Last of the giveaways is here! DesignConnected will give one of you lucky followers their chance to pick 15 models from their big collection… any model you like. You will also have the chance to win 15 more great 3d models by sending a 3d render you made using one of their freely available models and the ones from the latest 13 free models posted here.

About DesignConnected

DesignConnected mission is to make your interior designing and presentation process easier and tight connected with the latest 3d technologies. It’s aim is to deliver the best quality digital content for all the interior design professionals. Starting from all the design classics, going through the most iconic modern design furniture and ending with the latest design arrivals at the furniture fair stands It connect’s you with the only digital library that is dedicated to interior design.

How to Enter

All you need to do to enter is:

1. Post a link to this giveaway – either on your blog, facebook page or on Twitter
2. Leave a comment below letting us know where you’ve posted the link and what model you fancy the most from DesignConnected’s vast catalog!

The first part of this giveaway closes in exactly 48 hours Sunday 29th 12:00 GMT, and a winner will be randomly selected shortly afterwards. This post will be updated with the winner information and DesignConnected we’ll get in touch with you.

The second part of sending your 3d renders showcasing one or more of DesignConnected’s free items will end on September 15th. Please use the following form to submit your renders.

A big thanks to DesignConnected, for sponsoring the giveaway. Good luck, and be sure to follow this blog or subscribe so that you can find out if you’re a winner!

Winner Announced: DesignConnected Giveaway is a post from Ronen Bekerman's 3D Architectural Visualization Blog

The DesignConnected Giveaway will start soon but as a prelude to it, the good people at DesignConnected added this free pack of 13 models especially for this blog and it’s birthday for everyone to use. The files come in various formats so please download only what you need.

In each of the model folders you will have one or more preview images, text file with link to the model at the DesignConnected website and the different file formats of the model to download. Enjoy!

A big thanks to DesignConnected for offering these models. Be sure to follow this blog or subscribe so that you can keep getting updates and free stuff when they are posted or sent as part of the newsletter only.

13 Free Models by DesignConnected is a post from Ronen Bekerman's 3D Architectural Visualization Blog

Bertrand posted two new personal visualization projects he recently finished at the forums. This one is House M by Titus Bernhard Architekten were he make intensive use of the new BRIX plugin (You can learn more about it here). Amazing work yet again!

Here are some of Bertrand’s images that he made in this set. You can see all of them in his flickr set for this.

Don’t forget to visit Bertrand’s blog too and…

Visit the project page on the architects website for more info including real photos and drawings. There is also a post about this house on archdaily.

House M Visualization by Bertrand Benoit is a post from Ronen Bekerman's 3D Architectural Visualization Blog

The second of the blog’s birthday giveaways is here! I’ll be giving away 2 months of free premium MindMeister account to 5 of you. I use this great online app all the time for work and personal stuff and hope you will like it like I do.

About MindMeister

Collaborative Online Mind Mapping

MindMeister brings the concept of mind mapping to the web, using its facilities for real-time collaboration to allow truly global brainstorming sessions. Users can create, manage and share mind maps online and access them anytime, from anywhere. In brainstorming mode, fellow MindMeisters from around the world (or just in different rooms) can simultaneously work on the same mind map and see each other’s changes as they happen.

I use MindMeister all the time for brainstorming, structuring things like this blog, a project for a client, personal tasks and more and it’s great that I can share it online.

A Tour of MindMeister from MindMeister on Vimeo.

How to Enter

All you need to do to enter is:

1. Post a link to this giveaway – either on your blog, facebook page or on Twitter
2. Leave a comment below letting us know where you’ve posted the link

This giveaway closes in exactly 48 hours, and the winners will be randomly selected shortly afterwards. This post will be updated with the winners information and I’ll be sending them the account codes for activation.

A big thanks to MindMeister, for offering this accounts. Good luck, and be sure to follow this blog or subscribe so that you can find out if you’re a winner!

Winners Announced: MindMeister Giveaway is a post from Ronen Bekerman's 3D Architectural Visualization Blog

The first of the blog’s birthday giveaways is here! model+model will give one of you lucky followers their Volume 01. accessories 3d model pack. You will also have the chance to win one more pack by sending a 3d render you made using one of their freely available models.

