camera. In addition to the usual specular highlights and reflectivity, parameters such as the color or transparency can also be controlled by some Fresnel shaders.

How you could apply them to your scenes:

Basically, you can put a fresnel reflection in the reflection slot of every material in your scene, and control the amount it reflects with the black/white sliders. I have it on most of my mats and just play around with the glossies. Voila, instant photorealism. (almost..)

[glorybound]

Fresnel

Thanks for the info. I applied a fresnel reflection on all these materials, but I am far from photoreal. I lowered the spinners to about 2... I didn't play with the black and white. I'll try that next time.

[Jonferimonic]

Having the spinners on 2 is pointless because that only allows 2% of the total reflectivity applied. Leave them all on 100 and just alter the black/white.

[glorybound]

Pointless

Ya, I figured it out that it was pointless when my image still looked like crap

[joconnell]

Thanks for the info. I applied a fresnel reflection on all these materials, but I am far from photoreal. I lowered the spinners to about 2... I didn't play with the black and white. I'll try that next time.

Heya!

I'm always mentioning this about buildings and in your case what it'll mean is that you're going to get a really nice gradient of variation running across your buildings. Fresnel just means that the amount of reflectivity of a surface changes depending on the angle you look at it from. If you're look at it front on, you'll see more of the diffuse colour of the surface but as you start to move towards looking at it from the side it starts to become more reflective. On your row of houses, your angle to the house on the right is more front on than the one on the left so as it moves from the right to left, you'll get gradually more reflection appearing on the houses - it'll add a nice gradient reflection of the sky and gives you more variation for free. Pretty much everything is reflective to some extent including brick and concrete so you're going to need to use some reflection on those surfaces - it'll be very glossy though since the surfaces are quite rough so you're not going to see anything defined in them.

Here's an example image showing the effect:



As you can see the house at the right is more face on and as you gradually go to the left houses, they start picking up more specular burn from the sun - that's the effect I'm talking about. It might not be as pronounced as I've seen but I couldn't find a stronger example quickly. It'll just add a bit more life and realism to the surfaces of your buildings.