After lots of fooling around with furniture and small pieces, here is one full-scale personal project: a 3D version of the Ewerk, a converted power station in the centre of Berlin that is now home to offices and event spaces. The original conversion was made by Hoyer Schindele Hirschmüller Architekten, Berlin.
Because of a heavy work load in the last year, this project took ages to complete. I must have worked on it on-and-off over a period of six months, mostly late at night. I could have done more on it - some views that are not shown in the final renders were maybe 90 per cent complete - but I had to move on and call it a day at some point.
I picked this building because of the wealth of materials and textures and was helped by a great deal of good reference material, both in terms of plans and in terms of textures, which were all created from actual photos of the facades and the various ground and wall surfaces.
As always, the modelling was done in 3ds Max (2012 this time) and rendered in Vray 2.1. The scene was about 5m polys (without the vegetation) and even though each view was heavily optimised, most images took just shy of 24GB to render, presumably because of the huge amount of displacement. Most images were rendered overnight on 16 cores at about 3,000 pixels wide. All modelling was mine except for the cars, which are mainly 3D-World freebies.
Perhaps one interesting fact about this series is that all images were lit only with HDR maps, plugged into a Vray Dome Light and Gamma-tweaked using my HDR workflow in order to obtain sharper shadows. There are no other lights present in the scene.
Another bit of trivia is that I used a medium format (Vray Physical) camera with a film width of 120mm, hence the rather shallow depth of field despite the wide angles.
Hope you like it - all comments and criticism much welcome.
Click on the images below to see the whole series in higher definition on Flickr.
Got to pick something lighter, perhaps in warmer climes, next time.