About model+model

model+model is a new 3d model provider. They have a very stylish website in which you can purchase single items and collections. Their first Volume of accessories is up for grabs here and they will soon publish Vol 2. You may also find a selection of their items on their 3DOcean portfolio page.

How to Enter

All you need to do to enter is:

1. Post a link to this giveaway – either on your blog, or on Twitter
2. Leave a comment below letting us know where you’ve posted the link and which of the vol. 01 items you like best!

The first part of this giveaway closes in exactly 48 hours, and a winner will be randomly selected shortly afterwards. This post will be updated with the winner information and model+model we’ll get in touch with you.

The second part of sending your 3d renders showcasing one or more of the model+model free items will end on August 31st. Please use the following form to submit your renders.

A big thanks to model+model, for sponsoring the giveaway. Good luck, and be sure to follow this blog or subscribe so that you can find out if you’re a winner!

Winner Announced: model+model Giveaway is a post from Ronen Bekerman's 3D Architectural Visualization Blog

Hard to believe, but it’s been ONE year since I launched this blog… Time does fly when your having fun, isn’t it. It went live with the Blog is born post and it’s nice to look back and see what I had in mind back then and what did happen during the past months… I hope I can celebrate many more birthdays for this blog and keep providing you all the best place to find information, share & learn about Architectural Visualization.

I owe a big thank you to you all, my readers, followers & sponsors! Without you this wouldn’t be possible, so I thought I should give back a little.

The BRIX miniCHALLENGE

The first birthday event, as you probably know already is the BRIX miniCHALLENGE that starts today! Sponsored by the great people at Materialwerk it is a fast, fun little challenge for 3ds Max users. Check out the info on the BRIX miniCHALLENGE forum thread.

Giveaways

To further thank you for following this blog, commenting & participating in the forums I have arranged two giveaways for you. Keep track of the blog for the next days so you can take part in this!

5 Lucky readers will have the chance of getting a MindMeister Premium account for two months! I use MindMeister all the time. It is a collaborative online mind mapping solution I use for brainstorming, structuring things like this blog, a project for a client, personal tasks and more. The best thing about it is that you are able to share and collaborate online with others. And yes, I get something back for posting this here… but it’s only fair and so could you. I make sure I only do this with services I use personally on a daily basis.

model+model will be giving-away to one of you their brand new Vol. 1 3d model accessories pack. but in order to keep true to their one name I bumped it up to a 1+1 deal the first will be randomly given, the second you need to work for a little. More information about this will be posted soon.

That is all for now

Thanks again for following and sending me your feedback! Please consider visiting my sponsors websites and check out what they can offer you.., They help to keep this blog going! See you in the HOVER & BRIX challenges.

Happy Birthday! is a post from Ronen Bekerman's 3D Architectural Visualization Blog

I’ll be celebrating my blog’s 1st birthday this August 15th and plan some cool stuff for you all… And this is a heads up for this blog’s first miniCHALLENGE#01 – BRIX that is the first event for this birthday month. Sponsored by Materialwerk it will start on the 15th and will end on the 31st September 15th. Head to the miniCHALLENGE’s forum thread for more information, but you can see the prizes below too.

The Prizes

All of the BRIX miniCHALLENGE participants that submit final images will be eligible for 20% discount when purchasing BRIX and…

1. BRIX LIFE TIME License (BRIX full version + Unlimited render nodes + All future updates!)
2. BRIX Complete pack (BRIX full version + Unlimited render nodes)
3. BRIX full version

Have Fun & Good Luck to you all!

miniCHALLENGE 01 / BRIX is a post from Ronen Bekerman's 3D Architectural Visualization Blog

As mentioned in the latest newsletter, I bring you Tom Svilan’s making of 93 Tram scene. This will be the first Blender + Indigo Render article in this blog. This combo is not the usual thing in archviz and I’ll try to publish more content related to the use of Blender and Indigo in particular. In this article, Tom describes his process from CAD to Finish, creating 3 Interior / semi exterior night time 3d renders. I hope you’ll enjoy this article, learn from it and share your thoughts by commenting at the bottom of this article’s page.

Author: Tom Svilans
Tom is a 3d artist based in Ottawa, Canada. Doing architectural visualization work with the not so common combo of Blender + Indigo Render. Tom recently participated in the GH House challenge and his entry was picked as my personal judge favorite. You can check it out at the GH House challenge winners page and also directly in his ‘Swamp Thing’ WIP thread. Tom also entred the HOVER challenge and show great progress so far – Tom’s HOVER WIP Thread.

