Student Housing

[glorybound]

Man, we have a hard job. The modeling, and texture mapping, was the easy part. I spend 2 days modeling, and mapping, but twice as long to make it look special. I might have over done it, but I had a heck of a time making it look appealing.

[paolo242]

great looking but I think there is too much blur...

[glorybound]

yes... I went overboard on the blur. I'll remove it, and post an update.

[pailhead]

Why blur it at all?

[joconnell]

Exposure is looking quite realistic too. What might be worth looking at though is that for a lot of those type of shots where you've something heavily backlit or exposing a dark object against a bright sky, a photographer will often use a grad filter on the lens of the camera to pull back some detail into the sky. You'd likely still get the near white values at the mid horizon just over the building, but it'd gradually fade back into a sky colour at the top.

[Crayox13]

Yes, definitely no blur, I think the scene is too large that any lens would make blur on it.

Interesting ambience, it made me look at it longer and get the feel of this scene, like a late summer evening (or maybe morning since it's a bit foggy). I would though add a bit more contrast, though if you wanted to match the sky (sun mostly behind the clouds) than I guess it's correct.

[glorybound]

here is an update, without the blur

[glorybound]

grad filter

I like that idea, and I am going to try it.

[joconnell]

The glow is a bit too much on the latest one - it looks like a film "pro mist" filter which diffuses and blurs - normally used to soften and give more of a sense of romance. I'd be inclined to turn on lights in some of the windows too or add in a few street lamps around the car park - the place looks pretty spooky at the mo and some small pools of light could give you a lot more richness in the darker areas at the edge of the grass!

[glorybound]

Well, I don't want spooky. I lightened up a tad, toned down the diffused filter a bit, and took a little color out of it.

[joconnell]

Better, I'd be inclined to take the diffuse off entirely though. I'd look at your reflection filter element for your walls / bricks and see what type of values you're getting on it. I'd be half incline to use a falloff map for your brick reflections and tweak the curve until you get a clear gradient of grey to black running over the faces of the building. Definitely some small localized street lights around the perimeter of the car park and the build entrances would be great too - a quickie job with the spacing tool should do it. Even if you've no lamp models I'd put in vray lights on their own just to see the difference it makes. The based of the image is just a bit heavy looking.

[glorybound]

I did place a falloff map in the high-gloss slot. of the bricks. but it was subtle. I'll talk to the architect about the street lamps. I know it is due into the city by noon, so it will not happen today, but maybe with later revisions. I tried all kinds of light setups, but the building lacks detail, so I wanted to add detail with ambiance.

[joconnell]

Might even be worth swinging your light setup a tiny bit more to bring up the building and bring the sky down? It's a very contrasty setup and the building is your main focus so you'd be exposing for that as much as possible.

[Neilg]

I think that view is just a difficult one to make good. You could have done a courtyard shot and a detail of the sign and had a much easier job of it.

[glorybound]

The architect wanted one view, showing the whole building - sound familiar?

I think that view is just a difficult one to make good. You could have done a courtyard shot and a detail of the sign and had a much easier job of it.