Windows at Night

[duke2]

I've always had trouble with this. Making convincing interiors of buildings at night, as seen from the outside, seems to be an art unto itself.

I was asked to make this yesterday which was a day-long exercise in making a notch-up-from-Sketchup presentation. I was happy with the rest, but the windows on the towers are utterly unconvincing.

Anyone have any tips?

[Morne]

I don't know, it doesnt look too bad to me. What does look a bit odd is the reflections of the glass. Are you using standard fresnel with IOR of 1.5 to 1.6?

[joconnell]

You need to extrude the rooms back in to the building behind the glass - it looks like exactly what it is right now, a flat texture of a room mapped onto the surface of the building. The guys from double negative are told to photograph each wall of their hotel room any time they go away purely to build up a library of rooms to use for this type of thing. Duplicate the window faces to a seperate object to use as your glass, then extrude the original faces back in to create depth in the rooms. It might be a bit fiddly to select all the needed polygons to break them up into wall / ceiling / floor selections but it'll look far better for doing this.

[super gnu]

way back when rendering lots of geometry was an issue, i had an idea for a plugin that could help with this.

using the same method that rpc did with photos of people from diff angles that were loaded depending on the angle of the camera, it would be great to have a plane you could put behind a window in scenes like this, that would load a diff perspective view of a generic room depending on the cam angle.

a small library of diff rooms, some colour correction and randomising tools and youd have a nice tool for quickly populating big tower scenes.


unfortunately im no programmer, it seemed beyond maxscript, not that im a scripter either, so the idea just stayed as an idea.

[joconnell]

Yep, not a bad idea at all - would be a tough one alright and definitely beyond maxscript.

[Dave_Wortley]

There's a plugin for lightwave called VRoom which he should be developing for 3dsmax and Vray, it's rather good, but I don't think he's got that far with it yet for Vray.

[joconnell]

Okay, lets script a utility to do it in the mean time based around material ID's and selections.

[super gnu]

ha.. looks like pretty much exactly what i dreamed up. hopefully they will bring it to max and vray.

[Neilg]

I've got an ever reliable quick method for this. Cut the glass into floor plates, push it back, make a black material with an opacity map of a building (frames & clutter black, glass white & blinds grey). throw that into a multi sub and make a few darker versions, cut the object up vertically a bit & put a material by element on the glass (so it's all transparent, but some parts less so than others). throw some internal walls in there, rough as anything. Take the object you'd pushed back and make a copy pushed back even further, then make a multi sub with 10 different vraylight materials on to give variation to the lighting - leaving some black. That should take you most of the way. The next step after that is to use a scatter plugin to array proxied furniture through the floor plates, depending on how much detail you need.

get a stack of photography as reference to balance the colours/transparency.

[duke2]

Thanks for the tips, I'll give these a shot on Monday!

[Pixelcon]

For the last (and first) one I did, I created a spline from the slab edges, offset (inwards) and used Pflow to scatter planes along the spline with a few different vraylightmaterials of varying colour. The whole effect comes together when you use masks in photoshop to boost and adjust colours and add glow etc. IMO you'll never get the intensity you're after straight out of max in an efficient manner.

[duke2]

How rude of me! Here's the result after taking a crack at some suggestions:

[muoto]

HMmmm...reflections in the glass are a bit strange no ?

[MoonDoggie]

This sounds great, but it's pretty hard to follow. Video tutorial imo.

[Sawyer]

seems like you have a giant scale smoke bump map applied to the material.