Check out his personal blog for more info – http://tomsvilans.com/blog/

Feel free to comment about any aspect of this article or things you think need more detailed explanation. I’m sure Tom will answer it all

Introduction

Genesis: In the beginning Tom received the email attachment containing PDF’s and CAD drawings. And the drawings were without form and color, and a general lack of specific information was upon the face of the elevations. And Tom said, please shed some light! After an extended e-mail exchange between the Client and the Client’s Architect, Tom received a rough material schedule for the project. And Tom saw that everything is good and he could begin working.

And now let’s get to business

When starting this particular project, I already had the general elevations of the whole building as I had done exterior shots of it a while back, and I guess the client was now moving towards marketing the individual apartments so I was asked to do some interior shots of the penthouse apartments on the 10th floor. Fine and dandy. I got the floorplan, a section through the building for my interior heights and a couple of photos of the kind of interior the client wanted (pretty basic stuff, mostly just furniture in white-walled rooms with recessed lighting).

CAD & Blender

The first step was to clean up the drawings in AutoCAD and make sure that I had all the relevant information for modeling. This meant deleting unneeded information such as text and dimensions and background stuff. Once I got the plan and section cleaned up, I saved it as a separate DXF file so that I could import it into Blender. As always, the original files are never touched for obvious reasons. Ending up with 20 very similar copies of a drawing is way better than accidently saving over your only copy of a certain, very important detail.

CAD Plan

CAD Elevation

So, with my DXF file ready, I fired up Blender…

It’s no real surprise, at least to me, that some people find it hard to believe that Blender can work with CAD files. I’ve heard “CAD is more precise, Blender is just an animation thing” or “There is no OSNAP in Blender, therefore how-the-hell-can-you-make-any-straight-lines and you ought to be burned at the stake”. The truth is, for someone coming from AutoCAD or Rhino or pretty much any other commercial modeling package, Blender is just plain weird. I remember the first time I opened it, I just sat there for a minute, stared, went “Well… that’s interesting”, closed it and went back to CorelDream 3d (which is the first, and by far the worst, 3d program I’ve ever used but it came with the Corel Suite). After spending time with it, however, and making silly animations of spaceships, I cobbled together a pretty reliable method of doing things.

Blenders 4 Big Breakthroughs for Archviz

The first big breakthrough was finding the DXF/DWG import script, which is when I started to seriously do some Archviz. The second big breakthrough was Blender’s snapping system which sped things up about ten-fold and saved me so much time and infuriating effort. The third big breakthrough was finding out what, exactly, the GeomTools script was all about, though I didn’t need it in this project. The fourth big breakthrough was particle instancing which, again, I didn’t need in this project.

Between those four things, I’ve found a reasonable way of doing Archviz. Anyways, back to the project.

Loading the DXF

Using the DXF importer, I loaded up the DXF files I created from the original drawings. The important things here were to :

• Make sure it imports everything as a mesh (edges and vertices) and not splines (just quicker to work with and less of a hassle).
• Make sure the scale responds to the actual scale of the drawings (I always work with 1 Blender Unit = 1 meter, so since my drawing was in mm, I have a glob.Scale value of 0.001).
• Separate all the materials by COLOR (this allows us to pick apart the different colored lines because the whole drawing was on two layers, which I suspect is the result of architect crippling his CAD drawings for me, thank you very much, buddy).

Hitting ‘Start Import’, I let Blender do its thing.

DXF Importer Screen

A thing to remember – ‘newScene’ should be disabled as that will create a new scene for each drawing you import, which is unnecessary.

Modeling the Architecture

The modeling was really simple. Once the drawings were imported as a mesh object and aligned (plan is moved up to the floor level of the section), I extracted the walls by selecting all the edges and separating them into their own object. Extruded up and subdivided, I snapped the door frame and window sill heights and bridge the openings where necessary. Deleting top and bottom faces and making sure the normals were OK, the walls were done.

