The Brewery

[Macker]

Hey guys,

It's pretty rare that I get to do residential interiors. These are some that I've been working on (client hasn't seen them yet) for some small, but well situated apartments in a city centre above a shopping complex that we designed. As is the way of the world, the developer initially wanted high-spec apartments, but this has gradually been whittled down to the cheapest finishes so I'm trying to make them look a bit better by including nice furnishings, etc.

It's been a challenge for me as I'm so used to doing exteriors, though that said the hardest part so far was having to remove all of the scaffolding from the panorama's I shot for the outsides of the windows - nightmare!






Will post more later as I complete them. Original renders are 6000 pixels along their longest edge, so plenty of detail.

[rikou]

Well done ! I like it !

[glorybound]

Nice! Maybe a little too much glow on the sky, but that is just being picky.

[Macker]

Thanks guys,

Just a couple more rooms...

[jacksc02]

Nice and clean.
I would remove the rubbish bin in the kitchen shot.

[leo.surrealismo]

nice; what are you color mapping settings? full linear?

[Macker]

nice; what are you color mapping settings? full linear?

Just subtle Reinhard in VRay (0.85 burn value). The rest of the exposure/colour corrections are dealt with primarily in camera raw/lightroom and then creative adjustments in photoshop. In terms of post work, each image is about 5 minutes worth maximum. All of them are VRay sun/sky and whatever interior lights are turned on - except for the bedroom where I had to create a fill-flash that bounced off the wall behind the camera and back into shot to light the foreground of the image.

Here's some more that completed this morning - though two will need to be re-rendered on account of me accidentally moving the kitchen units away from the wall!

[PIXELBOX_SRO]

Oh these came out really nice!!!
Congrats!

May i ask what sort of values for sun/sky have you used as well as EV value?

I really have problems using vray sun as i never seem to find the right balance in blacks and whites while getting the room well lit and exposed.
for example in interior which has 200 for white walls and 47 for darker gray floor, and EV 12, i get FLOAT value of the floor where its hit by the sun still around 1 although using the 0.85 burn value in reinhard.
This really does my heading and i have to use HDRIs to get a nice balance :-/

[Macker]

Oh these came out really nice!!!
Congrats!

Thanks!

May i ask what sort of values for sun/sky have you used as well as EV value?

I really have problems using vray sun as i never seem to find the right balance in blacks and whites while getting the room well lit and exposed.
for example in interior which has 200 for white walls and 47 for darker gray floor, and EV 12, i get FLOAT value of the floor where its hit by the sun still around 1 although using the 0.85 burn value in reinhard.
This really does my heading and i have to use HDRIs to get a nice balance :-/

I usually start with a standard sun/sky setup and try to apply roughly the right colours to the largest surfaces in the room (so mainly walls, floors & ceilings). Then I adjust the camera exposure to correctly expose the room not the exterior - worry about that later. I have no idea what EV it is as I am always using a combination of ISO/Shutter speed/F-number as I'm much more used to that on my SLR.

These are the first two shots that I took to get the general exposure balance (and sign off on camera position).




As you can see the highlights are really over-exposed, but the rest of the room looks more or less correct - it's also at this point I sort out white balance to take into account the colour bleed from the floor. Don't be put off by the apparent lack of contrast either, as long as you've exposed to include as much pixel information as possible then the rest can be adjusted in Lightroom/Camera Raw/Photoshop. After this I spend some time populating all the main parts of the scene before deciding what to do with the lighting. In both situations I found that once I'd placed a number of items of furniture the shot began to look very cluttered because of the strong shadows cast by the window frames - these needed softening, which was a simple case of increasing the suns size multiplier to 10...

The downside of this is that those over-exposed highlights grew larger, which led me to ask this question: http://forums.chaosgroup.com/showthr...ySun-Sky-ratio

So I went with the tip there and used a separate sun/sky and specified the existing sun in my scene as the sun node - this way I could independently control the amount of light coming from the sun/sky. I ended up with just reducing the sun multiplier to ~ 0.5 - though it is worth noting this will throw your white balance off just a little, as there will be a higher proportion of blue light from the sky.

Hope this helps.

Chris

[PIXELBOX_SRO]

woudl you perhaps care to post uncorrected raw render withtou any VFB corrections please?

EDIT:
oh you did, thanks for your reply....inspecting now ))

[Macker]

Here's the "final" shot straight out of the framebuffer, no corrections.

[PIXELBOX_SRO]

great thanks for those tips
i am so used to working with HDRIs now that i completely forgot about the sun/sky tricks

I am using EVs simply because i can forget about all those fstops/ISOs/shutter speed.
Good thisn about this is that no matter how you change these values, the exposure stays the same.
So then when you want to play with DOF, youre free to set it up anyway you like without having to reexpose/recaulculate all the values

I guess ill just play with my simple scene now and use your tips to see if i can come up with something similar.

Just one more question please.

For maximum white and darkest black - in this particular scene did you go for?

I am now experimenting with 210 for white and 10 for black...

[Macker]

I tend to go with 225 for pure whites and 1 for blacks (0 on metals though).

[PIXELBOX_SRO]

interesting i will see if this works in my scene i am working on ... i still havent fully decided whether to use HDRI or sun systém on that one.
THANKS A LOT Macker

[PIXELBOX_SRO]

BTW the reason i am asking is because i ve read so many articles on PBR and albedo colors and physical approach to color and i seem to be completely confused now.
Some people say not to go bellow 16 and also keep whites bellow 220 and then to compensate for the lost contrast in post but this doestn work in every situation.

I am trying to find more universal workflow which woudl act the same no matter what i use whether sun or HDRI.

Moreover, some HDRI blow out a lot (quite a lot of Peter Guthrie ones too) when u expose them more....adding even more confusion into equation