Les Heures Claires

[BBB3]

Hi there,
Whiling away idle hours with some modelling and rendering practice...
This is a personal take on "Les Heures Claires", a house by architect Bruno Erpicum. The "David Chipperfield" brickwork is a personal addition.
I'm still puzzling over most of Vray's settings, so there's a lot of trial and error in there and when things work, it's generally sheer luck. So extremely grateful for any feedback.

[joconnell]

Looks like you've got most of it spot on - the exposure is really nice and the background sits in well.

[thablanch]

Quite nice work. nice feel and nice postprod.

[rivoli]

it's really good, especially like third and fourth ones.
the only thing that bothers me a little it's the chromatic aberration effect, which I found a bit excessive and out of place. in a series of shots like those, which are very clean and well composed you'd do everything you can to avoid such a cheap side effect. personally I don't think it adds realism to the pictures, on the contrary, abused as it is in archviz nowadays, it's turning into a kind of cg signature.

[Da_elf]

the guy must be blind to sit so close to the TV. nice work on the renders though

[sea2stars]

Dude. Quality work.

Care to share some of your "sheer luck"?

[jamesf73]

lovely renders

[BBB3]

Thanks a lot for the nice feedback. Much appreciated.

Joconell: Thanks man. The background is 3D. I use a Zdepth layer as a mask in post to mix between the original render and a desaturated, slightly bluish version of the image to create a slight fog effect.

rivoli: I agree with you in principle. Decent CA is hard to do. Ideally, one wouldn't even notice it if it just added a certain softness to an image. It's hard to get it right and I definitely overdid it in some of the shots.
One thing that would be great to have in Vray would be native lens effects like glow, dispersion, ca, etc. Some of the unbiased renders do it, some of them in the actual renders rather than as a post effect.

Da_elf: Yep. It's even worse than that, the guy is actually facing the wall. But that was the only way to get that Chieftain chair in the frame

sea2stars: Well, if you ask, sheer luck is when you finally get rid of a persistent blotchiness in an image but have no idea how and cannot replicate it. Or when a render that was taking eight hours to render on 16 threads suddenly clears in an hour with a few random tweaks. Some times I give up: for instance when I tried to have the noise map in my windows deform the reflection and not the refraction...

[rivoli]

One thing that would be great to have in Vray would be native lens effects like glow, dispersion, ca, etc. Some of the unbiased renders do it, some of them in the actual renders rather than as a post effect.

yes, I agree. really often I import renderings from vray to maxwell's mxcl and do this kind of post work there. most of the times results are ok, not always predictable, but nice

[peterguthrie]

nice work!

I especially like the 3rd image, the floor and wood textures are great. Did you model the Finn Juhl chair yourself?

[BBB3]

Hi Peter. Thanks a lot for the kind words.

Yes, everything is home made except the Buddha and the trees. And doing the Chieftain chair was definitely the most fun.

The floor is actually modelled, using the floor generator, and textured with Arroway's latest wood set.

When do we get to see more of your amazing work?

[peterguthrie]

ahh, I wondered if the boards were modeled, its so hard to get such crisp small gaps with displacement.

Maybe the leather on the chair needs a bit of work? I like the worn/scratched effect you've got there, but somehow it doesn't look quite right? Plus you need those little rounded things at the very top http://www.onecollection.com/Chiefta...Billede=10.jpg

Chipperfield brick looks great as well btw

My work? soon, promise! well, as soon as I get some of this annoying paid work out of the way!

[BBB3]

Yes, I should remodel the blobby bits.
Right now the leather is a simple tiling texture. But the seat is properly UVed so it should be easy to paint a more convincing map. I was going to go for black leather, as in the reference pics, but dropped it for two reasons: 1) The series colour scheme cried for a lighter shade, 2) I can never get black leather right, it either appears too dark or too grey.

The Chipperfield bricks were taken from an actual Chipperfield house here and a displacement map extracted from the diffuse texture (which was harder work than I expected but turned out quite nice, I thought).

[peterguthrie]

ah the all too familiar PAIN of tracing bricks in photoshop! always worth it in the end though

[simmsimaging]

Really nice job. That brushed metal texture is bang on - great eye on the materials.

b