Selected Wall Edges

Making the floor plate was as simple as creating a plane, deleting a corner of it so that we just have edges and tracing the floor plate in the plan. Using either the Beauty Fill command or Convert Edges To Curves script, I filled in the boundary. The terrace was done the same way. Easy as pie. So that’s pretty much it for the architectural part of it, the rest is interior decoration.

Building the Walls

Finished General Modeling

Additional Modeling of Interior

The hardest part to model was probably the couch and accompanying easy chair and it wasn’t even that bad. Simple box modeling, adding resolution with loop cuts and a slight displacement modifier on the cushions to get some irregularity across the cushions. The armchair and footrest are simple derivatives of the same.

Modeling Interior Furniture

Actually, the kitchen sink was probably the trickiest since it’s one of those modern ones with the coiling neck. The was done just by modeling the coil and then bending it with a curve. The rest of it was just an extruded and beveled cylinder. It’s got about 4 pieces and could be said to be rigged, if I wanted to make the neck come alive or something.

The chairs, stools and tables are also chopped up cubes with extrusions. Beveled edges all around. The glass tables are made of curve objects that have been extruded about a centimeter and the legs for the curvy wire one are just made by subdivision modeling (cubes again!). The little grass plants outside were made with Onyx, though they barely play a part in this scene.

Materials

The scene was originally made for VRay but I will skip that and talk about Indigo materials. The important thing for Indigo materials is that all textures are UV mapped, which means a certain amount of unwrapping is involved. Between the usual ‘Unwrap’ and ‘Unwrap (smart projections)’, you can Unwrap most objects pretty quickly and efficiently.

UV Mapping the Furniture

Most materials in the scene are basic Phong materials (Indigo terminology for materials with a specular/reflection component. The glass is a typical transparent specular material with an IOR of 1.55. The window frames are a Phong material with NK data of aluminum and a low exponent (high roughness). The floor is simply mapped with a top-down project from View method, textured with a diffuse, bump and exponent map (with a low exponent, I didn’t want super shiny floors).

I’m a sucker for tileable textures as I get lazy and often don’t have time to spend on individual textures. Most textures are from CGtextures.com, the rest are from my personal photos and painted textures. Below are some material settings screenshots you might find useful

Material Settings 01

Material Settings 02

Material Settings 03

Setting the Lighting & Mood

In essence, the lighting of this scene is pretty basic. A somewhat regular grid of downlights, kitchen counter lighting and an HDR background are all that is involved. The individual levels and white balance were adjusted within Indigo while it rendered, using the very handy Light Layers. You can change the color of the lights with a color picker or a temperature setting. The HDR map was brought down from 6500K (pretty much white, untouched) to about 5200K (more red, less blue) using the light Temperature adjustment. The color temperature of the interior downlights was also dropped a bit to warm them up. The kitchen counter light was tweaked with a slight greenish cast to simulate fluorescent lighting.

Lights Layout

HDRI Look & Feel Outside

The light flares are caused by Indigo’s in-camera Aperture Diffraction. This works off your camera’s f-stop to create a controllable flare around bright spots. I used the Circular option in this case as I just wanted a bloom so that the light sources don’t just look like white spots with sharp edges.

After that it was mostly just tweaking the light temperatures and relative powers to get where I wanted to go. The vignetting is automatic in Indigo, as it would be in real life. The wider the lens is, the less light reaches the edges, or something like that. I think it should be plausible enough to construct a lens that compensates for that, which is why I’m still hoping that the vignetting will be made optional sometime. As you can see in these renderings, sometimes it can be a bit much, but here I thought it contributed to the dark, brooding mood.

I used Camera tone-mapping with the dscs315_4 film to get lots of contrast and a green cast to the shadows. The warm tones of the bright lights contrasted with the green mid-dark tones of the film but it still left a distinct greenish cast to the image.

Post-Processing

There wasn’t all that much post-processing for these renderings. Not more than the usual. Most of it was simple color correction using Selective Color and Black & White adjustment layers in Photoshop to tone the images a bit. The greenish cast was lessened to achieve a more balanced color tone, though I kept hints of it in the low end to keep with the cold mood.

Finally, a little bit of camera distortion and chromatic aberration in Photoshop was added to get rid of the super-crisp edges here and there and to generally tie the image together.

I learned a lot with this project. Mostly about mood lighting and materials but I think it also helped me with transferring my intentions into a 3d image. Often it seems like a surprising result (“Oh, that looks cool, I guess I’ll go with that.”) but I think it’s important to be able to follow a clear idea from the moment you start and end up with a product that stays true to that idea.

