Preliminary Apartment Exterior - needs a lot of work :(

[paulison]

Hi Guys,

We got this model last week (which is incomplete) and the clients require images for their brochure so i've had a go in Vray but this isnt good enough yet. Can anyone give any tips on how to improve this?



There is no handrails, windowframes etc and the colours arnt right yet (although they do want that colour pattern) but all of this will come later as we may be rebuilding the model from scratch. The image is a preliminary attempt (may not show the client)

Anyway, I've tried to use a HDRI background along with 1 standard viz4 light with vray shadows but it looks like the HDRI is doing nothing. The 8 mins rendering time is with IR and Photonmaps precalculated and its quite a big model which is why i had to keep the IR settings low (-4/-2)

I tried using egz glass at first but I was getting huge weird diffraction patterns so i went back to a standard transparent material with vrmap for reflections (only a small amount) and an IOR? or 1.0

I suppose to summarise my main areas of problem other than colours and modelling (I guess):

photonmapping - doesnt seem to be doing anything
HDRI - doesnt seem to be doing much
Shadows - too dark and not enough light under balconies
glass - isnt realistic enough
GI - not doing enough in shadowed areas
Light - maybee free directional light is the wrong one to use?

Any tips on what settings people would use for this kind of project would be most welcome! The most obvious would be to crank up the min/max values for the Irradiance map wouldnt it?

BTW: finished building will be photoshopped onto photo taken from the roof of a nearby building - has a similar look and colours to the HDRI background

[kippu]

ok here goes and these are my views on your queries ....

photonmapping - doesnt seem to be doing anything

usually photonmapping is used in interiors and for exteriors its usually irrmap for both first and second bounces

HDRI - doesnt seem to be doing much

i havent used hdri so i cant help you out here

Shadows - too dark and not enough light under balconies
GI - not doing enough in shadowed areas
try playing with dark and light multipliers,

glass - isnt realistic enough

simple vray material with lots of refraction and slight reflection( use falloff)

Light - maybee free directional light is the wrong one to use?

totally ....try target direct....

you might get some few pointers from this

http://www.chaoticdimension.com/foru...ighlight=house

good luck and keep us posted

[percydaman]

why do you not think hdri is not working? with a predominantly blue sky, your going to get a predominantly blue skylight image. have you tried changing the hdri to something radically different to see if theres a change?

[trixian]

...
totally ....try target direct....

How would a targeted direct help in this sense? As long as he uses a direct light for his sun he should be safe....regardless if its targeted or not.
The target is there only to help with manipulating the light in the viewport.

[dusan]

Are you even using GI?

why dont you try with a simple setting, just to get the overall feel of how the scene should be lighted?

make a copy of the scene, assign a white material to all the objects, and render @ 640x480 with lets say, a direct light with multiplier of 0.7, a skylight with multiplier of 0.8, irradiance map and direct computation for secondary,
irr map with -3 -2, leave everything else default

[doan]

I would do as Duasn have said. Before working on matl, try to have correct light balance. As you can notice in your scene, the shadows are too dark. It make the scene too heavy in terms of contrast.
Egz's glass works fine here. The problem is the light amount according to me.

[Hallock]

Okay, I recently did my first exterior and after about two weeks of fiddling with GI and a direct light I tried HDRi, I feel it looked a lot better. My advice to you is to tweak the HDRi with all other lights turned off, then turn on your direct light as a sun with a relatively low level, about .2-.6 so you don't washout the HDRi effects. Use linear multiplier. I've seen people work with exponential and HSV exponential well before, but that was just my preferance. I also had to bump up the dark multiplier to about 1.5.

[paulison]

thanks guys im getting the hang of it now. the different light source did make a difference for some reason but it was more likely i messed up one of the settings. I'll post an all white model tomorrow from work

there seems to be so many ways of doing things!!

[paulison]

I gave up on that job because the crapness of the model was starting to frustrate me and moved onto something more urgent that I started modelling last friday. Using the tips you guys gave and following some other tutes and threads in here I came up with this image which im almost happy with!



Any more tips/ crits most welcome. thanks

[paulison]

here was how the other building ended up. Too many modelling errors causing problems though i think. At least there is light under the balconies now



still not happy with the lighting but after 49 hours processing the IR map I kind of gave up on it (will come back to it later)

[percydaman]

keep in mind that having a diffuse material on everything magnifies errors and problems areas that wont be near so obvious when you have textures applied.

[Hallock]

I gave up on that job because the crapness of the model was starting to frustrate me and moved onto something more urgent that I started modelling last friday. Using the tips you guys gave and following some other tutes and threads in here I came up with this image which im almost happy with!



Any more tips/ crits most welcome. thanks

HDRi for that or are you using standard GI?

[paulison]

its just using 1 light using IR map -3 -1 and direct computation with a HDRI skylight with a multiplier of 1.5. had to lower the brightness of the light to get the background image to show up more

[percydaman]

no complaints here...looks pretty good.

[Hallock]

Are you using Dosch sky HDRi images or freebies?