Post Production 01

Post Production 02

Anyways, voila! Not sure of the total time for this project, as the initial part dragged on for weeks while I bounced things back and forth with the client, but re-creating it in Indigo took about a week or so, not including rendering. Once I get a hardware upgrade I could finally crank out the high rez renderings in a few days.

Blender + Indigo + Photoshop – Final Images…

Tom’s original 93 Tram thread (Plus other things too)

If you are a Blender or Indigo Render user let us now by commenting below and what you like most about it

You are welcome to comment on this article and ask questions using the comment box below!

Making of 93 Tram is a post from Ronen Bekerman's 3D Architectural Visualization Blog

I love just about any project Marcio Kogan turns out and now with House 6 it is also a perfect fit as HOVER inspiration. The Hovering private dwelling of the house defines the exterior / interior lounge area very well. Concrete, Stone, Plaster, Wood and a magnificent play of volumes and light.

Photography by Pedro Kok

Casa 6, São Paulo, Brasil from Pedro Kok on Vimeo.

original post House 6 / Marcio Kogan at archdaily

House 6 / Marcio Kogan is a post from Ronen Bekerman's 3D Architectural Visualization Blog

I present to you this interview with HOVER judge Bertrand Benoit, Grand Prize Winner of the previous GH House challenge and also 2010 Architectural Awards Winner in Best Architectural Image with the same GH House entry. Starting as a photographer and moving into 3d visualization for the limitless option, he is someone to follow and learn from.

Please tell us a little bit about yourself and how you initially became interested in Architectural Visualization? Do you have any formal training in this field?

Unlike many colleagues in the field, I wasn’t trained as an architect but came to Visualization via photography about four years ago. I was attracted to CG as a means to push the boundaries I was encountering in architectural photography. The ability to create photorealistic renders of virtual scenes on off-the-shelf hardware was what initially fired my interest.

Interior vizualisation animation from Bertrand Benoit on Vimeo.

Do you have any background or interest in traditional art and if so does it help you to make your digital 3d art better?

I do have a relatively strong – and much older – drawing background, but I think my comparatively recent photography background is much more crucial to making my 3d work better. It helps you to know how far you can push some effects – such as a shallow DOF – without making an image photographically implausible. I think it’s no coincidence that many of the best Archviz artists, people like Peter Guthrie, are also excellent photographers in their own right.

What is your favorite project / render that you have done?

I’m not sure I have a favorite project. I’m quite critical of my own work. I find it hard to look at my images, especially older ones, without finding anything I would do differently and, hopefully, better if I were returning to them now. I guess that’s because I’m still learning so much with each new project. Which is why, very often, my favorite project happens to be my latest one.

On what types of projects you like to work best?

I like to work on promotion and marketing material since these tend to stress the artistic (rather than the informational) qualities of an image most and give the artist the biggest amount of freedom. If I were to be completely honest, though, I would say I much prefer to work on personal projects, where freedom is absolute. I almost never publish images of paid-for projects even when I’m allowed to.

What’s the archviz field like in your local area?

I couldn’t really say as I almost never worked for local architecture firms.

What do you like to do when you are not working?

Above all I like to spend time, of which I have far too little, with my kids and wife. If there’s time, mainly photography and personal 3d projects, including non-Archviz stuff.

What is your software of choice? Do you use more the one modeling / rendering application in your workflow?

I use mainly 3ds Max, VRay and ZBrush, plus a zillion 3ds Max plugins. I still use Blender quite extensively, although mainly for compositing purposes and no longer so much for rendering and modeling.

I’m very intrigued by Octane, which I also own, but I’ve been unable to use it lately because it requires the most recent NVidia drivers to work. Unfortunately, most of the drivers written for my GTX 285 in the past year slow 3ds Max down to a crawl. So for the moment, unfortunately, I’m having to choose between Octane and Max.

Once Octane is made to run on non-NVidia cards, I will consider changing card makes and return to Octane as I think it is a very powerful piece of software.

You previously used Blender + VRay for Blender combination and turned out great images. Why did you make the move to 3ds Max?

There are many different reasons. One of them was frustration at the reluctance of commercial software firms to make their tools compatible with Blender. Blender is an amazing and extraordinarily powerful application. But it’s somewhat isolated in its open-source corner. Another, somewhat related, reason was VRay. I’d fallen in love with the renderer when using it in Blender. The work done single-handedly by Andrey Izrantsev, a very gifted coder, to make VRay available to the Blender community was astonishing. But I had reached such a stage of infatuation with VRay that I desperately wanted to use all the features that were only – at the time – available in the 3ds Max version.

Can you tell us about other tools you can’t do without these days?

These are pretty much all the tools I’m using, but I should give VRay a special mention here as I think it’s the only tool I could say I’m forever married with. Not only does it have everything I could ever need from a renderer, but ChaosGroup’s customer policy is among the most enlightened in the business. It’s not the only reason but it’s one of the main reasons why I’m sticking to 3ds Max.

Photoreal or NPR – where do you stand in this debate?

Definitely photoreal, although I concede that this is very much a matter of taste and therefore highly subjective. I’m very attracted to some of the more abstract or stylized work but I don’t think I could produce any.

Are you a post work or pure render type of artist? (Granted, post work is always needed, but how much remains for you to do in post)

I’m a strong believer in doing as much as possible in 3D. I would never paint additional texture layers in 2d on finished renders, for instance. I do this in 3ds Max when needed by applying texture layers after texture layers using different UV sets. I also would rather model my surroundings and entourage than compositing them. This is not because I think the outcome looks better that way (it frequently doesn’t), but I want to have maximum freedom in placing my camera once a scene is fully modeled and shaded.

I also like to know that I could animate my scene if I wanted to and not be restricted to stills. Of course, post-work is always a must when it comes to color correction and some lens effects. You can improve a good render enormously with sensible post-work, but I think you can never rescue a mediocre render.

What other artists inspire you?

All the usual suspects: Peter Guthrie whom I’ve mentioned, Alex Roman, Viktor Fretyan, the entire Berlin team at Pure and all the others I forget. I also keep a close eye on non-Archviz CG stuff and am a great fan of people like Stefan Morrell.

What do you find most challenging in your daily work?

Implementing artistic concepts I don’t believe in. It’s hard to persuade viewers when you’re not persuaded yourself.

How do you keep up to date will all the frequent software updates and plugin additions? Do you even bother yourself with that?

I try to keep up to date. But it can become quite a distraction from actually doing art. On this note, I would say it was a very wise idea of Autodesk to keep its SDK stable between Max 2010 and 2011. Migrating used to be a nightmare when one had to wait for all plugins to be updated.

What would you suggest to someone wanting to become part of this industry? What are the essential skills to focus on when one starts?

To be honest, the industry has become so global and so competitive, and the barriers to entry so low, that I don’t know if I would recommend anyone to become a visualizer. One thing I would say is that strong artistic skills are a prerequisite but they are nothing without a strong business sense and an ability to understand clients’ needs.

Beyond that, I would recommend beginners keep a close eye on competitors’ work and try to learn as much as they can from them – both technically and artistically – while vying to make their work stand out from the crowd and trying to get noticed. Having said that, I think one thing that is hugely important is to make sure you don’t restrict yourself to other people’s CG as your sole source of inspiration. Look at photographs, look around you and try to think of how you would translate what you see into CG. This is probably the best way to push your limits and improve your work.

What do you love about doing what you do? What is your motivation to keep going?

What I love is the absolute freedom CG gives you to break the laws of physics. CG is the most empowering and liberating artistic tool I can think of.

Do you have any interesting projects going on at the moment?

I have a million projects but sadly far too little time right now to make them come to fruition.

You do a lot of personal projects. What is the motivation behind that? And how do you find the time?

The sole motivation is the superior satisfaction one gets from doing personal projects and the fact that they really allow you to push yourself. Just to illustrate the point: In a commercial environment, one would not model every single piece of furniture or every plant. It would not make business sense. But you can do that in a personal project and producing your own assets and creating something that is very much the product of your own work is intensely satisfying.

Finding the time is the biggest challenge of all. Sometimes these projects come to the detriment of paid work and, more often, of sleep. I wish I didn’t have to sleep.

Interview with Bertrand Benoit is a post from Ronen Bekerman's 3D Architectural Visualization Blog